Bayesianism

Michael Nielsen (Columbia University), Rush Stewart
This essay is a corrective to an increasingly popular way to misunderstand Belot's Orgulity Argument. The Orgulity Argument charges Bayesianism with defect as a normative epistemology. For concreteness, we reply to Cisewski et al.'s recent rejoinder to Belot's argument. The conditions that underwrite their version of the argument are too strong and Belot does not endorse them on our reading. A more compelling version of the Orgulity Argument than Cisewski et al. present is available, however---a point that we make by drawing an analogy with de Finetti's argument against mandating countable additivity. Moreover, we show that Elga's strategy of appealing to finitely additive probability to meet the challenge posed by the Orgulity Argument can be extended considerably to meet variations of the challenge.

Silvia Milano (University of Oxford)
The Sleeping Beauty problem has attracted considerable attention in the literature as a paradigmatic example of how self-locating uncertainty creates problems for the Bayesian principles of Conditionalization and Reflection. Furthermore, it is also thought to raise serious issues for diachronic Dutch Book arguments.I show that, contrary to what is commonly accepted in the literature, it is possible to represent the Sleeping Beauty problem within a standard Bayesian framework. Once the problem is correctly represented, the solution satisfies all the standard Bayesian principles, including Conditionalization and Reflection, is immune from Dutch Books, and does not make any appeal to the Restricted Principle of Indifference which, I argue, is incompatible with the essential features of Bayesian reasoning. Moreover, it emerges from my discussion that the disagreement between different solutions proposed in the literature is not due to the inapplicability of Bayesianism to centered settings, but is instead an instance of the familiar problem of setting the priors.

Frank Cabrera (Kansas State University)
In this paper, I consider whether a recent argument by Roche and Sober (2013) shows that Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) and Bayesianism are incompatible. According to Roche and Sober, in many cases "explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant" from the Bayesian perspective. As I argue, even if this claim is granted, it does not follow that IBE is incompatible with Bayesianism. After showing why R&S's argument is not a threat to compatibilism, I conclude with some general remarks about the prospects of a compatibilist view, given that Bayesianism is often construed as a theory of epistemic rationality that is all-encompassing.

Christian J. Feldbacher-Escamilla (DCLPS), Alexander Gebharter (DCLPS)
Schurz (2008) proposed a justification of creative abduction on the basis of the Reichenbachian principle of the common cause. In this paper we take up the idea of combining creative abduction with causal principles and model instances of successful creative abduction within a Bayes net framework. We identify necessary conditions for such inferences and investigate their unificatory power. We also sketch several interesting applications of modeling creative abduction Bayesian style. In particular, we discuss use-novel predictions, confirmation, and the problem of underdetermination in the context of abductive inferences.