May 11 2015 54 mins 1
Ben Levinstein (Oxford) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (6 May, 2015) titled "A Pragmatic Vindication of Epistemic Utility Theory". Abstract: Traditionally, probabilism and other norms on partial belief have been motivated from a pragmatic point of view. For instance, as Frank Ramsey long ago showed, if you're probabilistically incoherent, then you're subject to a set of bets each of which you consider fair but which are jointly guaranteed to result in a net loss. Since Joyce's seminal 1998 paper, some epistemologists have shifted course and have tried to establish norms on epistemic states without any recourse to practical rationality. I use a theorem from Schervish to bridge the gap between these two approaches. We can either take standard measures of accuracy to be formalizations of purely epistemic value, or we can generate them from what are at base practical foundations. Even if we opt for this latter approach, I show we can mostly cordon off the epistemic from the practical while ultimately grounding epistemic norms in purely practical rationality.
