Alexander Pruss's Blog

The obvious analysis of “ p is known” is: There is someone who knows p . But this obvious analysis doesn’t seem correct, or at least th...

Suppose Alice and Bob are students and co-religionists. Alice is struggling with a subject and asks Bob to pray that she might do fine on th...

Suppose that the right way to combine epistemic utilities across people is averaging: the overall epistemic utility of the human race is the...

We live in a deeply epistemically divided society, with lots of different views, including on some of the most important things. Say that t...

Suppose the members of a committee individually assign credences or probabilities to a bunch of propositions—maybe propositions about climat...

Consider forty rational people each individually keeping track of the ethnicities and virtue/vice of the people they interact with and hear ...

Conciliationists say that when you meet an epistemic peer who disagrees with you, you should alter your credence towards theirs. While there...

I just realized something that I should have known earlier. Suppose I have a doppelganger who is just like me and goes wherever I go—by magi...

Let’s say that I want to find the maximum value of some function over some domain. Here’s one naive way to do it: Algorithm 1 : I pick a s...

Conciliationism holds that in cases of peer disagreement the two peers should move to a credence somewhere between their individual credence...

Let suppose that Alice and Bob are interested in the truth of some proposition Q . They both assign a prior probability of 1/2 to Q , and al...

I assign a credence 0.75 to p and I find out that you assign credence 0.72 to it, despite us both having the same evidence and epistemic pr...

Two nights ago I had a dream. I was in the military, and we were being deployed, and I suddenly got worried about something like this line o...

This is a followup on the preceding post . 1. Whenever the rational credence of p is 0.5 on some evidence base E , at least 50% of human ag...

Free will is incompatible with (causal) determinism, and I know it. I know it because I have sound arguments for it, with compelli...

Loving someone has three aspects: the benevolent, the unitive and the appreciative. (I develop this early on in One Body .) Believing...

L: Rhetorical persuasion does not track truth in the way that good arguments do. The best way for us to collectively come to truth is ...

This discussion from Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (pp. 165-166) struck me as quite interesting: [Kate:] "Wha...

Consider a case where we have two or more rational agents who have in some sense the same evidence, but who evaluate the force o...

This expands on the discussion here . You query three distinguished astrobiologists each of whom is currently doing Mars research how...