Coin trials

Canadian Journal of Philosophy 48 (5):726-741 (2018)
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Abstract

According to the JUSTIFIED FAIR COINS principle, if I know that a coin is fair, and I lack justification for believing that it won’t be flipped, then I lack justification for believing that it won’t land tails. What this principle says, in effect, is that the only way to have justification for believing that a fair coin won’t land tails, is by having justification for believing that it won’t be flipped at all. Although this seems a plausible and innocuous principle, in a recent paper Dorr, Goodman and Hawthorne use it in devising an intriguing puzzle which places all justified beliefs about the future in jeopardy. They point out, further, that one very widespread theory of justification predicts that JUSTIFIED FAIR COINS is false, giving us additional reason to reject it. In this paper, I will attempt to turn this dialectic around. I will argue that JUSTIFIED FAIR COINS does not inevitably lead to scepticism about the future, and the fact that it is incompatible with a widespread theory of justifi...

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Martin Smith
University of Edinburgh

Citations of this work

Epistemology Normalized.Jeremy Goodman & Bernhard Salow - 2023 - Philosophical Review 132 (1):89-145.
Justification, Normalcy and Randomness.Martin Smith - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
Belief Revision Normalized.Jeremy Goodman & Bernhard Salow - forthcoming - Journal of Philosophical Logic:1-49.

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References found in this work

Knowledge and its limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Knowledge and Its Limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - Philosophy 76 (297):460-464.
Knowledge and Its Limits.Timothy Williamson - 2003 - Philosophical Quarterly 53 (210):105-116.
Between Probability and Certainty: What Justifies Belief.Martin Smith - 2016 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK.
Knowledge and Its Limits.Timothy Williamson - 2005 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 70 (2):452-458.

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