Richard Pettigrew (Bristol) - What Accuracy Can Teach Us About Chance-Credence Principles

Talk given by Richard Pettigrew (Bristol) at the Rutgers Conference on the Philosophy of Probability on Oct 26, 2019.

Chance-credence principles tell us how our beliefs about the objective chances should relate to our beliefs about other things. Roughly speaking, things we believe to have a higher chance of happening we should believe more strongly. But we need something more precise than this. However, when we come to formulate the principles with full precision, a range of different possibilities present themselves: Lewis’s Principal Principle, Hall’s New Principle, and Ismael’s General Recipe, to name a few. Yet each of these faces various problems, particularly if our metaphysics of chance allows so-called self-undermining chances. How are we to adjudicate between these? In this talk, I’ll appeal to accuracy-first epistemology to determine which chance-credence principle we should use.

This conference was funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation and by the Rutgers Philosophy Department.