Alexander Pruss's Blog

Drawings: Adobe stock; Photos: elephant and human

We tend to imagine a Bayesian agent as starting with some credences, “the ur-priors”, and then updating the credences as the observations co...

One of the unattractive ingredients of the Sleeping Beauty problem is that Beauty gets memory wipes. One might think that normal probabilis...

Suppose that we live in a Humean universe and the universe contains an extremely large collection of coins scattered on a flat surface. Stat...

Suppose that a fair coin has been flipped in my absence. If it’s heads, there is an independent 50% chance that I will be irresistably brain...

Alice is confused about the nature of practical rationality and asks wrong philosopher about it. She is given this advice: For each of you...

Every so often I get asked to do a video interview. I almost always turn down these requests. Recently, I gave in and agreed to do one, beca...

An accuracy scoring rule is open-minded provided that the expected value of the score after a Bayesian update on a prospective observation ...

Here is a plausible argument for purgatory. Start with these observations: Some people end up in heaven even though at the time of death ...

It is impossible end up in heaven without forgiving all evils done to one at least by other people who end up in heaven. Some people have ...

Accuracy scoring rules measure the epistemic utility of having some credence assignment. For simplicity, let’s assume that all credence assi...

Plausibly, a Christian commitment prohibits hedging. Thus in some sense even if one’s own credence in Christianity is less than 100%, one sh...

Suppose that Alice wronged Bob, repented, and God forgave Alice for it. Bob, however, withholds his forgiveness. First, it is interesting to...

Some people have the intuition that there is something fishy about doing standard Bayesian update on evidence E when one couldn’t have obse...

Socrates famously held that a wrongdoer harms themselves more than they harm their victim. This is a correct rule of thumb, but I doubt tha...