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Joyce's Argument for Probabilism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Patrick Maher
Patrick Maher*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
*
Send requests for reprints to the author, Department of Philosophy, 105 Gregory Hall, 810 South Wright Street, Urbana, IL 61801 [email protected].
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Abstract

James Joyce's ‘Nonpragmatic Vindication of Probabilism’ gives a new argument for the conclusion that a person's credences ought to satisfy the laws of probability. The premises of Joyce's argument include six axioms about what counts as an adequate measure of the distance of a credence function from the truth. This paper shows that (a) Joyce's argument for one of these axioms is invalid, (b) his argument for another axiom has a false premise, (c) neither axiom is plausible, and (d) without these implausible axioms Joyce's vindication of probabilism fails.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 69 , Issue 1 , March 2002 , pp. 73 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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References

Joyce, James M. (1998), “A Nonpragmatic Vindication of Probabilism”, A Nonpragmatic Vindication of Probabilism 65:575–603.Google Scholar
Maher, Patrick (1993), Betting on Theories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar