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PEOPLE WITH COMMON PRIORS CAN AGREE TO DISAGREE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2015

HARVEY LEDERMAN
HARVEY LEDERMAN*
Affiliation:
New York University
*
*DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY NEW YORK UNIVERSITY 5 WASHINGTON PLACE NEW YORK, NY 10003 USA E-mail:[email protected]
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Abstract

Robert Aumann presents his Agreement Theorem as the key conditional: “if two people have the same priors and their posteriors for an event A are common knowledge, then these posteriors are equal” (Aumann, 1976, p. 1236). This paper focuses on four assumptions which are used in Aumann’s proof but are not explicit in the key conditional: (1) that agents commonly know, of some prior μ, that it is the common prior; (2) that agents commonly know that each of them updates on the prior by conditionalization; (3) that agents commonly know that if an agent knows a proposition, she knows that she knows that proposition (the “KK” principle); (4) that agents commonly know that they each update only on true propositions. It is shown that natural weakenings of any one of these strong assumptions can lead to countermodels to Aumann’s key conditional. Examples are given in which agents who have a common prior and commonly know what probability they each assign to a proposition nevertheless assign that proposition unequal probabilities. To alter Aumann’s famous slogan: people can “agree to disagree”, even if they share a common prior. The epistemological significance of these examples is presented in terms of their role in a defense of the Uniqueness Thesis: If an agent whose total evidence is E is fully rational in taking doxastic attitude D to P, then necessarily, any subject with total evidence E who takes a different attitude to P is less than fully rational.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Symbolic Logic , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 11 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Symbolic Logic 2014 

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