Alexander Pruss's Blog

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

We like being more confident. We enjoy having credences closer to 0 or 1 . Even if the proposition we are confident in is one that is such t...

Suppose knowledge has a non-infinitesimal value. Now imagine that you continuously gain evidence for some true proposition p , until your ev...

Whether p is evidence for q will often depend on one’s background beliefs. This is a well-known phenomenon. But here’s an interesting fac...

In a recent post , I noted that it is possible to cook up a Bayesian setup where you don’t meet some threshold, say for belief or knowledge,...

Suppose I am just the slightest bit short of the evidence needed for belief that I have some condition C . I consider taking a test for C t...

Classic utilitarianism holds that the right thing to do is what actually maximizes utility. But: If the best science says that drug A is b...

Consider this toy story about belief. It’s inconvenient to store probabilities in our minds. So instead of storing the probability of a prop...

One of the big puzzles about divine simplicity which I have been exploring is that of God’s knowledge of contingent facts. A sloppy way to p...

One might think that being closer to the truth is guaranteed to get one to make better decisions. Not so. Say that a probability assignment ...

A credence assignment c on a space Ω of situations is a function from the powerset of Ω to [0, 1], with c ( E ) representing one’s degree...

Today I am making an important decision between A and B . The expected utilities of A and B depend on a large collection of empirical pro...

Let p be the proposition that among the last six coin tosses worldwide that proceeded my typing the period at the end of this sentence, the...

One picture of credences is that they are derived from agents’ valuations of wagers (i.e., previsions) as follows: the agent’s credence in a...

An (inaccuracy) scoring rule measures how far a probabilistic forecast lies from the truth. Thus, it assigns to each forecast p a score s (...

Suppose that we have a utility function U and an inconsistent credence function P , and for simplicity let’s suppose that our utility funct...

It is said that if an agent has inconsistent credences, she is Dutch Bookable. Whether this is true depends on how the agent calculates expe...

On a supervaluationist view of vagueness, a sentence such as “Bob is bald” corresponds to a large number of perfectly precise propositions, ...

For years, I’ve been inclining towards the view that belief is just high credence, but this morning the following argument is swaying me awa...

One might think that having a less extreme (i.e., further from 0 and 1, and closer to 1/2) credence than is justified by the evidence is pre...