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Kyburg, Levi, and Petersen

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Mark Stone
Mark Stone*
Affiliation:
University of Rochester
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Abstract

In this paper I attempt to tie together a longstanding dispute between Henry Kyburg and Isaac Levi concerning statistical inferences. The debate, which centers around the example of Petersen the Swede, concerns Kyburg's and Levi's accounts of randomness and choosing reference classes. I argue that both Kyburg and Levi have missed the real significance of their dispute, that Levi's claim that Kyburg violates Confirmational Conditionalization is insufficient, and that Kyburg has failed to show that Levi's criteria for choosing reference class are problematic. Rather, the significance of the Petersen case is to show that other aspects of their respective systems are defective: for Levi his account of credal judgments other than direct inference, and for Kyburg his explanation of how indexes are associated with a body of knowledge.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 54 , Issue 2 , June 1987 , pp. 244 - 255
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I would like to thank Henry Kyburg, Isaac Levi, and the anonymous Philosophy of Science referee for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

References

REFERENCES

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