Aggregating agents with opinions about different propositions

Synthese 200 (5):1-25 (2022)
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Abstract

There are many reasons we might want to take the opinions of various individuals and pool them to give the opinions of the group they constitute. If all the individuals in the group have probabilistic opinions about the same propositions, there is a host of pooling functions we might deploy, such as linear or geometric pooling. However, there are also cases where different members of the group assign probabilities to different sets of propositions, which might overlap a lot, a little, or not at all. There are far fewer proposals for how to proceed in these cases, and those there are have undesirable features. I begin by considering four proposals and arguing that they don't work. Then I'll describe my own proposal, which is intended to cover the situation in which we want to pool the individual opinions in order to ascribe an opinion to the group considered as an agent in its own right.

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Richard Pettigrew
University of Bristol

References found in this work

Accuracy and the Laws of Credence.Richard Pettigrew - 2016 - New York, NY.: Oxford University Press UK.
Probability Theory. The Logic of Science.Edwin T. Jaynes - 2002 - Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. Edited by G. Larry Bretthorst.
In Defence of Objective Bayesianism.Jon Williamson - 2010 - Oxford University Press.
Decision Theory with a Human Face.Richard Bradley - 2017 - Cambridge University Press.
Probabilistic Opinion Pooling.Franz Dietrich & Christian List - 2016 - In Alan Hájek & Christopher Hitchcock (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Probability and Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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