Alexander Pruss's Blog

Here’s a way that an atheist could undercut the consensus gentium argument (the argument for theism based on how much belief in God or gods...

I am toying with the thesis that each person’s self-consciousness is qualitatively different. Perhaps all persons have uniquely individuatin...

In the case of non-epistemic goods, it’s an obvious feature of life that someone there is a choice to be made by an individual between their...

It’s easy to generate probabilistic paradoxes in a universe (or multiverse) with infinitely many people (e.g., if infinitely many people rol...

Assume that in fact all ravens are black. Suppose you are sequentiallly observing ravens, and noting each one to be black. After observing n...

Pascal’s Wager is an argument that it is prudentially rational to engage in theistic belief promotion practices (TBPP), namely practices apt...

Good’s Theorem basically says that a utility-maximizing agent can expect to make decisions that are at least as good if they get more inform...

Suppose a positive integer N is generated by a fair lottery. Then, a random integer K is chosen between 1 and N (inclusive). What infor...

You’re thinking whether to become an assembly-line worker or an artist. Then you reflect on the value of knowledge. And you become a factory...

I’ve been thinking about the diachronic aspects of epistemic utility. In the case of non-epistemic utility, we can get a decent first approx...

In the previous post , I proved that we get a proper scoring rule if we compute epistemic utilities as follows. We start with our current cr...

An accuracy scoring rule assigns a score to a probability function representing an agent’s credences, ostensibly measuring how close that pr...

Here is a test case for explanationist stories about initial priors, on which a more explanatory theory has a higher initial prior. Consider...

One promising way to define priors is with algorithmic probability , such as Solomonoff priors. The idea is that we have a language L (say,...

Suppose infinitely many people independently roll a fair die. Before they get to see the result, they will need to guess whether the die sho...

It seems that a rational agent cannot guarantee their credence in a hypothesis H to go up by choosing what observation to perform. For if n...

Suppose for simplicity that everyone is a good Bayesian and has the same priors for a hypothesis H , and also the same epistemic interests w...

In my last two posts ( here and here ), I introduced the notion of an experiment being epistemically at least as good as another for a set ...

Fix a proposition p , and let T ( r ) and F ( r ) be the utilities of assigning credence r to p when p is true and false, respectively. ...

A couple of years ago I showed how to construct hyperreal finitely additive probabilities on infinite sets that satisfy certain symmetry co...