Fundamentals of Bayesian Epistemology Vol 1 and 2 - 2022

Fundamentals of Bayesian Epistemology 1
Fundamentals of Bayesian Epistemology 2

Fundamentals of
Bayesian Epistemology
Introducing Credences
MICHAEL G. TITELBAUM
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Fundamentals of
Bayesian Epistemology 2
Arguments, Challenges, Alternatives
MICHAEL G. TITELBAUM
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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to Colleen
without whom nothing is possible
Contents
Quick Reference xv
Preface xvii
0.1 What’s in this book xviii
0.2 How to read—and teach—this book xix
0.3 Acknowledgments xxi
VOLUME 1
I. OUR SUBJECT
1. Beliefs and Degrees of Belief 3

1.1 Binary beliefs 4
1.1.1 Classificatory, comparative, quantitative 4
1.1.2 Shortcomings of binary belief 5
1.2 From binary to graded 9
1.2.1 Comparative confidence 9
1.2.2 Bayesian epistemology 12
1.2.3 Relating beliefs and credences 14
1.3 The rest of this book 17
1.4 Exercises 19
1.5 Further reading 19
II. THE BAYESIAN FORMALISM
2. Probability Distributions 25
2.1 Propositions and propositional logic 25
2.1.1 Relations among propositions 28
2.1.2 State-descriptions 29
2.1.3 Predicate logic 30
2.2 The probability axioms 31
2.2.1 Consequences of the probability axioms 33
2.2.2 A Bayesian approach to the Lottery scenario 35
2.2.3 Doxastic possibilities 37
2.2.4 Probabilities are weird! The Conjunction Fallacy 38
2.3 Alternative representations of probability 39
2.3.1 Probabilities in Venn diagrams 39
2.3.2 Probability tables 41
viii CONTENTS
2.3.3 Using probability tables 43

2.3.4 Odds 45
2.4 What the probability calculus adds 46
2.5 Exercises 48
3. Conditional Credences 55
3.1 Conditional credences and the Ratio Formula 55
3.1.1 The Ratio Formula 56
3.1.2 Consequences of the Ratio Formula 59
3.1.3 Bayes’s Theorem 61
3.2 Relevance and independence 64
3.2.1 Conditional independence and screening off 67
3.2.2 The Gambler’s Fallacy 68
3.2.3 Probabilities are weird! Simpson’s Paradox 70
3.2.4 Correlation and causation 72
3.3 Conditional credences and conditionals 75
3.4 Exercises 80
4. Updating by Conditionalization 90
4.1 Conditionalization 90
4.1.1 Consequences of Conditionalization 94
4.1.2 Probabilities are weird! The Base Rate Fallacy 96
4.2 Evidence and certainty 99
4.2.1 Probabilities are weird! Total Evidence and the Monty
Hall Problem 101
4.3 Priors and standards 105
4.3.1 Initial priors 105
4.3.2 Epistemic standards 107
4.3.3 Hypothetical priors 109
4.4 Exercises 114
5. Further Rational Constraints 123

5.1 Subjective and Objective Bayesianism 124
5.1.1 Frequencies and propensities 124
5.1.2 Two distinctions in Bayesianism 129
5.2 Deference principles 133
5.2.1 The Principal Principle 133
5.2.2 Expert principles and Reflection 141
5.3 The Principle of Indifference 145
5.4 Credences for infinitely many possibilities 149
5.5 Jeffrey Conditionalization 156
5.6 Exercises 161
CONTENTS ix
Glossary for Volume 1 175

Bibliography of Volume 1 185
Index of Names in Volume 1 191
VOLUME 2
III. APPLICATIONS
6. Confirmation 195
6.1 Formal features of the confirmation relation 196
6.1.1 Confirmation is weird! The Paradox of the Ravens 196
6.1.2 Further adequacy conditions 200
6.2 Carnap’s theory of confirmation 208
6.2.1 Confirmation as relevance 208
6.2.2 Finding the right function 210
6.3 Grue 215
6.4 Subjective Bayesian confirmation 221
6.4.1 Confirmation measures 225
6.4.2 Subjective Bayesian solutions to the Paradox of the Ravens 230
6.5 Exercises 235
7. Decision Theory 246

7.1 Calculating expectations 247
7.1.1 The move to utility 250
7.2 Expected utility theory 251
7.2.1 Preference rankings and money pumps 251
7.2.2 Savage’s expected utility 254
7.2.3 Jeffrey’s theory 256
7.2.4 Risk aversion and Allais’ Paradox 260
7.3 Causal Decision Theory 262
7.3.1 Newcomb’s Problem 263
7.3.2 A causal approach 267
7.3.3 Responses and extensions 270
7.4 Exercises 271
IV. ARGUMENTS FOR BAYESIANISM
8. Representation Theorems 285

8.1 Ramsey’s four-step process 286
8.2 Savage’s representation theorem 291
8.3 Representation theorems and probabilism 295
8.3.1 Objections to the argument 297
8.3.2 Reformulating the argument 300
X CONTENTS
8.4 Exercises 304

9. Dutch Book Arguments 310

9.1 Dutch Books 311
9.1.1 Dutch Books for probabilism 313
9.1.2 Further Dutch Books 315
9.2 The Dutch Book Argument 318
9.2.1 Dutch Books depragmatized 321
9.3 Objections to Dutch Book Arguments 324
9.3.1 The Package Principle 326
9.3.2 Dutch Strategy objections 329
9.4 Exercises 333
10. Accuracy Arguments 338

10.1 Accuracy as calibration 339
10.2 The gradational accuracy argument for probabilism 343
10.2.1 The Brier score 343
10.2.2 Joyce’s accuracy argument for probabilism 346
10.3 Objections to the accuracy argument for probabilism 351
10.3.1 The absolute-value score 351
10.3.2 Proper scoring rules 354
10.3.3 Are improper rules unacceptable? 359
10.4 Do we really need Finite Additivity? 361
10.5 An accuracy argument for Conditionalization 366
10.6 Exercises 368
V. CHALLENGES AND OBJECTIONS
11. Memory Loss and Self-locating Credences 381

11.1 Memory loss 382
11.1.1 The problem 382
11.1.2 A possible solution 385
11.1.3 Suppositional Consistency 389
11.2 Self-locating credences 392
11.2.2 The HTM approach 396
11.2.3 Going forward 401
11.3 Exercises 403
12. Old Evidence and Logical Omniscience 413

12.1 Old evidence 414
CONTENTS Xi
12.1.2 Solutions to the diachronic problem 417

12.1.3 Solutions to the synchronic problem 419
12.1.4 More radical solutions 424
12.2 Logical omniscience 428
12.2.1 Clutter avoidance and partial distributions 429
12.2.2 Logical confirmation and logical learning 432
12.2.3 Allowing logical uncertainty 433
12.2.4 Logical omniscience reconsidered 436
12.3 Exercises 439
13. The Problem of the Priors and Alternatives to Bayesianism 445

13.1 The Problem of the Priors 446
13.1.1 Understanding the problem 448
13.1.2 Washing out of priors 453
13.2 Frequentism 457
13.2.1 Significance testing 459
13.2.2 Troubles with significance testing 461
13.3 Likelihoodism 467
13.3.1 Troubles with likelihoodism 470
13.4 Exercises 474
14. Comparative Confidence, Ranged Credences,

and Dempster-Shafer Theory 484
14.1 Comparative confidence 485
14.1.1 de Finetti’s comparative conditions 486
14.1.2 The Scott Axiom 491
14.1.3 Extensions and challenges 496
14.2 Ranged credences 505
14.2.1 Ranged credences, representation, and evidence 510
14.2.2 Extensions and challenges 517
14.3 Dempster-Shafer theory 527
14.4 Exercises 533
Glossary for Volumes 1 & 2 551

Bibliography of Volumes 1 & 2 573
Index of Names in Volumes 1 & 2 591
The most important questions of life... are indeed, for the most part,
only problems in probability. One may even say, strictly speaking, that
almost all our knowledge is only probable; and in the small number of
things that we are able to know with certainty, in the mathematical
sciences themselves, the principal means of arriving at the truth—
induction and analogy—are based on probabilities, so that the whole
system of human knowledge is tied up with the theory set out in this
essay.
Pierre-Simon Laplace, Philosophical Essay on Probabilities
(1814/1995)
Quick Reference
The Core Bayesian Rules
Non-Negativity: For any P in £, cr(P) ≥ 0.

Normality: For any tautology T in £, cr(T) = 1.
Finite Additivity: For any mutually exclusive P and Q in £, cr(P V Q) = cr(P) + cr(Q).
Ratio Formula: For any P and Q in £, if cr(Q) > 0 then cr(P I Q) = cr-&Q').
cr(Q)
Conditionalization: For any time ti and later time tj, if E in £ represents everything
the agent learns between ti and tj∙, and cr,∙(E) > 0, then for any H in √3,
cry(H) = cη(H∣E).
Consequences of These Rules
Negation: For any P in £, cr(~P) = 1 — cr(P).

Maximality: For any P in £, cr(P) < 1.
Contradiction: For any contradiction F in £, cr(F) = 0.
Entailment: For any P and Q in £, if P 1= Q then cr(P) ≤ cr(Q).
Equivalence: For any P and Q in £, if P =11= Q then cr(P) = cr(Q).
General Additivity: For any P and Q in £, cr(P V Q) = cr(P) + cr(Q) - cr(P & Q).
Finite Additivity (Extended): For any finite set of mutually exclusive propositions
{P1, P2, ..., Pn}, cr(P1 V P2 V ... V Pn) = cr(P1) + cr(P2) + ... + cr(P„).
Decomposition: For any P and Q in £, cr(P) = cr(P & Q) + cr(P & ~Q).
Partition: For any finite partition of propositions in £, the sum of their unconditional
cr-values is 1.
Law of Total Probability: For any proposition P and finite partition {Q1 ,Q2, ... ,Qn}
in £,
cr(P) = cr(P∣ Q1) ∙ cr(Q1) + cr(P∣ Q2) ∙ cr(Q2) +

+cr(P∣Qn)∙cr(Qπ).
Bayes’s Theorem: For any Hand Pin
cr(P∣H)∙cr(H)
cr(H∣E) =
cr(E)
Multiplication: P and Q with nonextreme cr-values are independent relative to cr if

and only if cr(P & Q) = cr(P) ∙ cr(Q).
Preface
When I played junior varsity basketball in high school, our coach was always
yelling at us about “the fundamentals”. What my teammates and I derisively
called “the fundies”—shooting, passing, dribbling—wouldn’t win you a game
by themselves. But without them, you’d have no chance of winning.
This book aims to teach you the fundamentals of Bayesian epistemology. It
won’t necessarily put you in a position to produce cutting-edge research in the
area. But I hope that after reading this book you’ll be able to pick up an article
that uses the tools of Bayesian epistemology and understand what it says.
The word “Bayesian” is now familiar to academics across such diverse fields
as statistics, economics, psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence,
and even “legal probabilism” in the law. Bayesianism contains a few core
notions across all of these fields: priors and posteriors, the probability calculus,
updating by conditionalization. This book will introduce all of those core ideas.
Still, this book was written by a philosopher, and a philosopher with
particular interests and areas of expertise. While I will make some allusions
to those other fields, and will certainly draw connections to disparate parts
of philosophy, I will focus on Bayesian epistemology—roughly, the idea that
an agent has numerical degrees of belief subject to normative constraints
based on probability mathematics. And I will examine Bayesian epistemology
from a philosopher’s point of view, asking the kinds of questions about it a
philosopher would be interested in, and providing arguments in an analytic
philosophical style.
For that reason, it will probably be easier to read this book if you have
some background in philosophy (though that’s not strictly necessary). As far
as the mathematics goes, only a solid understanding of high-school level
algebra will be assumed (except in Section 5.4). Chapter 2 quickly reviews the
portions of elementary deductive logic—most of sentential logic, plus a bit of
predicate logic—that will be needed later. If you’ve never had any exposure to
formal logic, you might want to peruse an introductory text in that area before
proceeding.
XViii PREFACE
0.1 What,s in this book
After this preface, the book has five parts. The first two parts appear in
Volume 1, while the final three are in Volume 2. The first part, consisting of
Chapter 1, defines a Bayesian epistemology as any theory adhering to two
principles:
1. Agents have doxastic attitudes that can usefully be represented by assign

ing real numbers to claims.
2. Rational requirements on those doxastic attitudes can be represented by
mathematical constraints on the real-number assignments closely related
to the probability calculus.
Chapter 1 explains why it’s helpful to include numerical degrees of belief

(or “credences”) in one’s epistemology, instead of working exclusively with
binary beliefs and/or confidence comparisons. This justifies the first principle
of Bayesian epistemology.
The second part of the book then fleshes out the second principle, by
laying out the normative rules of the Bayesian formalism. Chapter 2 covers
the probability axioms, which represent rational constraints on an agent’s
unconditional degrees of belief at a given time. Chapter 3 examines conditional
credences, relating them to unconditional credences through the Ratio
Formula. Chapter 4 concerns Conditionalization, the traditional Bayesian
norm for updating degrees of belief over time. Chapter 5 is a bit of a grab bag,
introducing a variety of additional norms various Bayesians have proposed,
none of which has achieved quite the canonical status of the rules covered in
the previous chapters.
Part III investigates how the Bayesian formalism is used, covering its two
most historically important applications. Chapter 6 applies Bayesianism to
confirmation theory, the theory of how evidence justifies or supports hypothe
ses. Chapter 7 provides a brief introduction to decision theory (other texts go
into much greater depth on this subject).
Once we’ve proposed a number of rational constraints on degrees of belief,
and seen how they are used, Part IV asks how we might argue that these
contraints are indeed normatively binding. A wide variety of arguments have
been offered for the various constraints over the years; this part discusses three
major argument-types. In Chapter 8, we see how any agent meeting certain
plausible decision-theoretic constraints is representable as satisfying Bayesian
norms. Chapter 9 looks at Dutch Books, which guarantee a sure loss for any
agent violating the Bayesian rules. Chapter 10 covers more recent accuracy
PREFACE XIX
arguments, showing how Bayesian norms help an agent make her credences as
accurate as possible.
Part V treats various challenges and objections to Bayesian epistemol
ogy. Chapter 11 explores how our Bayesian formalism might be extended to
accommodate memory loss, and uncertainty about one’s identity or spatio
temporal location. Chapter 12 takes up two interrelated objections to Bayesian
norms: the “Problem of Old Evidence” that Bayesianism doesn’t allow agents
to learn now from information obtained in the past; and the “Problem of
Logical Omniscience” that Bayesianism demands unrealistic logical abilities.
Chapter 13 compares Bayesian epistemology to the statistical paradigms of
frequentism and likelihoodism, focusing on the “Problem of the Priors” that is
supposed to put Bayesianism at a serious disadvantage to those rivals. Finally,
Chapter 14 considers three formalisms for representing intermediate levels
of confidence—confidence comparisons, ranged credences, and Dempster-
Shafer functions—that are related to the Bayesian template but try to improve
it in various ways.
0.2 How to read—and teach—this book
Each chapter has the same structure. There’s a brief introduction to the content
of the chapter, then the main substance. In the main text, I bold a technical
term when it is defined. I have opted for chapter endnotes rather than footnotes
to highlight that the main text can be read through without attention to
the notes. The notes contain references, technical extras for experts, random
asides, and the occasional bad joke. After the main text, each chapter has a set
of exercises, which are intended to review material from the chapter, challenge
you to extend that material, and sometimes set up points for later chapters.
Then there are recommendations for further reading, typically divided up into
introductions and overviews of various topics from the chapter, classic texts
from the Bayesian literature on those topics, and places where the discussion
continues.
The frontmatter of each volume contains a Quick Reference page of Bayesian
rules to which I’ll be referring often. The backmatter contains three further
resources: a glossary of terms, in which each term receives both a definition
and a reference to the page on which it’s initially defined; an index of names;
and a bibliography.
I have successfully taught this book a number of times to upper-level
undergraduates and early-year PhD students. I can teach almost the entire
XX PREFACE
book in a semester. The pace is roughly one chapter per week, with extra time
devoted to Chapter 5 (by far the most overstaffed chapter in the book), and a
bit less time devoted to Chapter 8.
If you have to be selective in your reading—or your teaching—of this
book, you should know that Chapters 2 through 4 provide formal material
on which the entire rest of the book is based. Anyone who hasn’t worked with
the probability calculus before, or Bayesianism in general, should absolutely
complete those chapters. (If you’re in a serious hurry and want only the barest
bones, the final section in each of those chapters—Sections 2.4, 3.3, and 4.3—
may be skipped.) After that, the content becomes much more modular; each
section of Chapter 5, for instance, may be read independently of the others.
Some knowledge of decision theory (obtained via Chapter 7 or some other
source) is necessary for Chapter 8, and probably helpful for Chapters 9 and
10. Some study of confirmation in Chapter 6 may also help with Chapter 13.
But beyond those connections, each of the chapters after Part II was designed
to depend only on the formal material from Part II; the farther you go in the
book, the easier it should be just to skip to the chapters or even the sections of
most interest.
It’s also worth noting that probabilities move in counterintuitive ways. Intu
itions built up from long experience working with full beliefs and deductive
reasoning don’t always transfer to degrees of belief and inductive contexts.
People who work with probabilities for a living gradually build up new
intuitions. Since I can’t beam those directly into your brain, I’ve at least
tried to point out situations in which relying on your old intuitions may be
especially hazardous. Sections whose titles begin “Probabilities are weird!”
focus especially on such situations. I also occasionally offer “Warning” boxes to
highlight the most common confusions about Bayesianism I’ve encountered.
But the best way to build up new intuitions is to work through many proba
bility exercises. Taking apart the guts of the Bayesian machinery and reassem
bling them to solve new problems is the best way to internalize how they work.
So I recommend that anyone reading through this book—as a student or for
their own interest—at least attempt some of the chapter exercises. Instead of
boring, repetitive review of the content, I’ve tried to make the exercises intrigu
ing, puzzling, and sometimes downright challenging. The level of challenge
varies a great deal among the exercises, so I’ve used a system of one- to three-
chili peppers to indicate degrees of difficulty. I’ve marked with a feather the
exercises that call for essay-type responses; when I assign those to my classes
I usually expect around a page apiece in response. Solutions to non-feather
exercises are available to instructors by emailing the author. Still, I would highly
PREFACE XXI
recommend that instructors try solving exercises themselves before assigning

them to students—especially the exercises with three chili peppers!1
Having now written an introductory text, I have much greater respect for
the authors of every introduction Γve read before. The most difficult part was
choosing what to leave in, and what to leave out. I quickly realized that I
couldn’t cover every move in every debate about Bayesianism. So my discus
sions aim to provide an entry point for readers into the critical conversation,
rather than an all-encompassing summary of it. The entry point I provide has
inevitably been shaped by my own perspective on the relevant issues. There are
many ways to construct a Bayesian formalism; I have labored to present one
here that is typical of the way most practitioners proceed.2 Nevertheless, when
it comes to interpreting and critiquing that formalism, my own concerns and
ideas definitely come to the fore.
0.3 Acknowledgments
Below Γve acknowledged everyone I can remember who provided advice on

this book, answered my questions about the material, read a portion of it,
taught it to their class, gave me notes on the text, or contributed in any other
way. My apologies to anyone who should have appeared on this list but fell vic
tim to my haphazard note-keeping process. Before providing the list, I want to
single out a few resources and people for their special contributions. In writing
the book I have relied on previous texts on aspects of Bayesianism, including
Earman (1992), Skyrms (2000), Hacking (2001), Howson and Urbach (2006),
Weisberg (2009), Bradley (2015), Talbott (2016), and unpublished lecture
notes by Michael Strevens and Brian Weatherson. Galavotti (2005) is a phe
nomenal account of the history of Bayesian thought that I can’t recommend
highly enough. I am grateful to my editor, Peter Momtchiloff, who has been
incredibly patient through this book’s long gestation process; and to his Oxford
University Press team and the referees and advisors whom he consulted along
the way. Shimin Zhao read the final manuscript for me, wrote solutions to
all the exercises, and improved the ultimate product in myriad ways. Shimin
also checked the proofs with me. David Makinson encountered this book in a
seminar he was attending, and without provocation conferred the great benefit
of page-by-page comments on the entire manuscript as it existed at that time.
Most importantly, Branden Fitelson introduced me to all of this material in
the first place, shaped my thinking about it in ways I can’t begin to recognize,
and has been a dear friend and mentor ever since.
XXfi PREFACE
And now the list. My thanks to David Alexander, Dallas Amico, Yuval
Avnur, Michael Barkasi, Joseph Barnes, Zach Barnett, Marty Barrett,
Elizabeth Bell, John Bengson, JC. Bjerring, David Black, Darren Bradley,
Seamus Bradley, R.A. Briggs, Stuart Brock, Lara Buchak, David Builes,
Michael Caie, Catrin Campbell-Moore, Fabrizio Cariani, Jennifer Carr,
Lisa Cassell, Clinton Castro, Jake Chandler, Isaac Choi, David Christensen,
Hayley Clatterbuck, Nevin Climenhaga, Stew Cohen, Mark Colyvan, Juan
Comesana, Vincenzo Crupi, Martin Curd, Lars Danzer, Glauber De Bona,
Finnur Dellsen, Nick DiBella, Josh DiPaolo, Sinan Dogramaci, Kevin Dorst,
Billy Dunaway, Kenny Easwaran, Philip Ebert, Andy Egan, Adam Elga, Jordan
Ellenberg, Nic Fillion, Malcolm Forster, Melissa Fusco, Dmitri Gallow, Greg
Gandenberger, Michal Godziszewski, Simon Goldstein, Daniel Greco, Max
Griffin, Alba Guijarro, Alan Hajek, Jacqueline Harding, Casey Hart, Stephan
Hartmann, Dan Hausman, Brian Hedden, Sophie Horowitz, Franz Huber,
Liz Jackson, Pavel Janda, Jim Joyce, Mark Kaplan, Andrew Kernohan, Patrick
Klug, Jason Konek, Matt Kopec, Johannes Korbmacher, Stephan Kramer,
Jon Kvanvig, Tamar Lando, Bill Lawson, Hannes Leitgeb, Ben Lennertz, Ben
Levinstein, Hanti Lin, Clayton Littlejohn, Tracy Lupher, Aidan Lyon, Amanda
MacAskill, John MacFarlane, John Mackay, Anna Mahtani, Barry Maguire,
Anna-Sara Malmgren, Conor Mayo-Wilson, David McCarthy, Tim McGrew,
Brian McLoone, Chris Meacham, Silvia Milano, Peter Milne, Andrew Moon,
Sarah Moss, Corey Mulvihill, Andre Neiva, Dilip Ninan, Ittay Nissan,
Shannon Nolen, Samir Okasha, Jeff Paris, Sarah Paul, Carlotta Pavese, Trevor
Pearce, Richard Pettigrew, Ted Poston, Vishal Prasad, Thomas Raleigh, Rosa
Runhardt, Joe Salerno, Richard Samuels, Paolo Santorio, Joshua Schechter,
Miriam Schoenfield, Jonah Schupbach, Teddy Seidenfeld, Glenn Shafer, Larry
Shapiro, Alan Sidelle, Paul Silva, Rory Smead, Elliott Sober, Julia Staffel, Orri
Stefansson, Reuben Stern, Brian Talbot, David Thorstad, Brett Topey, Aron
Vallinder, Brandt van der Gaast, Steven van Enk, Olav Vassend, Joel Velasco,
Susan Vineberg, Justin Vlastis, Jonathan Vogel, Peter Vranas, Christian
Wallmann, Petra Walta, Naftali Weinberger, Paul Weirich, Jonathan Weisberg,
Roger White, Robbie Williams, Seth Yalcin; my students in Philosophy 504 and
Philosophy 903 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Foundations
seminar at the Australian National University; anyone I haven’t yet listed
who’s ever attended the Formal Epistemology Workshop; my philosophy
colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and funding from the
Australian National University, the Marc Sanders Foundation, and the
following organizations affiliated with the University of Wisconsin-Madison:
the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the Vilas Trust, the Office of the
PREFACE XXiii
Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education, and the Institute for
Research in the Humanities.
As the length of this list should indicate, philosophy is a community It has
been much critiqued—in part because it’s our job to critique things, and in part
because there are genuine, significant problems within that community. But it
is also incredibly valuable, and that value should not be overlooked. Every piece
of philosophy I have ever written has been dramatically improved by other
members of the philosophy community: friends, colleagues, correspondents,
audience members at conferences, etc. The formal epistemology community
in particular has helped me at every step of this project, and is composed of a
remarkably generous, intelligent, well-informed group of scholars.3 Still, as this
book will make apparent, there are many open questions right at the surface
of our subject. If you finish the book and find yourself interested in pursuing
any of them further, we invite you to join us.
Finally, I should add that while I am indebted to those listed here for their
invaluable help, I am sure there remain errors in the main text, for which
I assign sole responsibility to David Makinson.
Notes
1. Thanks to Joel Velasco for excellent advice on what teachers will want to know about
this book, and to Maria Debowsky for the peppers icon and attendant LaTex code.
2. If you’d like to know how I personally prefer to build a formal Bayesian model, see
Titelbaum (2013a).
3. At the beginning of his (2004), Richard Jeffrey recalls being introduced to Bayesianism
by Carnap and Hempel. He writes that they were “the sweetest guys in the world. It
seems to go with the territory.” I couldn’t agree more.
PART I
OUR SUBJECT
Beliefs and Degrees of Belief
Most of epistemology concerns propositional attitudes. A propositional

attitude is an attitude an agent adopts toward a proposition, or toward a
set of propositions. While much philosophical ink has been spilled over the
nature of propositions, we will assume only that a proposition is an abstract
entity expressible by a declarative sentence and capable of being true or false.
(True and false are truth-values, so we say that a proposition is capable of
“having a truth-value”.) For example, the sentence “Nuclear fusion is a viable
energy source” expresses a proposition. If I believe that fusion is viable, this
belief is a propositional attitude—it is an attitude I take toward the proposition
that fusion is viable.
Humans adopt a variety of attitudes toward propositions. I might hope that
fusion is a viable energy source, desire that fusion be viable, wonder whether
fusion is viable, fear that fusion is viable, or intend to make it the case that fusion
is a viable energy source. While some propositional attitudes involve plans to
change the world, others attempt to represent what the world is already like.
Epistemology focuses on the latter kind of propositional attitude-
representational attitudes. Examples of such attitudes include belief and
knowledge. (Knowledge will not be a major focus of this book.)1 Belief is in
some sense a purely representational attitude: when we attribute a belief to an
agent, we are simply trying to describe how she takes the world to be. A belief
attribution does not indicate any emotional affect toward the proposition,
level of justification in that proposition, etc. Yet belief is not the only purely
representational attitude; an agent might be certain that a proposition is true,
or disbelieve a particular proposition. Philosophers often discuss the class of
doxastic attitudes (“belief-like” attitudes) into which belief, disbelief, and
certainty fall. Bayesian epistemology focuses on a type of doxastic attitude
known variously as degree of belief, degree of confidence, or credence.
Over the last few decades discussion of credences has become much more
common in epistemology, as well as in other areas of philosophy (not to
mention psychology, economics, and adjacent disciplines). This chapter tries
to explain why credences are important to epistemology. I’ll begin by contrast
ing degree of belief talk with other doxastic attitude attributions—especially
Fundamentals of Bayesian Epistemology 1: Introducing Credences. Michael G. Titelbaum, Oxford University Press.
© Michael G. Titelbaum 2022. DOI: 10.1093∕oso∕9780198707608.003.0001
4 BELIEFS AND DEGREES OF BELIEF
attributions of “binary” belief that have historically been significant in epis

temology. I’ll then consider what working with degrees of belief adds to our
account of an agent’s doxastic life. Finally I’ll introduce a basic characterization
of Bayesian epistemology and outline how we will explore that view in the
chapters to come.
1.1 Binary beliefs
1.1.1 Classificatory, comparative, quantitative
In his (1950), Rudolf Carnap helpfully distinguishes classificatory, compara

tive, and quantitative concepts:
Classificatory concepts are those which serve for the classification of things
or cases into two or a few [kinds].... Quantitative concepts.. .are those which
serve for characterizing things or events or certain of their features by the
ascription of numerical values.... Comparative concepts.. .stand between the
two other kinds.... [They] serve for the formulation of the result of a com
parison in the form of a more-less-statement without the use of numerical
values, (p. 9)
In Carnap’s famous example, describing the air in a room as warm or cold

employs classificatory concepts. Characterizing one room as warmer than
another uses a comparative concept. The temperature scale describes the heat
of a room with a quantitative concept.
Both our everyday talk about doxastic attitudes and our philosophical the
orizing about them use classificatory, comparative, and quantitative concepts.
Classificatory concepts include belief, disbelief, suspension of judgment, and
certainty. The doxastic attitudes picked out by these concepts are monadic;
each is adopted toward a single proposition. Moreover, given any particular
proposition, agent, and classificatory doxastic attitude, the agent either has
that attitude toward the proposition or she doesn’t. So classificatory doxastic
attitudes are sometimes called “binary”. (I’ll alternate between “classificatory”
and “binary” terminology in what follows.) A comparative attitude, on the
other hand, is adopted toward an ordered pair of propositions. For example,
I am more confident that fission is a viable energy source than I am that fusion
is. A quantitative attitude assigns a numerical value to a single proposition; my
physicist friend is 90% confident that fusion is viable.
1.1 BINARY BELIEFS 5
Until the last few decades, much of epistemology revolved around

classificatory concepts. (Think of debates about the justification of belief, or
about necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge.) This wasn’t an
exclusive focus, but more a matter of emphasis. So-called “traditional”
or “mainstream” epistemologists certainly employed comparative and
quantitative terms.2 Moreover, their classificatory attitude ascriptions were
subtly shaded by various modifiers: a belief, for example, might be reluctant,
intransigent, or deeply held. Nevertheless, Bayesian epistemologists place much
more emphasis on quantitative attitudes such as credences.
This chapter examines reasons for such a shift: Why should epistemologists
be so interested in credences? To aid our understanding, I’ll introduce a
philosophical character who has probably never existed in real life: the Simple
Binarist. A Simple Binarist insists on describing agents’ doxastic propositional
attitudes exclusively in terms of belief, disbelief, and suspension of judgment.
The Simple Binarist eschews all other doxastic attitude attributions, and even
refuses to add shading modifiers like the ones above. I introduce the Simple
Binarist not as a plausible rival to the Bayesian, but instead as an illustrative
contrast. By highlighting doxastic phenomena for which the Simple Binarist
has trouble accounting, I will illustrate the importance of quantitative attitude
attributions.
Nowadays most everyone uses a mix of classificatory, comparative, and
quantitative doxastic concepts to describe agents’ doxastic lives. I hope to
demonstrate the significance of quantitative concepts within that mix by
imagining what would happen if our epistemology lacked them entirely. And
I will suggest that epistemologists’ growing understanding of the advantages
of degree-valued doxastic concepts helps explain the preponderance of quan
titative attitude ascriptions in epistemology today.
1.1.2 Shortcomings of binary b elief
My physicist friend believes that nuclear fusion is a viable energy source. She
also believes that her car will stop when she presses the brake pedal. She is
willing to bet her life on the latter belief, and in fact does so multiple times
daily during her commute. She is not willing to bet her life on the former belief.
This difference in the decisions she’s willing to make seems like it should be
traceable to a difference between her doxastic attitudes toward the proposition
that fusion is viable and the proposition that pressing her brake pedal will
stop her car. Yet the Simple Binarist—who is willing to attribute only beliefs,
disbeliefs, and suspensions—can make out no difference between my friends

doxastic attitudes toward those propositions. Once the Simple Binarist says my
friend believes both propositions, he has said all he has to say.
Now suppose my physicist friend reads about some new research into
nuclear energy. The research reveals new difficulties with tokamak design,
which will make fusion power more challenging. After learning of this
research, she still believes fusion is a viable energy source. Nevertheless, it
seems this evidence should cause some change in her attitude toward the
proposition that fusion is viable. Yet the Simple Binarist lacks the tools to
ascribe any such change; my friend believed the proposition before, and she
still believes it now.
What do these two examples show? The Simple Binarist doesn’t say anything
false—it’s true that my friend believes the propositions in question at the
relevant times. But the Simple Binarist’s descriptive resources don’t seem
fine-grained enough to capture some further things we want to say about
my friend’s doxastic attitudes. Now maybe there’s some complicated way the
Simple Binarist could account for these examples within his classificatory
scheme. Or maybe a complex binarist with more classificatory attitudes in his
repertoire than the Simple Binarist could do the trick. But it’s most natural
to respond to these examples with confidence comparisons: my friend is more
confident that her brakes will work than she is that fusion is viable; reading
the new research makes her less confident in the viability of fusion than she
was before. Comparative doxastic attitudes fine-grain our representations in a
manner that feels appropriate to these examples.
We’ve now seen two examples in which the Simple Binarist has trouble
describing an agent’s doxastic attitudes. But in addition to descriptive ade
quacy, we often want to work with concepts that figure in plausible norms.3
Historically, epistemologists were often driven to work with comparative
and quantitative doxastic attitudes because of their difficulties in framing
defensible rational norms for binary belief.
The normative constraints most commonly considered for binary belief
are:
Belief Consistency: Rationality requires the set of propositions an agent

believes to be logically consistent.
Belief Closure: If some subset of the propositions an agent believes entails
a further proposition, rationality requires the agent to believe that
further proposition as well.
1.1 BINARY BELIEFS 7
Belief Consistency and Belief Closure are proposed as necessary conditions

for an agent’s belief set to be rational. They are also typically proposed as
requirements of theoretical rather than practical rationality.
Practical rationality concerns connections between attitudes and actions.
Our earlier contrast between my friends fusion beliefs and her braking beliefs
was a practical one; it concerned how those doxastic attitudes influenced her
betting behavior. Our other problematic example for the Simple Binarist was a
purely theoretical one, having to do with my friend s fusion beliefs as evidence-
responsive representations of the world (and without considering those beliefs’
consequences for her actions).
What kinds of constraints does practical rationality place on attitudes?
In Chapter 7 we’ll see that if an agent’s preferences fail to satisfy certain
axioms, this can lead to a disastrous course of actions known as a “money
pump”. We might argue on this basis that practical rationality requires agents’
preferences to satisfy those axioms. Similarly, we’ll see in Chapter 9 that if an
agent’s credences fail to satisfy the probability axioms, her betting behavior
is susceptible to a troublesome “Dutch Book”. This fact has been used to
argue that practical rationality requires credences to satisfy the probability
axioms.
Perhaps practical rationality provides all the rational constraints that there
are.4 The standard response to this proposal invokes Pascal’s Wager. Pascal
(1670/1910, Section III) argues that it is rational to believe the proposition
that the Christian god exists. If that proposition is true, having believed it
will yield vast benefits in the afterlife. If the proposition is false, whether
one believed it or not won’t have nearly as dramatic consequences. Assuming
Pascal has assessed these consequences correctly, they seem to provide some
sort of reason to maintain religious beliefs. Nevertheless, if an agent’s evidence
points much more strongly to atheism than to the existence of a deity, it feels
like there’s a sense of rationality in which religious belief would be a rational
mistake. This is theoretical rationality, a standard that assesses represen
tational attitudes in their capacity as representations—how well they do at
depicting the world, being responsive to evidence, etc.—without considering
how they influence action. Belief Consistency and Closure are usually offered
as requirements of theoretical rationality. The idea is that a belief set fails as a
responsible representation of the world if it contradicts itself or doesn’t include
its own logical consequences.5
The versions of Belief Consistency and Closure I’ve stated above are pretty
implausible as genuine rational requirements. Belief Closure, for instance,
requires an agent to believe any arbitrarily complex proposition entailed by
what she already believes, even if she’s never come close to entertaining
that proposition. And since any set of beliefs has infinitely many logical
consequences, Closure also requires rational agents to have infinitely many
beliefs. Belief Consistency, meanwhile, forbids an agent from maintaining a
logically inconsistent set of beliefs even if the inconsistency is so recondite that
she is incapable of recognizing it. One might find these requirements far too
demanding to be rational constraints.
It could be argued, though, that Belief Consistency and Closure seem to have
these flaws only because Γve presented them inaptly or uncharitably. Perhaps
we could make a few tweaks to the principles that would leave their spirit intact
while inoculating them against these flaws. In Chapter 12 we will consider
such tweaks to a parallel set of Bayesian constraints with similar problems. In
the meantime, though, there are counterexamples to Belief Consistency and
Closure that require much more than a few tweaks to resolve.
Kyburg (1961) first described the Lottery Paradox:
A fair lottery has sold one million tickets. Because of the poor odds, an agent
who has purchased a ticket believes her ticket will not win. She also believes,
of each other ticket purchased in the lottery, that it will not win. Nevertheless,
she believes that at least one purchased ticket will win.6
The beliefs attributed to the agent in the story seem rational. Yet these beliefs
are logically inconsistent—you cannot consistently believe that at least one
ticket will win while believing of each ticket that it will lose. So if the agents
beliefs in the story are rationally permissible, we have a counterexample to
Belief Consistency. Moreover, if we focus just on the agent’s beliefs about the
individual tickets, that set of beliefs entails that none of the tickets will win.
Yet it seems irrational for the agent to believe that no ticket will win. So the
Lottery also provides a counterexample to Belief Closure.
Some defenders of Belief Consistency and Closure have responded that,
strictly speaking, it is irrational for the agent in the Lottery to believe her ticket
will lose. (If you believe your ticket will lose, why buy it to begin with?)7 If true,
this resolves the problem. But it’s difficult to resolve Makinson’s (1965) Preface
Paradox in a similar fashion:
You write a long nonfiction book with many claims in its main text, each of
which you believe. In the acknowledgments at the beginning of the book you
write, “While I am indebted to those listed here for their invaluable help, I am
sure there remain errors in the main text, for which I take sole responsibility.”
1.2 FROM BINARY TO GRADED 9
Many authors write such statements in the prefaces to their books, and it’s hard
to deny that it’s rational for them to do so. It’s also very plausible that nonfiction
authors believe the contents of what they write. Yet if the concession that there
are mistakes is an assertion that there is at least one falsehood in the main text,
then the belief asserted in the preface is logically inconsistent with belief in all
of the claims in the text.8
The Lottery and Preface pose a different kind of problem from our ear
lier examples. The examples with my friend the physicist didn’t show that
descriptions in classificatory belief terms were false; they simply suggested that
classificatory descriptions don’t capture all the important aspects of doxastic
life. The Lottery and Preface, however, are meant to demonstrate that Belief
Consistency and Belief Closure—the most natural normative principles for
binary belief—are actually false.
An extensive literature has grown up around the Lottery and Preface,
attempting to resolve them in a number of ways. One might deny that the
sets of beliefs described in the paradoxes are in fact rational. One might find a
clever way to establish that those sets of beliefs don’t violate Belief Consistency
or Belief Closure. One might drop Belief Consistency and/or Belief Closure for
alternative normative constraints on binary belief. All of these responses have
been tried, and I couldn’t hope to adjudicate their successes and failures here.
For our purposes, the crucial point is that while it remains controversial
how to square norms for binary belief with the Lottery and Preface, norms
for rational credence have no trouble with those examples at all. In Chapter 2
we’ll see that Bayesian norms tell a natural, intuitive story about the rational
credences to adopt in the Lottery and Preface situations. The ease with which
Bayesianism handles cases that are paradoxical for binary belief norms has
been seen as a strong advantage for credence-centered epistemology.
1.2 From binary to graded
1.2.1 Comparative confidence
The previous section articulated both descriptive and normative difficulties

for restricting one’s attention exclusively to classificatory doxastic attitude
ascriptions (belief, disbelief, suspension of judgment, etc.). We imagined a
Simple Binarist who works only with these kinds of attitudes, and posed both
descriptive and normative problems for him. The first descriptive problem was
that an agent may believe two propositions while nevertheless treating these
propositions quite differently when it comes to action. The second descriptive

problem was that new evidence may change an agents doxastic attitudes
toward a proposition despite her believing the proposition both before and
after incorporating the evidence. We could address both of these shortcomings
in a natural fashion by moving beyond strictly classificatory concepts to com
parisons between an agents levels of confidence in two different propositions,
or between her levels of confidence in a single proposition at two different
times.
So let’s augment our resources a bit beyond what the Simple Binarist has
to offer. We’ll still allow ourselves to say that an agent believes, disbelieves, or
suspends judgment in a proposition. But we’ll also allow ourselves to describe
an agent as at least as confident of one proposition as another, more confident
in one proposition than another, or equally confident in the two. Some of these
comparisons follow directly from classificatory claims. For instance, when
I say that my friend believes nuclear fusion is a viable energy source, we
typically infer that she is more confident in the proposition that fusion is
viable than she is in the proposition that fusion is nonviable. But there are
also comparisons which, while consistent with classificatory information, are
not entailed by such information. My friend believes both that fusion is viable
and that her brakes are functional. We go beyond this description when we add
that she is more confident in the latter proposition than the former.
We can think of an agents confidence comparisons as aspects of an over
all ranking of propositions. For example, Figure 1.1 depicts my confidence
ranking of a particular set of propositions.9 Here D represents the proposition
that the Democrats will win the next presidential election, and W represents
the proposition that anthropogenic global warming has occurred. The arrows
indicate more confident than relations: for instance, I am more confident that
warming either has or hasn’t occurred than I am that it has, but I am also more
confident that warming has occurred than I am that it has not.
It’s important that not every confidence ranking is complete—there may
be some pairs of propositions for which the ranking says nothing about the
agent’s relative confidences. Don’t be fooled by the fact that “not D” and “ W”
are at the same height in Figure 1.1. In that diagram only the arrows reflect
features of the ranking; the ranking depicted remains silent about whether
I am more confident in “not D” or “W”. This reflects an important truth
about my doxastic attitudes: while Γm more confident in warming than non
warming and in a Democratic loss than a win, I may genuinely be incapable
of making a confidence comparison across those two unrelated issues. In
D or not D IV or not IV
notD IV
D not IV
D and not D IV and not IV
Figure 1.1 A confidence ranking
other words, I may view warming propositions and election propositions as

incommensurable.
We now have the basic elements of a descriptive scheme for attributing
comparative doxastic attitudes. How might we add a normative element to this
scheme? A typical norm for confidence comparisons is:
Comparative Entailment: For any pair of propositions such that the first
entails the second, rationality requires an agent to be at least as
confident of the second as the first.
Comparative Entailment is intuitively plausible. For example, it would be

irrational to be more confident in the proposition that Arsenal is the best
soccer team in the Premier League than the proposition that Arsenal is a soccer
team. Being the best soccer team in the Premier League entails that Arsenal is
a soccer team!10
Although it’s a simple norm, Comparative Entailment has a number of
substantive consequences. For instance, assuming we are working with a
classical entailment relation on which any proposition entails a tautology
and every tautology entails every other, Comparative Entailment requires
a rational agent to be equally confident of every tautology and at least as
confident of any tautology as she is of anything else. Comparative Entailment
also requires a rational agent to be equally confident of every contradiction.
While Comparative Entailment (or something close to it)11 has generally
been endorsed by authors working on comparative confidence relations, there
is great disagreement over which additional comparative norms are correct.
Some alternatives are presented in Chapter 14, which works much more
slowly and carefully through the technical details of comparative confidence
rankings.
1.2.2 Bayesian epistemology
There is no single Bayesian epistemology; instead, there are many Bayesian

epistemologies.12 Every view I would call a Bayesian epistemology endorses the
following two principles:
1. Agents have doxastic attitudes that can usefully be represented by assign

ing real numbers to claims.
2. Rational requirements on those doxastic attitudes can be represented by
mathematical constraints on the real-number assignments closely related
to the probability calculus.
The first of these principles is descriptive, while the second is normative—

reflecting the fact that Bayesian epistemologies have both descriptive and
normative commitments. Most of the rest of this chapter concerns the descrip
tive element; extensive coverage of Bayesian epistemology’s normative content
begins in Chapter 2.13
Γve articulated these two principles vaguely to make them consistent with
the wide variety of views (many of which we’ll see later in this book) that call
themselves Bayesian epistemologies. For instance, the first principle mentions
“claims” because some Bayesian views assign real numbers to sentences or
other entities in place of propositions. Still, the most common Bayesian
descriptive approach—and the one we will stick to for most of this book—
assigns numerical degrees of confidence to propositions.
In the previous section, we took the Simple Binarist’s repertoire of belief,
disbelief, and suspension descriptions and added comparative confidence
relations. What more can we gain by moving to a full numerical representation
of confidence? Confidence comparisons rank propositions, but cannot tell
us how relatively large the gaps are between entries in the ranking. Without
quantitative concepts we can say that an agent is more confident in one
proposition than she is in another, but we cannot say how much more confident
she is.
These matters of degree can be very important. Suppose you’ve been offered
a job teaching at a university, but there’s another university at which you’d
much rather teach. The first university has given you two weeks to respond to
their offer, and you know you won’t have a hiring decision from the preferred
school by then. Trying to decide whether to turn down the offer in hand, you
contact a friend at the preferred university. She says you’re one of only two
candidates for their job, and she’s more confident that you’ll get the offer than
the other candidate. At this point you want to ask how much more confident
she is in your prospects than the other candidates. A 51-49 split might not be
enough for you to hang in!
Like our earlier brake pedal story, this is an example about the practical con
sequences of doxastic attitudes. It suggests that distinctions between doxastic
attitudes affecting action cannot all be captured by a confidence ranking—
important decisions may depend on the sizes of the gaps. Put another way,
this example suggests that one needs more than just confidence comparisons
to do decision theory (the subject of Chapter 7). In Chapter 6, we will use
quantitative confidence measures to investigate a topic of great significance
for theoretical rationality: degrees of confirmation. Numerical credence values
are very important in determining whether a body of experimental evidence
supports one scientific hypothesis more than it supports another.14
These are some of the advantages of numerically measuring degrees of belief.
But credence ascriptions have disadvantages as well. For instance, numerical
representations may provide more specific information than is actually present
in the situation being represented. The Beatles were better than the Monkees,
but there was no numerical amount by which they were better. Similarly,
I might be more confident that the Democrats will lose the next election
than I am that they will win without there being a fact of the matter about
exactly how much more confident I am. Representing my attitudes by assigning
precise credence values to the proposition that the Democrats will lose and the
proposition that they will win attributes to me a confidence gap of a particular
size—which maybe an over-attribution in the actual case.
Numerical degree of belief representations also impose complete commen-
surability. It is possible to build a Bayesian representation that assigns credence
values to some propositions but not others—representing the fact that an agent
takes attitudes toward the former but not the latter.15 But once our representa
tion assigns a numerical credence to some particular proposition, that propo
sition immediately becomes comparable to every other proposition to which
a credence is assigned. Suppose I am 60% confident that the Democrats will
lose, 40% confident that they will win, and 80% confident that anthropogenic
global warming has occurred. One can immediately rank all three of these
propositions with respect to my confidence. Assigning numerical credences
over a set of propositions creates a complete ranking, making it impossible
to retain any incommensurabilities among the propositions involved. This
is worrying if you think confidence incommensurability is a common and
rational feature in real agents’ doxastic lives.
Epistemologists sometimes complain that working with numerical

credences is unrealistic, because agents “don’t have numbers in their heads”.
This is a bit like refusing to measure gas samples with numerical temperature
values because molecules don’t fly around with numbers pinned to their
backs.16 The relevant question is whether agents’ doxastic attitude sets have a
structure that can be well represented by numbers, by a comparative ranking,
by classificatory concepts, or by something else. This is the context in which
it’s appropriate to worry whether agents’ confidence gaps have important size
characteristics, or whether an agent’s assigning doxastic attitudes to any two
propositions should automatically make them confidence-commensurable.
We will return to these issues a number of times in this book.
1.2.3 Relating beliefs and credences
I’ve said a lot about representing agents as having various doxastic attitudes.
But presumably these attitudes aren’t just things we can represent agents as
having; presumably agents actually have at least some of the attitudes in
question. The metaphysics of doxastic attitudes raises a plethora of questions.
For instance: What is it—if anything—for an agent to genuinely possess a
mental attitude beyond being usefully representable as having such? Or: If
an agent can have both binary beliefs and degrees of belief in the same set
of propositions, how are those different sorts of doxastic attitudes related? The
latter question has generated a great deal of discussion, which I cannot hope
to summarize here. Yet I do want to mention some of the general issues and
best-known proposals.
Warning
There are two different philosophical conventions for employing the terms
“belief” and “doxastic attitude”, and it’s important to disambiguate them
before proceeding. In this book I will use “belief” as a synonym for “binary
belief”, one of the classificatory representational attitudes. “Doxastic atti
tude” will then be an umbrella term for propositional attitude types that are
belief-like in the sense of being purely representational attitudes, including
not only binary belief but also disbelief, certainty, doubt, suspension of
belief, comparative confidence, numerical credence, and others. Yet there is
a different convention on which “belief” is the umbrella term, and “doxastic
attitude” means something like “variety of belief On this approach, binary

beliefs are sometimes called “full beliefs”, and credences may be called
“partial beliefs” or “graded beliefs” Adherents of this convention often say,
“Belief comes in degrees.” These last few locutions wouldn’t make sense
if “belief” meant exclusively binary belief. (A credence is not a partial or
incomplete binary belief.) But they make more sense when “belief” is an
umbrella term.
Going forward, I will refer to the quantitative representational attitudes
that are our main topic as either “credences” or “degrees of belief”.17
I will also use “belief” and “doxastic attitude” according to the first of the
two conventions just described, so for me “belief” will not be an umbrella
term.
Now suppose some philosopher asserts a particular connection between

(binary) beliefs and credences. That connection might do any of the following:
(1) define attitudes of one kind in terms of the other; (2) reduce attitudes of
one kind to attitudes of the other; (3) assert a descriptively true conditional (or
biconditional) linking one kind of attitude to the other; (4) offer a normative
constraint to the effect that any rational agent with an attitude of one kind will
have a particular attitude of the other.
For example, the Lockean thesis connects believing a proposition with pos
sessing a degree of confidence in that proposition surpassing some numerical
threshold. Taking inspiration from John Locke (1689/1975, Bk. IV, Ch. 15-16),
Richard Foley entertains the idea that:
To say that you believe a proposition is just to say that you are sufficiently
confident of its truth for your attitude to be one of belief. Then it is rational
for you to believe a proposition just in case it is rational for you to have
sufficiently high degree of confidence in it. (1993, p. 140)
Foley presents the first sentence—identifying belief with sufficiently high

degree of belief—as the Lockean thesis. The latter sentence is presented as
following from the former. But notice that the latter sentences normative
claim could be secured by a weaker, purely normative Lockean thesis, asserting
only that a rational agent believes a proposition just in case she is sufficiently
confident of it.
On any reading of the Lockean thesis, there are going to be questions about
exactly how high this threshold must be. One might suggest that the confidence
threshold for belief is certainty (i.e., 100% confidence). But many of us believe
propositions of which we are not certain, and this seems perfectly rational.
Working down the confidence spectrum, it seems that in order to believe a
proposition one should be more confident of it than not. But that leaves a lot
of space to pin down the threshold between 50% and 100% confidence. Here
it may help to suggest that the relevant threshold for belief is vague, or varies
with context.
The Lockean thesis also causes problems when we try to layer traditional
norms of rational belief and credence on top of it. If we set a credence
threshold for belief lower than 100%, and adopt Bayesian probabilistic norms
for credence, the Lockean thesis generates rational belief sets for the Lottery
and Preface that violate Belief Consistency and Closure. We will see why when
we give a probabilistic solution to the Lottery in Section 2.2.2.
The Lockean thesis works by identifying belief with a particular kind of cre
dence. But we might try connecting these attitudes in the opposite direction—
identifying credence with a particular kind of belief. For instance, we might
say that I have a 60% credence that the Democrats will lose the next election
just in case I believe the proposition that their probability of losing is 60%. The
general strategy here is to align my credence in one proposition with belief in
a second proposition about the probability of the first.
This connective strategy—whether meant definitionally, reductively, nor
matively, etc.—is now generally viewed as unlikely to succeed. For one thing,
it requires thinking that whenever a (rational) agent has a degree of confidence,
she also has a belief about probabilities. David Christensen (2004, Ch. 2)
wonders about the content of these probability beliefs. In Chapter 5 we will
explore various “interpretations of probability” that attempt to explain the
meaning of “probability” claims. The details need not concern us here; what
matters is that for each possible interpretation, it’s implausible to think that
whenever a (rational) agent has a degree of confidence she (also?) has a belief
with that kind of probabilistic content. If “probability” talk is, for instance,
always talk about frequency within a reference class, must I have beliefs
about frequencies and reference classes in order to be pessimistic about the
Democrats’ prospects?
The idea that the numerical value of a credence occurs inside a proposition
toward which the agent adopts some attitude also generates deeper prob
lems. We will discuss some of them when we cover conditional credences in
Chapter 3. Generally, contemporary Bayesians think of the numerical value
of a credence not as part of the content toward which the agent adopts the
attitude, but instead as an attribute of the attitude itself. I adopt a credence
1.3 THE REST OF THIS BOOK 17
of 60% toward the proposition that the Democrats will lose; no proposition
containing the value 60% is involved.18
This is a small sample of the positions and principles that have been pro
posed relating beliefs to degrees of belief. One might embrace some connecting
principle I haven’t mentioned here. Or one might deny the existence of
attitudes in one category altogether. (Perhaps there are no beliefs. Perhaps
there are no degrees of belief.) Yet Γd like to note that it is possible that
both types of attitudes exist without there being any fully general, systematic
connections between them.
Here’s an anology:19 Consider three different maps of the same square mile
of earthly terrain. One is a topographic map; another is a satellite image;
another shows streets marked with names. Each map represents different
features of the underlying terrain. The features represented on each map are
equally real. There are some connections between the information on one map
and the information on another; a street that appears on the satellite photo will
presumably appear on the streetmap as well. But there are no fully general,
systematic connections that would allow you to derive everything about one
map from any of the others. For instance, nothing on the topo or the streetmap
provides the location of a tree picked up by the satellite.
Similarly, describing agents as possessing beliefs or as possessing degrees of
belief might be equally valid representations of a complex underlying reality,
with each description useful for different purposes. The features of an agent’s
cognitive state picked out by each representation might also be equally real. Yet
there might nevertheless be no general, systematic connections between one
representation and the other (even for a fully rational agent). Going forward,
we will assume that it is at least sometimes philosophically useful to represent
agents as having numerical degrees of belief. We will not assume any systematic
connection between credences and beliefs, and indeed we will only rarely
mention the latter.
1.3 The rest of this book
Hopefully I have now given you some sense of what credences are, and of
why one might incorporate them into one’s epistemology. Our first task in
Chapter 2 will be to develop a Bayesian formalism in which credences can be
descriptively represented. After that, much of our focus will be on the norms
Bayesians require of rational degrees of belief.
There is a great deal of disagreement among Bayesians about exactly what

these norms should be. Nevertheless, we can identify five core normative
Bayesian rules: Kolmogorov’s three probability axioms for unconditional cre
dence, the Ratio Formula for conditional credence, and Conditionalization for
updating credences over time. These are not core rules in the sense that all
Bayesian epistemologists agree with them. Some Bayesians accept all five rules
and want to add more; some don’t even accept these five. They are core in the
sense that one needs to understand them in order to understand any further
Bayesian position entertained.
This chapter completes Part I of this book. Part II is primarily concerned
with the five core Bayesian rules. Chapter 2 covers Kolmogorov’s axioms;
Chapter 3 covers the Ratio Formula; and Chapter 4 covers Conditionalization.
Chapter 5 then discusses a variety of norms Bayesians have proposed either to
supplement or to replace the core five.
The presence of all these alternatives raises the question of why we should
accept any of these rules as genuinely normative to begin with. To my mind,
one can see the advantages of Bayesianism best by seeing its consequences
for applications. For instance, I’ve already mentioned that Bayesian credence
norms accommodate a natural story about doxastic attitudes in the Lottery
Paradox. Part III of this book discusses the two historically most important
applications of Bayesian epistemology: confirmation theory (Chapter 6) and
decision theory (Chapter 7).
Along with their benefits in application, Bayesian normative rules have
been directly defended with a variety of philosophical arguments. I discuss
the three most popular arguments in Part IV, and explain why I find each
ultimately unconvincing. Chapter 8 discusses Representation Theorem argu
ments; Chapter 9 Dutch Books; and Chapter 10 arguments based on the goal
of having accurate credences.
Finally, a number of important challenges have been raised to Bayesian
epistemology—both to its descriptive framework and to its normative rules.
Many of these (though not nearly all) are covered in Part V. Chapter 11
discusses how we might extend Bayesian updating to incorporate memory
loss and self-locating belief. Chapter 12 takes up the Problem of Old Evidence
and the Problem of Logical Omniscience. Chapter 13 introduces the Problem
of the Priors, then compares Bayesianism to the rival statistical paradigms
of frequentism and likelihoodism. Finally, Chapter 14 considers alternative
frameworks for modeling levels of confidence that employ the probability
calculus but put it to different formal use.
1.5 FURTHER READING 19
1.4 Exercises
Problem 1.1. 0 What do you think the agent in the Lottery Paradox should
believe? In particular, should she believe of each ticket in the lottery that that
ticket will lose? Does it make a difference how many tickets there are in the
lottery? Explain and defend your answers.
Problem 1.2. Explain why (given a classical logical entailment relation)

Comparative Entailment requires a rational agent to be equally confident of
every contradiction.
Problem 1.3. Assign numerical confidence values (between 0% and 100%,

inclusive) to each of the propositions in Figure 1.1. These confidence values
should be arranged so that if there’s an arrow in Figure 1.1 from one propo
sition to another, then the first proposition has a lower confidence value than
the second.
Problem 1.4. The arrows in Figure 1.1 represent “more confident in”
relations between pairs of propositions. Comparative Entailment, on the other
hand, concerns the “at least as confident in” relation. So suppose we re
interpreted Figure 1.1 so that the arrows represented “at least as confident
in” relations. (For example, Figure 1.1 would now tell you that Γm at least as
confident of a Democratic loss as a win.)
(a) Explain why—even with this reinterpretation—the arrows in Figure 1.1
do not provide a ranking that satisfies Comparative Entailment.
(b) Describe a bunch of arrows you could add to the (reinterpreted) dia
gram to create a ranking satisfying Comparative Entailment.
Problem 1.5. 0 Is it ever helpful to describe an agents attitudes in terms of

binary beliefs? Or could we get by just as well using only more fine-grained
(comparative and quantitative) concepts? Explain and defend your answer.
1.5 Further reading
Introductions and Overviews
Elizabeth G. Jackson (2020). The Relationship between Belief and Credence.

Philosophy Compass 15, pp. 1-13
Systematic overview of the various philosophical views (both descriptive and

normative) connecting beliefs and credences. Includes a nice discussion of the
possible metaphysical relationships between the two types of attitude.
Classic Texts
Henry E. Kyburg Jr (1970). Conjunctivitis. In: Induction, Acceptance, and

Rational Belief. Ed. by M. Swain. Boston: Reidel, pp. 55-82
David C. Makinson (1965). The Paradox of the Preface. Analysis 25, 205-7
Classic discussions of the Lottery and Preface Paradoxes (respectively), by the

authors who introduced these paradoxes to the philosophical literature.
Extended Discussion
Richard Foley (2009). Beliefs, Degrees of Belief, and the Lockean Thesis.
In: Degrees of Belief. Ed. by Franz Huber and Christoph Schmidt-Petri.
Vol. 342. Synthese Library. Springer, pp. 37-48
Ruth Weintraub (2001). The Lottery: A Paradox Regained and Resolved.
Synthese 129, pp. 439-49
David Christensen (2004). Putting Logic in its Place. Oxford: Oxford Uni
versity Press
Foley, Weintraub, and Christensen each discuss the relation of binary beliefs to
graded, and the troubles for binary rationality norms generated by the Lottery
and Preface Paradoxes. They end up leaning in different directions: Chris
tensen stresses the centrality of credence to norms of theoretical rationality,
while Foley and Weintraub emphasize the role of binary belief in a robust
epistemology.
Notes
1. While Bayesian epistemology has historically focused on doxastic representational

attitudes, some authors have recently applied Bayesian ideas to the study of knowledge.
See, for instance, Moss (2018).
2. John Bengson, who has greatly helped me with this chapter, brought up the interesting
historical example of how we might characterize David Hume’s (1739-40/1978) theory
of belief vivacity in classificatory/comparative/quantitative terms.
3. On some epistemologies, descriptive and normative projects cannot be prized apart,
because various normative conditions are either definitional of or constitutive of what
NOTES 21
it is to possess particular doxastic attitudes. See, for instance, Davidson (1984) and Kim
(1988).
4. See, for example, Kornblith (1993). Kornblith has a response to the Pascalian argument
Γm about to offer, but chasing down his line would take us too far afield.
5. Has Pascal conclusively demonstrated that practical rationality requires religious belief?
I defined practical rationality as concerning an attitudes connection to action. One odd
aspect of Pascals Wager is that it seems to treat believing as a kind of action in itself.
Many philosophers have wondered whether we have the kind of direct control over our
beliefs to deliberately follow Pascal’s advice.
For our purposes, the crucial point is that the pressure to honor atheistic evidence
doesn’t seem immediately connected to action. This suggests a standard of theoretical
rationality distinct from concerns of practical rationality.
6. William Folz pointed out to me that when many American English speakers hear the
word “lottery”, they think of something like a state lotto (scratch-off tickets, Keno, etc.),
in which one’s chances of winning are often unaffected by the number of other players.
Decision theorists, statisticians, and philosophers of probability (not to mention Shirley
Jackson) use the word “lottery” to cover a wider variety of chance events. The kind of
lottery described in the Lottery Paradox (and at other points in this book) might more
commonly be called a “raffle”.
7. This is why I never play the lottery.
8. If you find the Preface Paradox somehow unrealistic or too distant from your life,
consider that (1) you have a large number of beliefs (each of which, presumably, you
believe); and (2) you may also believe (quite reasonably) that at least one of your beliefs
is false. This combination is logically inconsistent.
9. One of the challenges of introducing technical material in ordinary English is that
many of the words of ordinary English have also been assigned technical meanings
by mathematicians or philosophers. If one looks, one can find formal definitions of
what constitutes a “ranking”—as well as an entire formalism called “ranking theory”.
Nevertheless, I am going to use “ranking” in an informal sense throughout this book,
to indicate the general idea of placing some things higher than others, some lower, and
some on equal footing.
10. In an article dated January 2, 2014 ori grantland.com, a number of authors made bold
predictions for the forthcoming year. Amos Barshad wrote:
And so, here goes, my two-part prediction:
1. The Wu-Tang album will actually come out.
2. It’ll be incredible.
Γm actually, illogically more sure of no. 2.
11. Comparative Entailment shares some of the intuitive flaws we pointed out earlier for
Belief Closure: (1) as stated, Comparative Entailment requires an agent to compare
infinitely many ordered pairs of propositions (including propositions the agent has
never entertained); (2) Comparative Entailment places demands on agents who have
not yet recognized that some particular proposition entails another. So it is tempting to
tweak Comparative Entailment in ways similar to the tweaks we will propose in Chapter
12 for Belief Consistency, Belief Closure, and their Bayesian cousins.
12. I.J. Good famously argued in a letter to the editor of The American Statistician that there
are at least 46,656 varieties of Bayesians (Good 1971).
13. These days philosophers sometimes talk about "Formal Epistemology”. A formal epis
temology is any epistemological theory that uses formal tools. Bayesian epistemology
is just one example of a formal epistemology; other examples include AGM theory
(Alchourron, Gardenfors, and Makinson 1985) and the aforementioned ranking theory
(Spohn 2012).
14. There exists a quantitative strand of epistemology (e.g., Pollock 2001) focusing on
numerical degrees of justification conferred by bodies of evidence. Since this topic
is potentially related to degrees of confirmation, I will return to it in Section 6.4.1.
For now, it suffices to note that even if an agent’s evidence confers some numerically
measurable amount of justification on a particular proposition or a particular belief for
her, that degree of justification is conceptually distinct from her degree of belief in the
proposition, and the norms we will study apply to the latter.
15. I’ll describe some details of this construction in Chapter 12.
16. Joel Velasco reminded me that doctors often ask us to rate our pain on a scale of 1 to
10. May we respond only if we have numbers in our heads? In our nerves?
17. The word “credence” has been used as a mass noun in English for centuries, coming
over from French and ultimately having Latin roots. It’s unclear to me, though, when
it started being used as a count noun the way Bayesians do—as when we say that
agents have credences in particular claims. In a discussion on this subject with Branden
Fitelson and Andrew Moon, Fitelson highlighted the following passage in Carnap that
may supply an important bridge to the contemporary usage: “The concept of probability
in the sense of the actual degree of belief is a psychological concept.... I shall use for
this psychological concept the technical term ‘degree of credence’ or shortly ‘credence’”
(Carnap 1962b, p. 305).
18. If we shouldn’t think of the number in a numerical credence as part of the content of
the proposition toward which the attitude is adopted, how exactly should we think of
it? I tend to think of the numerical value as a sort of property or adjustable parameter
of a particular doxastic attitude-type: credence. An agent adopts a credence toward
a specific proposition, and it’s a fact about that credence that it has degree 60% (or
whatever).
For the contrasting view, and arguments in favor of putting the numerical value in
the content of a proposition believed, see Lance (1995) and Holton (2014). Another
option—which would take us too far afield to address in this book—is to read a credence
as a belief in a more complex kind of content, one component of which is propositional
and a distinct component of which is numerical. Moss (2018) adopts this approach.
19. Thanks to Elizabeth Bell for discussion. I also found the following passage from Lange
(2019) evocative: “In his landmark book, The Image of the City, published in 1961,
[Kevin] Lynch asked people to draw their city for a visitor, paying attention to their own
everyday paths and major landmarks, without reference to geography. Of course, each
person’s map.. .was different—but that did not mean that one map was more accurate
than another. Rather, each person was telling a different story through cartography.”
PART II
THE BAYESIAN FORMALISM
There are five core normative rules of Bayesian epistemology: Kolmogorov’s

three probability axioms, the Ratio Formula, and updating by Conditionaliza-
tion. That is not to say that these are the only normative rules Bayesians accept,
or that all Bayesians accept all five of these. But one cannot understand any
additional rules or replacement rules without understanding these five first.
Chapter 2 begins with some review of propositions and propositional
logic. It then discusses unconditional credence, an agent’s general degree of
confidence that a particular proposition is true. The Kolmogorov axioms are
introduced as rational constraints on unconditional credences, then their
consequences are explored. Finally, I discuss how the resulting normative
system goes beyond what one gets from simple non-numerical norms for
comparative confidence.
Chapter 3 then introduces conditional credence—an agent’s confidence that
one proposition is true on the supposition that another proposition is. The
Ratio Formula is a normative rule relating an agent’s conditional credences to
her unconditional credences. Chapter 3 applies the Ratio Formula to develop
Bayesian notions of relevance and probabilistic independence. It then dis
cusses relationships among conditional credences, causes, and conditional
propositions.
The probability axioms and the Ratio Formula relate credences held by
an agent at a given time to other credences held by that agent at the same
time. Conditionalization relates an agent’s credences at different times. After
introducing Conditionalization, Chapter 4 discusses the roles that evidence
and certainty play in that rule. It then explains how Conditionalization does
the useful epistemological work of distinguishing an agent’s evidence from the
epistemic standards she brings to bear on that evidence.
24 THE BAYESIAN FORMALISM
Chapter 5 begins by discussing distinctions between “Subjective” and

“Objective” Bayesians, and various interpretations of “probability” talk. It
then covers a number of well-known Bayesian norms that go beyond the core
five, including: the Principal Principle, the Reflection Principle, various other
deference principles, the Principle of Indifference, Countable Additivity, and
Jeffrey Conditionalization.
2
Probability Distributions
This chapter introduces Kolmogorovs probability axioms, the first three core
normative rules of Bayesian epistemology. They represent constraints that an
agents unconditional credence distribution at a given time must satisfy in
order to be rational.
The chapter begins with a quick overview of propositional and predicate
logic. The goal is to remind readers of logical notation and terminology we will
need later; if this material is new to you, you can learn it from any introductory
logic text. Next I introduce the notion of a numerical distribution over a
propositional language, the tool Bayesians use to represent an agents degrees
of belief. Then I present the probability axioms, which are mathematical
constraints on such distributions.
Once the probability axioms are on the table, I point out some of their
more intuitive consequences. The probability calculus is then used to analyze
the Lottery Paradox scenario from Chapter 1, and Tversky and Kahnemans
Conjunction Fallacy example.
Kolmogorovs axioms are the canonical way of defining what it is to be a
probability distribution, and they are useful for doing probability proofs. Yet
there are other, equivalent mathematical structures that Bayesians often use to
illustrate points and solve problems. After presenting the axioms, this chapter
describes how to work with probability distributions in three alternative forms:
Venn diagrams, probability tables, and odds.
I end the chapter by explaining what I think are the most distinctive
elements of probabilism, and how probability distributions go beyond what
one obtains from a comparative confidence ranking.
2.1 Propositions and propositional logic
Following the discussion in Chapter 1, we will assume that degrees of belief

are propositional attitudes—they are attitudes agents assign to propositions.1
In any particular application we will be interested in the degrees of belief an
agent assigns to the propositions in some language £. £ will contain a finite
26 PROBABILITY DISTRIBUTIONS
number of atomic propositions, which we will usually represent with capital

letters (P, Q, R, etc.).
The rest of the propositions in £> are constructed in standard fashion from
atomic propositions using five propositional connectives: ~, &, V, D, and ≡.
A negation ~p is true just in case P is false. A conjunction P &. Q is true
just in case its conjuncts P and Q are both true, “v” represents inclusive “or”;
a disjunction Pv Q is false just in case its disjuncts P and Q are both false. “D”
represents the material conditional; P D Qis false just in case its antecedent
P is true and its consequent Q is false. A material biconditional P ≡ Q is true
just in case P and Q are both true or P and Q are both false.
Philosophers sometimes think about propositional connectives using sets of
possible worlds. Possible worlds are somewhat like the alternate universes to
which characters travel in science-fiction stories—events occur in a possible
world, but they may be different events than occur in the actual world (the
possible world in which we live). Possible worlds are maximally specified, such
that for any event and any possible world that event either does or does not
occur in that world. And the possible worlds are plentiful enough such that
for any combination of events that could happen, there is a possible world in
which that combination of events does happen.
We can associate with each proposition the set of possible worlds in which
that proposition is true. Imagine that in the Venn diagram of Figure 2.1
(named after a logical technique developed by John Venn), the possible worlds
are represented as points inside the rectangle. Proposition P might be true in
some of those worlds, false in others. We can draw a circle around all the worlds
in which P is true, label it P, and then associate proposition P with the set of
all possible worlds in that circle (and similarly for proposition Q).
The propositional connectives can also be thought of in terms of possible
worlds. ~P is associated with the set of all worlds lying outside the P-circle.
P & Q is associated with the set of worlds in the overlap of the P-circle and the
Q-circle. P V Q is associated with the set of worlds lying in either the P-circle
2.1 PROPOSITIONS AND PROPOSITIONAL LOGIC 27
Figure 2.2 The set of worlds associated with P V Q
or the Q-circle. (The set of worlds associated with P V Q has been shaded in
Figure 2.2 for illustration.) P D Q is associated with the set containing all the
worlds except those that lie both inside the P-circle and outside the Q-circle.
P ≡ Q is associated with the set of worlds that are either in both the P-circle
and the Q-circle or in neither one.2
Warning
I keep saying that a proposition can be “associated” with the set of possible
worlds in which that proposition is true. It’s tempting to think that the
proposition just is that set of possible worlds, but we will avoid that tempta
tion. Here’s why: The way we’ve set things up, any two logically equivalent
propositions (such as P and ~P D P) are associated with the same set of
possible worlds. So if propositions just were their associated sets of possible
worlds, P and ~P D P would be the same proposition. Since we’re taking
credences to be assigned to propositions, that would mean that of necessity
every agent assigns P and ~P D P the same credence. Eventually we’re going
to suggest that if an agent assigns P and ~P Ξ) P different credences, she’s
making a rational mistake. But we want our formalism to deem it a rational
requirement that agents assign the same credence to logical equivalents,
not a necessary truth. It’s useful to think about propositions in terms of
their associated sets of possible worlds, so we will continue to do so. But
to keep logically equivalent propositions separate entities we will not say
that a proposition just is a set of possible worlds.
Before we discuss relations among propositions, a word about notation. I said

we will use capital letters to represent specific atomic propositions. We will
also use capital letters as metavariables ranging over propositions. I might say,
“If P entails Q, then...”. Clearly the atomic proposition P doesn’t entail the
atomic proposition Q. So what Γm saying in such a sentence is “Suppose
we have one proposition (which we’ll call ‘P’ for the time being) that entails
another proposition (which we’ll call ‘Q’). Then..At first it may be con
fusing sorting atomic proposition letters from metavariables, but context will
hopefully make my usage clear. (Look out especially for phrases like: “For any
propositions P and Q.. .”.)3
2.1.1 Relations among propositions
Propositions P and Q are equivalent just in case they are associated with the
same set of possible worlds—in each possible world, P is true just in case Q is.
In that case I will write “P =lf= Q”. P entails Q (“P 1= Q”) just in case there is
no possible world in which P is true but Q is not. On a Venn diagram, P entails
Q when the P-circle is entirely contained within the Q-circle. (Keep in mind
that one way for the P-circle to be entirely contained in the Q-circle is for them
to be the same circle! When P is equivalent to Q, P entails Q and Q entails P.)
P refutes Q just in case P 1= ~Q. When P refutes Q, every world that makes
P true makes Q false.4
For example, suppose I have rolled a six-sided die. The proposition that the
die came up six entails the proposition that it came up even. The proposition
that the die came up six refutes the proposition that it came up odd. The
proposition that the die came up even is equivalent to the proposition that
it did not come up odd—and each of those propositions entails the other.
P is a tautology just in case it is true in every possible world. In that case
we write “1= P”. I will sometimes use the symbol “T” to stand for a tautology.
A contradiction is false in every possible world. I will sometimes use “F” to
stand for a contradiction. A contingent proposition is neither a contradiction
nor a tautology.
Finally, we have properties of proposition sets of arbitrary size. The propo
sitions in a set are consistent if there is at least one possible world in which all
of those propositions are true. The propositions in a set are inconsistent if no
world makes them all true.
The propositions in a set are mutually exclusive if no possible world makes
more than one of them true. Put another way, each proposition in the set refutes
each of the others. (For any propositions P and Q in the set, P 1= ~Q.) The
propositions in a set are jointly exhaustive if each possible world makes at
2.1 PROPOSITIONS AND PROPOSITIONAL LOGIC 29
Figure 2.3 Four mutually exclusive, jointly exhaustive regions
least one of the propositions in the set true. In other words, the disjunction of
all the propositions in the set is a tautology.
We will often work with proposition sets whose members are both mutually
exclusive and jointly exhaustive. A mutually exclusive, jointly exhaustive set of
propositions is called a partition. Intuitively, a partition is a way of dividing
up the available possibilities. For example, in our die-rolling example the
proposition that the die came up odd and the proposition that the die came
up even together form a partition. When you have a partition, each possible
world makes exactly one of the propositions in the partition true. On a Venn
diagram, the regions representing the propositions in a partition combine to
fill the entire rectangle without overlapping at any point.
2.1.2 State-descriptions
Suppose we are working with a language that has just two atomic propositions,
P and Q. Looking back at Figure 2.1, we can see that these propositions divide
the space of possible worlds into four mutually exclusive, jointly exhaustive
regions. Figure 2.3 labels those regions s1, s2, s3, and s4. Each of the regions
corresponds to one of the lines in the following truth-table:
P Q state-description
51 τ T P&Q
s2 τ F P&~Q
¾ F T ~P&Q
s4 F F ~P⅛~Q
Each line on the truth-table can also be described by a kind of proposition

called a state-description. A state-description in language £ is a conjunction
in which (1) each conjunct is either an atomic proposition of £> or its negation;
and (2) each atomic proposition of £> appears exactly once. For example,
P 8c Q and ~P & Q are each state-descriptions. A state-description suc
cinctly describes the possible worlds associated with a line on the truth-table.
For example, the possible worlds in region s3 are just those in which P is
false and Q is true; in other words, they are just those in which the state
description ~P & Q is true. Given any language, its state-descriptions will form
a partition.5
Notice that the state-descriptions available for use are dependent on the
language we are working with. If instead of language £ we are working with a
language £' containing three atomic propositions (P, Q, and R), we will have
eight state-descriptions available instead of T’s four. (You’ll work with these
eight state-descriptions in Exercise 2.1. For now we’ll go back to working with
language £ and its paltry four.)
Every non-contradictory proposition in a language has an equivalent that
is a disjunction of state-descriptions. We call this disjunction the proposition’s
disjunctive normal form. For example, the proposition P V Q is true in regions
s1, s2, ands3. Thus
PVQ=II= (P&Q)v(P&~Q)V(~P&Q) (2.1)
The proposition on the right-hand side is the disjunctive normal form equiv
alent of P V Q. To find the disjunctive normal form of a non-contradictory
proposition, figure out which lines of the truth-table it’s true on, then make a
disjunction of the state-descriptions associated with each such line.6
2.1.3 Predicate logic
Sometimes we will want to work with languages that represent objects and
properties. To do so, we first identify a universe of discourse, the total set
of objects under discussion. Each object in the universe of discourse will be
represented by a constant, which will usually be a lower-case letter (a,b,c, ...).
Properties of those objects and relations among them will be represented by
predicates, which will be capital letters.
Relations among propositions in such a language are exactly as described
in the previous sections, except that we have two new kinds of propositions.
First, our atomic propositions are now generated by applying a predicate
to a constant, as in “Fa”. Second, we can generate quantified sentences, as
2.2 THE PROBABILITY AXIOMS 31
in “(Vx)(Fx D ~Fx)”. Since we will rarely be using predicate logic, I won’t

work through the details here; a thorough treatment can be found in any
introductory logic text.
I do want to emphasize, though, that as long as we restrict our attention to
finite universes of discourse, all the logical relations we need can be handled by
the propositional machinery discussed above. If, say, our only two constants
are a and b and our only predicate is F, then the only atomic propositions in ,£
will be Fa and Fb, for which we can build a standard truth-table:
Fa Fb state-description
T T Fa & Fb
T F Fa & ~Fb
F T ~Fa & Fb
F F ~Fa & ~Fb
For any proposition in this language containing a quantifier, we can find

an equivalent composed entirely of atomic propositions and propositional
connectives. To do this we need the notion of a substitution instance:
a substitution instance of a quantified sentence is produced by removing
the quantifier and replacing its variable throughout what remains with the
same constant. (So, for example, FaD~Fa is a substitution instance of
(Vx)(Fx D ~Fx).) A universally quantified sentence is equivalent to a
conjunction of all its substitution instances for constants in £, while an
existentially quantified sentence is equivalent to a disjunction of its substitution
instances. For example, when our only two constants are a and b we have:
(∀x)(Fx D ~Fx) =11= (Fα D ~Fa) & (Fb D -Fb) (2.2)

(3x)Fx =11= Fa V Fb (2.3)
As long as we stick to finite universes of discourse, every proposition will have

an equivalent that uses only propositional connectives. So even when we work
in predicate logic, every non-contradictory proposition will have an equivalent
in disjunctive normal form.
2.2 The probability axioms
A distribution over language £ assigns a real number to each proposition in

the language.7 Bayesians represent an agent’s degrees of belief as a distribution
over a language; I will use “cr” to symbolize an agent’s credence distribution.
For example, if an agent is 70% confident that it will rain tomorrow, we will
write
cr(K) = 0.7 (2.4)

where R is the proposition that it will rain tomorrow. Another way to put this
is that the agents unconditional credence in rain tomorrow is 0.7. (Uncon
ditional credences contrast with conditional credences, which we will discuss
in Chapter 3.) The higher the numerical value of an agent’s unconditional
credence in a proposition, the more confident the agent is that that proposition
is true.
Bayesians hold that a rational credence distribution satisfies certain rules.
Among these are our first three core rules, Kolmogorov’s axioms:
Non-Negativity: For any proposition P in £, cr(P) ≥ 0.

Normality: For any tautology T in £, cr(T) = 1.
Finite Additivity: For any mutually exclusive propositions P and Q in £,
cr(P V Q) = cr(P) + cr(Q).
Kolmogorov’s axioms are often referred to as “the probability axioms”.

Mathematicians call any distribution that satisfies these axioms a probability
distribution. Kolmogorov (1933/1950) was the first to articulate these axioms
as the foundation of mathematical probability theory.8
Warning
Kolmogorov’s work inaugurated a mathematical field of probability theory

distinct from the philosophical study of what probability is. While this was
an important advance, it gave the word “probability” a special meaning in
mathematical circles that can generate confusion elsewhere.
For a twenty-first-century mathematician, Kolmogorov’s axioms define
what it is for a distribution to be a “probability distribution”. This is distinct
from the way people use “probability” in everyday life. For one thing, the
word “probability” in English may not mean the same thing in every use.
And even if it does, it would be a substantive philosophical thesis that
probabilities (in the everyday sense) can be represented by a numerical
distribution satisfying Kolmogorov’s axioms. Going in the other direction,
there are numerical distributions satisfying the axioms that don’t count
as “probabilistic” in any ordinary sense. For example, we could invent a
distribution “tv” that assigns 1 to every true proposition and 0 to every

false proposition. To a mathematician, the fact that tv satisfies Kolmogorov’s
axioms makes it a probability distribution. But a propositions tv-value
might not match its probability in the everyday sense. Improbable propo
sitions can turn out to be true (I just rolled snake-eyes!), and propositions
with high probabilities can turn out to be false (the Titanic should’ve made
it to port).
Probabilism is the philosophical view that rationality requires an agent’s

credences to form a probability distribution (that is, to satisfy Kolmogorov’s
axioms). Probabilism is attractive in part because it has intuitively appealing
consequences. For example, from the probability axioms we can prove:
Negation: For any proposition P in £, cr(~P) = 1 — cr(P).
According to Negation, rationality requires an agent with cr(P) = 0.7 to have

cr(~P) = 0.3. Among other things, Negation embodies the sensible thought
that if you’re highly confident that a proposition is true, you should be dubious
that its negation is.
Usually I’ll leave it as an exercise to prove that a particular consequence
follows from the probability axioms, but here I will prove Negation as an
example for the reader.
Negation Proof:
Claim Justification
(1) P and ~P are mutually exclusive logic
(2) cr(P V ~P) = cr(P) + cr(~P) (1), Finite Additivity
(3) P V ~P is a tautology logic
(4) cr(PV~P) = 1 (3), Normality
(5) 1 = cr(P) + cr(~P) (2) > (4)
(6) cr(~P) = 1 — cr(P) (5), algebra
2.2.1 Consequences of the probability axioms
Below are a number of further consequences of the probability axioms. Again,

these consequences are listed in part to illustrate intuitive things that follow
from the axioms. But Γm also listing them because they’ll be useful in future
proofs.
Maximality: For any proposition P in £, cr(P) ≤ 1.

Contradiction: For any contradiction F in £, cr(F) = 0.
Entailment: For any propositions P and Q in £, if P 1= Q then
cr(P) ≤ cr(Q).
Equivalence: For any propositions P and Q in £, if P =11= Q then
cr(P) = cr(Q).
General Additivity: For any propositions P and Q in T,
cr(P V Q) = cr(P) + cr(Q) — cr(P & Q).
Finite Additivity (Extended): For any finite set of mutually exclusive propo -
sitions{P1,P2, ...,Pn},
cr(P1 V P2 V ... V Pn) = cr(P1) + cr(P2) + ... + cr(Pn).
Decomposition: For any propositions P and Q in £,
cr(P) = cr(P & Q) + cr(P & ~Q).
Partition: For any finite partition of propositions in /3, the sum of their
unconditional cr-values is 1.
Together, Non-Negativity and Maximality establish the bounds of our cre

dence scale. Rational credences will always fall between 0 and 1 (inclusive).
Given these bounds, Bayesians represent absolute certainty that a proposition
is true as a credence of 1 and absolute certainty that a proposition is false as
credence 0. The upper bound is arbitrary—we could have set it at whatever
positive real number we wanted. But using 0 and 1 lines up nicely with every
day talk of being 0% confident or 100% confident in particular propositions,
and also with various considerations of frequency and chance discussed later
in this book.
Entailment is plausible for all the same reasons Comparative Entailment
was plausible in Chapter 1; we’ve simply moved from an expression in terms
of confidence comparisons to one using numerical credences. Understanding
equivalence as mutual entailment, Entailment entails Equivalence. General
Additivity is a generalization of Finite Additivity that allows us to calculate
an agent’s credence in any disjunction, whether the disjuncts are mutually
exclusive or not. (When the disjuncts are mutually exclusive, their conjunction
is a contradiction, the cr(P & Q) term equals 0, and General Additivity takes
us back to Finite Additivity.)
Finite Additivity (Extended) can be derived by repeatedly applying Finite

Additivity. Begin with any finite set of mutually exclusive propositions
{P1, P2, ...,Pn}. By Finite Additivity,
cr(P1 V P2) = cr(P1) + cr(P2) (2.5)
Logically, since P1 and P2 are each mutually exclusive with P3, P1 V P2 is also
mutually exclusive with P3. So Finite Additivity yields
cr([P1 V P2] V P3) = cr(P1 V P2) + cr(P3) (2.6)
Combining Equations (2.5) and (2.6) then gives us
cr(P1 V P2 V P3) = cr(P1) + cr(P2) + cr(P3) (2.7)
Next we would invoke the fact that P1 V P2 V P3 is mutually exclusive with P4

to derive
cr(P1 V P2 V P3 V P4) = cr(P1) + cr(P2) + cr(P3) + cr(P4) (2.8)
Clearly this process iterates as many times as we need to reach
cr(P1 V P2 V ... V Pn) = cr(P1) + cr(P2) + ... + cr(Pπ) (2.9)
The idea here is that once you have Finite Additivity for proposition sets of
size two, you have it for proposition sets of any larger finite size as well. When
the propositions in a finite set are mutually exclusive, the probability of their
disjunction equals the sum of the probabilities of the disjuncts.
Combining Finite Additivity and Equivalence yields Decomposition. For
any P and Q, P is equivalent to the disjunction of the mutually exclusive
propositions P& Q and P& ~Q, so cr(P) must equal the sum of the cr-values of
those two. Partition then takes a finite set of mutually exclusive propositions
whose disjunction is a tautology. By Finite Additivity (Extended) the cr-values
of the propositions in the partition must sum to the cr-value of the tautology,
which by Normality must be 1.
2.2.2 A Bayesian approach to the Lottery scenario
In future sections Γll explain some alternative ways of thinking about the
probability calculus. But first let’s use probabilities to do something: a Bayesian
analysis of the situation in the Lottery Paradox. Recall the scenario from
Chapter 1: A fair lottery has one million tickets.9 An agent is skeptical of each
ticket that it will win, but takes it that some ticket will win. In Chapter 1 we
saw that it’s difficult to articulate plausible norms on binary belief that depict
this agent as believing rationally. But once we move to degrees of belief, the
analysis is straightforward.
We’ll use a language in which the constants a,b,c, ... stand for the various
tickets in the lottery, and the predicate W says that a particular ticket wins.
A reasonable credence distribution over the resulting language sets
cr(Wα) = cr(W¾) = cr(Wc) = ... = 1/1,000,000 (2.10)
Negation then gives us
cr(~Wα) = cr(~W⅛) = cr(~Wc) = ... = 1 - 1/1,000,000 = 0.999999

(2.11)
reflecting the agent’s high confidence for each ticket that that ticket won’t win.
What about the disjunction saying that some ticket will win? Since
the Wa, Wb, Wc,... propositions are mutually exclusive, Finite Additivity
(Extended) yields
cr(Wa VWbvWcVWdV...) =
(2.12)
cr(Wd) + cr(Wb) + cr(Wc) + cr(Wd) + ...
On the right-hand side of Equation (2.12) we have one million terms, each
of which has a value of 1/1,000,000. Thus the credence on the left-hand side
equals 1.
The Lottery Paradox is a problem for particular norms on binary belief.
We haven’t done anything to resolve that paradox here. Instead, we’ve shown
that the lottery situation giving rise to the paradox can be easily modeled by
Bayesian means. We’ve build a model of the lottery situation in which the
agent is both highly confident that some ticket will win and highly confident
of each ticket that it will not. (Constructing a similar model for the Preface is
left as an exercise for the reader.) There is no tension with the rules of rational
confidence represented in Kolmogorov’s axioms. The Bayesian model not only
accommodates but predicts that if a rational agent has a small confidence in
each of a set of mutually exclusive propositions, yet has a large enough number
of those propositions available, that agent will be certain (or close to certain)
that at least one of the propositions is true.
This analysis also reveals why it’s difficult to simultaneously maintain both
the Lockean thesis and the Belief Consistency norm from Chapter 1. The
Lockean thesis implies that a rational agent believes a proposition just in case
her credence in that proposition is above some numerical threshold. For any
such threshold we pick (less than 1), it’s possible to generate a lottery-type
scenario in which the agent’s credence that at least one ticket will win clears the
threshold, but her credence for any given ticket that that ticket will lose also
clears the threshold. Given the Lockean thesis, a rational agent will therefore
believe that at least one ticket will win but also believe of each ticket that it will
lose. This violates Belief Consistency, which says that every rational belief set
is logically consistent.
2.2.3 Doxastic possibilities
In the previous section we considered propositions of the form Wx, each of

which says of some particular ticket that it will win the lottery. To perform var
ious calculations involving these W propositions, we assumed that they form a
partition—that is, that they are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. But
you may worry that this isn’t right: what about worlds in which ticket a and
ticket b both win the lottery due to a clerical error, or worlds in which no ticket
wins the lottery, or worlds in which the lottery never takes place, or worlds in
which humans never evolve? These worlds are logically possible—the laws of
logic alone don’t rule them out. Yet the credence distribution we crafted for
our agent assigns these worlds degree of belief 0. Could it ever be rational for
an agent to assign a logical possibility no credence whatsoever?
We will refer to the possible worlds an agent entertains as her doxastically
possible worlds.10 Perhaps a fully rational agent never rules out any logically
possible world; if so, then a rational agent’s set of doxastic possibilities is always
the full set of logical possibilities, and includes worlds like the one in which
every ticket wins, the one in which no ticket wins, the one in which no humans
exist, etc. We will discuss this position when we turn to the Regularity Principle
in Chapters 4 and 5. For the time being I want to note that even if a rational
agent should never entirely rule out a logically possible world, it might be
convenient in particular contexts for her to temporarily ignore certain worlds
as live possibilities. Pollsters calculating confidence intervals for their latest
sampling data don’t factor in the possibility that our sun will explode before
the next presidential election.
How is the probability calculus affected when an agent restricts her

doxastically possible worlds to a proper subset of the logically possible worlds?
Section 2.1 defined various relations among propositions in terms of possible
worlds. In that context, the appropriate set of possible worlds to consider was
the full set of logically possible worlds. But we can reinterpret those definitions
as quantified over an agent’s doxastically possible worlds. In our analysis of
the Lottery scenario above, we effectively ignored possible worlds in which no
tickets win the lottery or in which more than one ticket wins. For our purposes
it was simpler to suppose that the agent rules them out of consideration. So
our Bayesian model treated each Wx proposition as mutually exclusive with
all the others, allowing us to apply Finite Additivity to generate equations like
(2.12)
. If we were working with the full space of logically possible worlds we
would have worlds in which more than one Wx proposition was true, so those
propositions wouldn’t count as mutally exclusive. But relative to the set of
possible worlds we’ve supposed the agent entertains, they are.
2.2.4 Probabilities are weird! The Conjunction Fallacy
As you work with credences it’s important to remember that probabilistic

relations can function very differently from the relations among categorical
concepts that inform many of our intuitions. In the Lottery situation it’s
perfectly rational for an agent to be highly confident of a disjunction while
having low confidence in each of its disjuncts. That may seem strange.
Tversky and Kahneman (1983) offer another probabilistic example that runs
counter to most people’s intuitions. In a famous study, they presented subjects
with the following prompt:
Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in phi
losophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination
and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.
The subjects were then asked to rank the probabilities of the following propo
sitions (among others):
• Linda is active in the feminist movement.

• Linda is a bank teller.
• Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
2.3 ALTERNATIVE REPRESENTATIONS OF PROBABILITY 39
Figure 2.4 Areas equal to unconditional credences
The “great majority” of Tversky and Kahneman’s subjects ranked the con
junction as more probable than the bank teller proposition. But this violates the
probability axioms! A conjuction will always entail each of its conjuncts. By our
Entailment rule—which follows from the probability axioms—the conjunct
must be at least as probable as the conjunction. Being more confident in a
conjunction than its conjunct is known as the Conjunction Fallacy.
2.3 Alternative representations of probability
2.3.1 Probabilities in Venn diagrams
Earlier we used Venn diagrams to visualize propositions and the relations

among them. We can also use Venn diagrams to picture probability dis
tributions. All we have to do is attach significance to something that was
unimportant before: the sizes of regions in the diagram. We stipulate that
the area of the entire rectangle is 1. The area of a region inside the rectangle
equals the agent’s unconditional credence in any proposition associated with
that region. (Note that this visualization technique works only for credence
distributions that satisfy the probability axioms.)11
For example, consider Figure 2.4. There we’ve depicted a probabilistic
credence distribution in which the agent is more confident of proposition P
than she is of proposition Q, as indicated by the P-circle’s being larger than
the Q-circle. What about cr(Q & P) versus cr(Q & ~P)? On the diagram the
region labeled s3 has slightly more area than the region labeled s1, so the agent
is slightly more confident of Q & ~P than Q & P. (When you construct your
own Venn diagrams you need not include state-description labels like “s3”; I’ve
added them for reference.)
Warning
It’s tempting to think that the size of a region in a Venn diagram represents
the number of possible worlds in that region—the number of worlds that
make the associated proposition true. But this would be a mistake. Just
because an agent is more confident of one proposition than another does not
necessarily mean she associates more possible worlds with the former than
the latter. For example, if I tell you I have a weighted die that is more likely
to come up six than any other number, your increased confidence in six
does not necessarily mean that you think there are disproportionately many
worlds in which the die lands six. The area of a region in a Venn diagram
is a useful visual representation of an agent’s confidence in its associated
proposition. We should not read too much into it about the distribution of
possible worlds.12
Venn diagrams make it easy to see why certain probabilistic relations hold. For
example, take the General Additivity rule from Section 2.2.1. In Figure 2.4, the
P V Q region contains every point that is in the P-circle, in the Q-circle, or in
both. We could calculate the area of that region by adding up the area of the
P-circle and the area of the Q-circle, but in doing so we’d be counting the P&Q
region (labeled s1) twice. We adjust for this double-counting as follows:
cr(P V Q) = cr(P) + cr(Q) - cr(P & Q) (2.13)
That’s General Additivity.

Figure 2.5 depicts a situation in which proposition P entails proposition Q.
As discussed earlier, this requires the P-circle to be wholly contained within the
Q-circle. But since areas now represent unconditional credences, the diagram
makes it obvious that the cr-value of proposition Q must be at least as great as
the cr-value of proposition P. That’s exactly what our Entailment rule requires.
(It also shows why the Conjunction Fallacy is a mistake—imagine Q is the
proposition that Linda is a bank teller and P is the proposition that Linda is a
feminist bank teller.)
Venn diagrams can be a useful way of visualizing probability relationships.
Bayesians often clarify a complex situation by sketching a quick Venn diagram
of the agents credence distribution. There are limits to this technique; when
our languages grow beyond three or so atomic propositions it becomes difficult
to get all the overlapping regions one needs and to make areas proportional to
credences. But there are also cases in which it’s much easier to understand why
a particular theorem holds by looking at a diagram than by working with the
axioms.
2.3.2 Probability tables
Besides being represented visually in a Venn diagram, a probability distribu

tion can be represented precisely and efficiently in a probability table. To build
a probability table, we begin with a set of propositions forming a partition of
the agent’s doxastic possibilities. For example, suppose an agent is going to roll
a loaded six-sided die that comes up six on half of its rolls (with the remaining
rolls distributed equally among the other numbers). A natural partition of the
agent’s doxastic space uses the propositions that the die comes up one, the die
comes up two, the die comes up three, etc. The resulting probability table looks
like this:
proposition cr
Die comes up one. 1/10
Die comes up two. 1/10
Die comes up three. 1/10
Die comes up four. 1/10
Die comes up five. 1/10
Die comes up six. 1/2
The probability table first lists the propositions in the partition. Then for each
proposition it lists the agent’s unconditional credence in that proposition. If
the agent’s credences satisfy the probability axioms, the credence values in the
table will satisfy two important constraints:
1. Each value is non-negative.

2. The values in the column sum to 1.
The first rule follows from Non-Negativity, while the second follows from our
Partition theorem.
Once we know the credences of partition members, we can calculate the
agents unconditional credence in any other proposition expressible in terms
of that partition. First, any contradiction receives credence 0. Then for any
other proposition, we figure out which rows of the table it’s true on, and
calculate its credence by summing the values on those rows. For example, we
might be interested in the agents credence that the die roll comes up even.
The proposition that the roll comes up even is true on the second, fourth,
and sixth rows of the table. So the agents credence in that proposition is
1/10+1/10+1/2 = 7/10.
We can calculate the agent’s credence in this way because
E=II=2V4V6 (2.14)
where E is the proposition that the die came up even, “2” represents its coming
up two, etc. By Equivalence,
cr(E) = cr(2 V 4 V 6) (2.15)
Since the propositions on the right are members of a partition, they are
mutually exclusive, so Finite Additivity (Extended) yields
cr(E) = cr(2) + cr(4) + cr(6) (2.16)
The agent’s unconditional credence in E can be found by summing the values

on the second, fourth, and sixth rows of the table.
Given a propositional language £, it’s often useful to build a probability
table using the partition containing £’s state-descriptions. For example, for a
language with two atomic propositions P and Q, I might give you the following
probability table:
P Q cr
51 τ T 0.1
s2 τ F 0.3
s3 F T 0.2
S4 F F 0.4
The state-descriptions in this table are fully specified by the Ts and Fs appearing
under P and Q in each row, but Γve also provided labels (s1, s2,...) for each
state-description to show how they correspond to regions in Figure 2.4.
Suppose a probabilistic agent has the unconditional credences specified in
this table. What credence does she assign to P V Q? From the Venn diagram
we can see that P V Q is true on state-descriptions s1, s2, and s3. So we find
cr(P V Q) by adding up the cr-values on the first three rows of our table. In this
case cr(P V Q) = 0.6.
A probability table over state-descriptions is a particularly efficient way
of specifying an agents unconditional credence distribution over an entire
propositional language.13 A language 23 closed under the standard connectives
contains infinitely many propositions, so a distribution over that language
contains infinitely many values. If the agents credences satisfy the probability
axioms, the Equivalence rule tells us that equivalent propositions must all
receive the same credence. So we can specify the entire distribution just by
specifying its values over a maximal set of non-equivalent propositions in the
language.
But that can still be a lot of propositions! If 23 has n atomic propositions, it
will contain 22" non-equivalent propositions (see Exercise 2.3). For 2 atomics
that’s only 16 credence values to specify, but by the time we reach 4 atomics it’s
up to 65,536 distinct values.
On the other hand, a language with n atomics will contain only 2" state
descriptions. And once we provide unconditional credences for these propo
sitions in our probability table, all the remaining values in the distribution
follow. Every contradictory proposition receives credence 0, while each non
contradictory proposition is equivalent to a disjunction of state-descriptions
(its disjunctive normal form). By Finite Additivity (Extended), the credence in
a disjunction of state-descriptions is just the sum of the credences assigned to
those state-descriptions. So the probability table contains all the information
we need to specify the full distribution.14
2.3.3 Using probability tables
Probability tables describe an entire credence distribution in an efficient

manner; instead of specifying a credence value for each non-equivalent propo
sition in the language, we need only specify values for its state-descriptions.
Credences in state-descriptions can then be used to calculate credences in
other propositions.
But probability tables can also be used to prove theorems and solve
problems. To do so, we replace the numerical credence values in the table
with variables:
P Q cr
51 τ T a
s2 τ F b
⅞ F T c
s4 F F d
This probability table for an £ with two atomic propositions makes no assump
tions about the agents specific credence values. It is therefore fully general,
and can be used to prove general theorems about probability distributions.
For example, on this table
cr(P) = a + b (2.17)
But a is just cr(P & Q), and b is cr(P & ~Q). This gives us a very quick proof
of the Decomposition rule from Section 2.2.1. It’s often much easier to prove a
general probability result using a probability table built on state-descriptions
than it is to prove the same result from Kolmogorov’s axioms.
As for problem-solving, suppose I tell you that my credence distribution
satisfies the probability axioms and also has the following features: I am certain
of P V Q, and I am equally confident in Q and ~Q. I then ask you to tell me my
credence in P D Q.
You might be able to solve this problem by drawing a careful Venn
diagram—perhaps you can even solve it in your head! If not, the probability
table provides a purely algebraic solution method. We start by expressing the
constraints on my distribution as equations using the variables from the table.
From our second constraint on probability tables we have:
u + ⅛ + c+ cZ = 1 (2.18)
(Sometimes it also helps to invoke the first constraint, writing inequalities

specifying that a, b, c, and d are each greater than or equal to 0. In this particular
problem those inequalities aren’t needed.) Next we represent the fact that I am
equally confident in Q and ~Q:
cr(Q) = cr(~Q) (2.19)

d+c—b+d (2.20)
Finally, we represent the fact that I am certain of P V Q. The only line of the
table on which PV Q is false is line s4; if Γm certain of P V Q, I must assign this
state-description a credence of 0. So
d=Q (2.21)
Now what value are we looking for? Γve asked you for my credence in P D Q;
that proposition is true on lines s1, s3, and s4; so you need to find a + c + d.
Applying a bit of algebra to Equations (2.18), (2.20), and (2.21), you should be
able to determine that a + c + d = 1/2.
2.3.4 Odds
Agents sometimes report their levels of confidence using odds rather than
probabilities. If an agents unconditional credence in P is cr(P), her odds for P
are cr(P) : cr(~P), and her odds against P are cr(~P) : cr(P).
For example, there are thirty-seven pockets on a European roulette wheel.
(American wheels have more.) Eighteen of those pockets are black. Suppose an
agents credences obey the probability axioms, and she assigns equal credence
to the roulette ball’s landing in any of the thirty-seven pockets. Then her
credence that the ball will land in a black pocket is 18/37, and her credence
that it won’t is 19/37. Her odds for black are therefore
18/37 : 19/37, or 18 : 19 (2.22)
(Since the agent assigns equal credence to each of the pockets, these odds are
easily found by comparing the number of pockets that make the proposition
true to the number of pockets that make it false.) Yet in gambling contexts we
usually report odds against a proposition. So in a casino someone might say
that the odds against the ball’s landing in the single green pocket are “36 to 1”.
The odds against an event are tightly connected to the stakes at which it would
be fair to gamble on that event, which we will discuss in Chapter 7.
Warning
Instead of using a colon or the word “to”, people sometimes quote odds
as fractions. So someone might say that the odds for the roulette ball’s
landing in a black pocket are “18/19”.15 It’s important not to mistake this
fraction for a probability value. If your odds for black are 18 : 19, you take
the ball’s landing on black to a bit less likely to happen than not. But if
your unconditional credence in black were 18/19, you would always bet
on black!
It can be useful to think in terms of odds not only for calculating betting stakes
but also because odds highlight differences that maybe obscured by probability
values. Suppose you hold a single ticket in a lottery that you take to be fair.
Initially you think that the lottery contains only two tickets, of which yours is
one. But then someone tells you there are 100 tickets in the lottery. This is a
significant blow to your chances, witnessed by the fact that your assessment
of the odds against winning has gone from 1:1 to 99:1. The significance of
this change can also be seen in your unconditional credence that you will lose,
which has jumped from 50% to 99%.
But now it turns out that your informant was misled, and there are actually
10,000 tickets in the lottery! This is another significant blow to your chances,
intuitively at least as bad as the first jump in size. And indeed, your odds against
winning go from 99:1 to 9,999:1. Yet your credence that you’ll lose moves
only from 99% to 99.99%. Probabilities work on an additive scale; from that
perspective a move from 0.5 to 0.99 looks important while a move from 0.99
to 0.9999 looks like a rounding error. But odds use ratios, which highlight
multiplicative effects more obviously.
2.4 What the probability calculus adds
In Chapter 1 we moved from thinking of agents’ doxastic attitudes in terms

of binary (categorical) beliefs and confidence comparisons to working with
numerical degrees of belief. At a first pass, this is a purely descriptive maneuver,
yielding descriptions of an agent’s attitudes at a higher fineness of grain. As we
saw in Chapter 1, this added level of descriptive detail confers both advantages
and disadvantages. On the one hand, credences allow us to say how much
more confident an agent is of one proposition than another. On the other
hand, assigning numerical credences over a set of propositions introduces a
complete ranking, making all the propositions commensurable with respect
to the agent’s confidences. This may be an unrealistic result.
Chapter 1 also offered a norm for comparative confidence rankings:
2.4 WHAT THE PROBABILITY CALCULUS ADDS 47
Comparative Entailment: For any pair of propositions such that the first
entails the second, rationality requires an agent to be at least as
confident of the second as the first.
We have now introduced Kolmogorov’s probability axioms as a set of norms

on credences. Besides the descriptive changes that happen when we move
from comparative confidences to numerical credences, how do the probability
axioms go beyond Comparative Entailment? What more do we demand of an
agent when we require that her credences be probabilistic?
Comparative Entailment can be derived from the probability axioms—we’ve
already seen that by the Entailment rule, if P1= Q then rationality requires
cr(P) ≤ cr(Q). But how much of the probability calculus can be recreated
simply by assuming that Comparative Entailment holds? We saw in Chapter
1 that if Comparative Entailment holds, a rational agent will assign equal,
maximal confidence to all tautologies and equal, minimal confidence to all
contradictions. This doesn’t assign specific numerical confidence values to
contradictions and tautologies, because Comparative Entailment doesn’t work
with numbers. But the probability axioms’ 0-to-l scale for credence values is
fairly stipulative and arbitrary anyway. The real essence of Normality, Contra
diction, Non-Negativity, and Maximality can be obtained from Comparative
Entailment.
That leaves one axiom unaccounted for. To me the key insight of
probabilism—and the element most responsible for Bayesianism’s distinctive
contributions to epistemology—is Finite Additivity. Finite Additivity places
demands on rational credence that don’t follow from any of the comparative
norms we’ve seen. To see how, consider the following two credence
distributions over a language with one atomic proposition:
Mr. Prob: cr(F) = 0 cr(P) =1/6 cr(~P) = 5/6 cr(T) = 1

Mr. Weak: cr(F) = 0 cr(P) =1/36 cr(~P) = 25/36 cr(T) = 1
With respect to their confidence comparisons, Mr. Prob and Mr. Weak are
identical; they each rank ~P above P and both those propositions between
a tautology and a contradiction. Both agents satisfy Comparative Entailment.
Both agents also satisfy the Non-Negativity and Normality probability axioms.
But only Mr. Prob satisfies Finite Additivity. His credence in the tautologous
disjunction P V ~P is the sum of his credences in its mutually exclusive
disjuncts. Mr. Weak’s credences, on the other hand, are superadditive: he
assigns more credence to the disjunction than the sum of his credences in its
mutually exclusive disjuncts (1 > 1/36 ÷ 25/36).
Probabilism goes beyond Comparative Entailment by exalting Mr. Prob over

Mr. Weak. In endorsing Finite Additivity, the probabilist holds that Mr. Weak’s
credences have an irrational feature not present in Mr. Prob’s. When we apply
Bayesianism in later chapters, we’ll see that Finite Additivity gives rise to some
of the theory’s most interesting and useful results. It does so by demanding
that rational credences be linear, in the sense that a disjunction’s credence is a
linear combination16 of the credences in its mutually exclusive disjuncts.
Of course, the fan of confidence comparisons need not restrict herself to
the Comparative Entailment norm. Chapter 14 will explore further com
parative constraints that have been proposed, some of which are capable of
discriminating between Mr. Prob and Mr. Weak. We will ask whether those
non-numerical norms can replicate all the desirable results secured by Finite
Additivity for the Bayesian credence regime. This will be an especially pressing
question because the impressive Bayesian numerical results come with a price.
When we examine explicit philosophical arguments for the probability axioms
in Part IV of this book, we’ll find that while Normality and Non-Negativity can
be straightforwardly argued for, Finite Additivity is the most difficult part of
Bayesian epistemology to defend.
2.5 Exercises
Problem 2.1.
(a) List all eight state-descriptions available in a language with the three
atomic sentences P, Q, and P.
(b) Give the disjunctive normal form of (P V Q) 3 P.
Problem 2.2. Here’s a fact: For any non-contradictory propositions X and Y,

X 1= Y if and only if every disjunct in the disjunctive normal form equivalent
of X is also a disjunct of the disjunctive normal form equivalent of Y.
(a) Use this fact to show that (P V Q) & P k (P V Q) 3 P.
(b) Explain why the fact is true. (Be sure to explain both the “if”
direction and the “only if” direction!)
Problem 2.3. Explain why a language £ with n atomic propositions

can express exactly 22" non-equivalent propositions. (Hint: Think about the
2.5 EXERCISES 49
number of state-descriptions available, and the number of distinct disjunctive

normal forms.)
Problem 2.4. Suppose your universe of discourse contains only two

objects, named by the constants “a” and “b”.
(a) Find a quantifier-free equivalent of the proposition (∀%)[Fx Z) (3y)Gy].
(b) Find the disjunctive normal form of your quantifier-free proposition
from part (a).
Problem 2.5. Can a probabilistic credence distribution assign cr(P) =

0.5, cr(Q) = 0.5, and cr(~P & ~Q) = 0.8? Explain why or why not.17
Problem 2.6. Starting with only the probability axioms and Negation,
write out proofs for all of the probability rules listed in Section 2.2.1. Your
proofs must be straight from the axioms—no using Venn diagrams or proba
bility tables! Once you prove a rule you may use it in further proofs. (Hint: You
may want to prove them in an order different from the one in which they’re
listed. And I did Finite Additivity (Extended) for you.)
Problem 2.7. Prove that for any propositions P and Q, if cr(P ≡ Q) = 1

then cr(P) = cr(Q).
Problem 2.8. In The Empire Strikes Back, C-3PO tells Han Solo that the
odds against successfully navigating an asteroid field are 3,720 to 1.
(a) What is C-3POs unconditional credence that they will successfully
navigate the asteroid field? (Express your answer as a fraction.)
(b) Suppose C-3PO is certain that they will survive if they either success
fully navigate the asteroid field, or fail to successfully navigate it but hide
in a cave. He is also certain that those are the only two ways they can
survive, and his odds against the conjunction of failing to successfully
navigate and hiding in a cave are 59 to 2. Assuming C-3POs credences
obey the probability axioms, what are his odds against their surviving?
(c) In the movie, how does Han respond to 3POs odds declaration?
(Apparently Han prefers his probabilities quoted as percentages.)
Problem 2.9. Consider the probabilistic credence distribution specified by

this probability table:
P Q R cr
τ T T 0.1
τ T F 0.2
τ F T 0
τ F F 0.3
F T T 0.1
F T F 0.2
F F T 0
F F F 0.1
Calculate each of the following values on this distribution:

(a) cr(P ≡ Q)
(b) cr(jR D Q)
(c) cr(P&R)-cr(~P&R)
(d) cr(P8lQ8cR~)∕cr(R)
Problem 2.10. Can an agent have a probabilistic cr-distribution meeting

all of the following constraints?
1. The agent is certain of A D (B ≡ C).
2. The agent is equally confident of B and ~B.
3. The agent is twice as confident of C as C & A.
4. cr(B&C&~A) = 1/5.
If not, prove that it’s impossible. If so, provide a probability table and demon
strate that the resulting distribution satisfies each of the four constraints.
(Hint: Start by building a probability table; then figure out what each of the
constraints says about the credence values in the table; then figure out if it’s
possible to meet all of the constraints at once.)
Problem 2.11. 0 Tversky and Kahneman’s finding that ordinary subjects

commit the Conjunction Fallacy has held up to a great deal of experimental
replication. Kolmogorov’s axioms make it clear that the propositions involved
cannot range from most probable to least probable in the way subjects con
sistently rank them. Do you have any suggestions for why subjects might
consistently make this mistake? Is there any way to read what the subjects are
doing as rationally acceptable?
Problem 2.12. Recall Mr. Prob and Mr. Weak from Section 2.4. Mr. Weak
assigns lower credences to each contingent proposition than does Mr. Prob.
While Mr. Weak’s distribution satisfies Non-Negativity and Normality, it

violates Finite Additivity by being superadditive: it contains a disjunction
whose credence is greater than the sum of the credences of its mutually
exclusive disjuncts.
Construct a credence distribution for “Mr. Bold” over language £ with
single atomic proposition P. Mr. Bold should rank every proposition in the
same order as Mr. Prob and Mr. Weak. Mr. Bold should also satisfy Non
Negativity and Normality. But Mr. Bold’s distribution should be subadditive:
it should contain a disjunction whose credence is less than the sum of the
credences of its mutually exclusive disjuncts.
2.6 Further reading
Merrie Bergmann, James Moor, and Jack Nelson (2013). The Logic Book. 6th
edition. New York: McGraw Hill
One of many available texts that thoroughly covers the logical material
assumed in this book.
Ian Hacking (2001). An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Brian Skyrms (2000). Choice and Chance: An Introduction to Inductive Logic.
4th edition. Stamford, CT: Wadsworth
Each of these books contains a Chapter 6 offering an entry-level, intuitive dis

cussion of the probability rules—though neither explicitly uses Kolmogorov’s
axioms. Hacking has especially nice applications of probabilistic reasoning,
along with many counterintuitive examples like the Conjunction Fallacy from
our Section 2.2.4.
Classic Texts
A. N. Kolmogorov (1933/1950). Foundations of the Theory of Probability.

Translation edited by Nathan Morrison. New York: Chelsea Publishing
Company
Text in which Kolmogorov laid out his famous axiomatization of probability

theory.
Extended Discussion
J. Robert G. Williams (2016). Probability and Non-Classical Logic. In:

Oxford Handbook of Probability and Philosophy. Ed. by Alan Hajek and
Christopher R. Hitchcock. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Covers probability distributions in non-classical logics, such as logics with

non-classical entailment rules and logics with more than one truth-value. Also
briefly discusses probability distributions in logics with extra connectives and
operators, such as modal logics.
Branden Fitelson (2008). A Decision Procedure for Probability Calculus

with Applications. The Review of Symbolic Logic 1, pp. 111-125
Fills in the technical details of solving probability problems algebraically using

probability tables (which Fitelson calls “stochastic truth-tables”), including
the relevant meta-theory. Also describes a Mathematica package that will
solve probability problems and evaluate probabilistic conjectures for you,
downloadable for free at http://fitelson.org/PrSAT/.
Notes
1. Other authors describe degrees of belief as assigned to sentences, statements, or sets

of events. Also, propositions are sometimes taken to be identical to one of these alter
natives. As mentioned in Chapter 1,1 will not assume much about what propositions
are, except that: they are capable of having truth-values (that is, capable of being true
or false); they are expressible by declarative sentences; and they have enough internal
structure to contain logical operators. This last assumption could be lifted with a bit of
work.
2. Bayesians sometimes define degrees of belief over a sigma algebra. A sigma algebra
is a set of sets that is closed under (countable) union, (countable) intersection, and
complementation. Given a language £, the sets of possible worlds associated with the
propositions in that language form a sigma algebra. The algebra is closed under union,
intersection, and complementation because the propositions in £ are closed under
disjunction, conjunction, and negation (respectively).
3. Γm also going to be fairly cavalier about corner-quotes, the use-mention distinction,
etc.
NOTES 53
4. Throughout this book we will be assuming a classical logic, in which each proposition
has exactly one of two available truth-values (true/false) and entailment obeys the
inference rules taught in standard introductory logic classes. For information about
probability in non-classical logics, see the Further Reading at the end of this chapter.
5. The cognoscenti will note that in order for the state-descriptions of £ to form a
partition, the atomic propositions of £ must be (logically) independent. We will assume
throughout this book that every propositional language employed contains logically
independent atomic propositions, unless explicitly noted otherwise.
6. Strictly, in order to get the result that the state-descriptions in a language form a
partition and the result that each non-contradictory proposition has a unique disjunc
tive normal form, we need to further regiment our definitions. To our definition of
a state-description we add that the atomic propositions must appear in alphabetical
order. We then introduce a canonical ordering of the state-descriptions in a language
(say, the order in which they appear in a standardly ordered truth-table) and require
disjunctive normal form propositions to contain their disjuncts in canonical order with
no repetition.
7. In the statistics community, probability distributions are often assigned over the possi
ble values of sets of random variables. Propositions are then thought of as dichotomous
random variables capable of taking only the values 1 and 0 (for “true” and “false”,
respectively). Only rarely in this book will we look past distributions over propositions
to distributions over more general random variables.
8. The axioms Γve presented are not precisely identical to Kolmogorov’s, but the dif
ferences are insignificant for our purposes. Some authors also include Countable
Additivity—which we’ll discuss in Chapter 5—among “Kolmogorov’s axioms”, but I’ll
use the phrase to pick out only Non-Negativity, Normality, and Finite Additivity.
Galavotti (2005, pp. 54-5) notes that authors such as Mazurkiewicz (1932) and
Popper (1938) also provided axioms for probability around the time Kolmogorov was
working. She recommends Roeper and Leblanc (1999) for an extensive survey of the
axiomatizations available.
9. This analysis could easily be generalized to any large, finite number of tickets.
10. Philosophers sometimes describe the worlds an agent entertains as her “epistemically
possible worlds”. Yet that term also carries a connotation of being determined by what
the agent knows. So I’ll discuss doxastically possible worlds, which are determined by
what an agent takes to be possible rather than what she knows.
11. A probability distribution over sets of possible worlds is an example of what math
ematicians call a “measure”. The function that takes any region of a Euclidean two-
dimensional space and outputs its area is also a measure. That makes probabilities
representable by areas in a rectangle.
12. To avoid the confusion discussed here, some authors use “muddy” Venn diagrams
in which all atomic propositions are associated with regions of the same size, and
probability weights are indicated by piling up more or less “mud” on top of particular
regions. Muddy Venn diagrams are difficult to depict on two-dimensional paper, so I’ve
stuck with representing higher confidence as greater area.
13. Truth-tables famously come to us from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
(Wittgenstein 1921/1961), in which Wittgenstein also proposed a theory of probability
assigning equal value to each state-description. But to my knowledge the first person
to characterize probability distributions in general by the values they assign to state
descriptions was Carnap, as in his (1945, Sect. 3).
14. We have argued from the assumption that an agents credences satisfy the probability
axioms to the conclusion that her unconditional credence in any non-contradictory
proposition is the sum of her credences in the disjuncts of its disjunctive normal form.
One can also argue in the other direction. Suppose I stipulate an agent’s credence
distribution over language £ as follows: (1) I stipulate unconditional credences for
£’s state-descriptions that are non-negative and sum to 1; (2) I stipulate that for every
other non-contradictory proposition in £, the agents credence in that proposition is
the sum of her credences in the disjuncts of that proposition’s disjunctive normal form;
and (3) I stipulate that the agent’s credence in each contradiction is 0. We can prove
that any credence distribution stipulated in this fashion will satisfy Kolmogorov’s three
probability axioms. I’ll leave the (somewhat challenging) proof as an exercise for the
reader.
15. Odds against a proposition, quoted with a slash like a fraction, are known as “British
odds”, for their popularity among British and Irish bookies.
16. Given two variables x and y and two constants a and b, we call z = ax + by a linear
combination of x andy. Finite Additivity makes cr(XV Y) a linear combination of cr(X)
and cr(Y), with the constants a and b each set to 1.
17. I owe this problem to Julia Staffel.
Conditional Credences
Chapter 2’s discussion was confined to unconditional credence, an agents

outright degree of confidence that a particular proposition is true. This chapter
takes up conditional credence, an agents credence that one proposition is true
on the supposition that another one is.
The main focus of this chapter is our fourth core normative Bayesian rule:
the Ratio Formula. This rational constraint on conditional credences has a
number of important consequences, including Bayes’s Theorem (which gives
Bayesianism its name).
Conditional credences are also central to the way Bayesians understand
evidential relevance. I will define relevance as positive correlation, then explain
how this notion has been used to investigate causal relations through the
concept of screening off.
Having achieved a deeper understanding of the mathematics of conditional
credences, I return at the end of the chapter to what exactly a conditional cre
dence is. In particular, I discuss an argument by David Lewis that a conditional
credence can’t be understood as an unconditional credence in a conditional.
3.1 Conditional credences and the Ratio Formula
Arturo and Baxter know that two events will occur simultaneously in separate
rooms: a fair coin will be flipped, and a clairvoyant will predict how it will land.
Let H represent the proposition that the coin comes up heads, and C represent
the proposition that the clairvoyant predicts heads. Suppose Arturo and Baxter
each assign an unconditional credence of 1/2 to H and an unconditional
credence of 1/2 to C.
Although Arturo and Baxter assign the same unconditional credences as
each other to H and C, they still might take these propositions to be related in
different ways. We could tease out those differences by saying to each agent,
cT have no idea how the coin is going to come up or what the clairvoyant is
going to say. But suppose for a moment the clairvoyant predicts heads. On
this supposition, how confident are you that the coin will come up heads?” If
56 CONDITIONAL CREDENCES
Arturo says 1/2 and Baxter says 99/100, that’s a good indication that Baxter
has more faith in the mystical than Arturo.
The quoted question in the previous paragraph elicits Arturo and Baxter’s
conditional credences, as opposed to the unconditional credences discussed in
Chapter 2. An unconditional credence is a degree of belief assigned to a single
proposition, indicating how confident the agent is that that proposition is true.
A conditional credence is a degree of belief assigned to an ordered pair of
propositions, indicating how confident the agent is that the first proposition is
true on the supposition that the second is. We symbolize conditional credences
as follows:
cr(H∣C)= 1/2 (3.1)
This equation says that a particular agent (in this case, Arturo) has a 1/2
credence that the coin comes up heads conditional on the supposition that the
clairvoyant predicts heads. The vertical bar indicates a conditional credence;
to the right of the bar is the proposition supposed; to the left of the bar is the
proposition evaluated in light of that supposition. The proposition to the right
of the bar is sometimes called the condition; I am not aware of any generally
accepted name for the proposition on the left.
To be clear: A real agent never assigns any credences ex nihilo, without
assuming at least some background information. An agent’s unconditional
credences in various propositions (such as H) are informed by her background
information at that time. To assign a conditional credence, the agent combines
her stock of background information with a further supposition that the
condition is true. She then evaluates the other proposition in light of this
combination.
A conditional credence is assigned to an ordered pair of propositions. It
makes a difference which proposition is supposed and which is evaluated.
Consider a case in which Γm going to roll a fair die and you have various cre
dences involving the proposition E that it comes up even and the proposition
6 that it comes up six. Compare:
cr(6 ∣ E~) = 1/3 (3.2)

cr(E ∣ 6) = 1 (3.3)
3.1.1 The Ratio Formula
Section 2.2 described Kolmogorov’s probability axioms, which Bayesians

take to represent rational constraints on an agent’s unconditional credences.
3∙1 CONDITIONAL CREDENCES AND THE RATIO FORMULA 57
Figure 3.1 The region that dictates cr(P ∣ Q)
Bayesians then add a constraint relating conditional to unconditional

credences:
Ratio Formula: For any P and Q in £, if cr(Q) > 0 then
Stated this way, the Ratio Formula remains silent on the value of cr(P ∣ Q) when
cr(Q) = 0. There are various positions on how one should assign conditional
credences when the condition has credence 0; we’ll address some of them in
our discussion of the infinite in Section 5.4.
Why should an agents conditional credence equal the ratio of those uncon
ditionals? Consider Figure 3.1. The rectangle represents all the possible worlds
the agent entertains. The agents unconditional credence in P is the fraction of
that rectangle taken up by the P-circle. (The area of the rectangle is stipulated
to be 1, so that fraction is the area of the P-circle divided by 1, which is just the
area of the P-circle.) When we ask the agent to assign a credence conditional
on the supposition that Q, she temporarily narrows her focus to just those
possibilities that make Q true. In other words, she excludes from her attention
the worlds Γve shaded in the diagram, and considers only what’s in the
Q-circle. The agents credence in P conditional on Q is the fraction of the
Q-circle occupied by P-worlds. So it’s the area of the PQ overlap divided by
the area of the entire Q-circle, which is cr(P & Q)∕cr(Q).
In the scenario in which I roll a fair die, your initial doxastic possibilities
include all six outcomes of the die roll. I then ask for your credence that the
die comes up six conditional on its coming up even—that is, cr(61 E). To assign
this value, you exclude from consideration all the odd outcomes. You haven’t
actually learned that the die outcome is even; I’ve simply asked you to suppose
that it comes up even and assign a confidence to other propositions in light of
that supposition. You distribute your credence equally over the outcomes that
remain under consideration (2, 4, and 6), so your credence in six conditional
on even is 1/3.
We get the same result from the Ratio Formula:
The Ratio Formula allows us to calculate your conditional credences (confi

dences under a supposition) from your unconditional credences (confidences
relative to no suppositions beyond your background information). Hopefully
it’s obvious why E gets an unconditional credence of 1/2 in this case; as for
6 8cE, that’s equivalent to just 6, so it gets an unconditional credence of 1/6.1
Warning
Mathematicians often treat the Ratio Formula as a definition of conditional

probability. From their point of view, a conditional probability has the
value it does in virtue of two unconditional probabilities’ standing in a
certain ratio. But I do not want to reduce the possession of a conditional
credence to the possession of two unconditional credences standing in a
particular relation. I take a conditional credence to be a genuine mental
state (an attitude toward an ordered pair of propositions) capable of being
elicited in various ways, such as by asking an agent her confidence in a
proposition given a supposition. So I will interpret the Ratio Formula as
a rational constraint on how an agent’s conditional credences should relate
to her unconditional credences. As a normative constraint (rather than a
definition), it can be violated—by assigning a conditional credence that
doesn’t equal the specified ratio.
The point of the previous warning is that the Ratio Formula is a rational
constraint, and agents don’t always meet all the rational constraints on their
credences. Yet for agents who do satisfy the Ratio Formula, there can be no
difference between their conditional credences without some difference in
their unconditional credences as well. If we’re both rational and I assign a
different cr(P ∣ Q) value than you, we cannot assign the same values to both
cr(P & Q) and cr(Q). (A rational agent’s conditional credences supervene on
her unconditional credences.) Fully specifying a rational agents unconditional

credence distribution suffices to specify her conditional credences as well.2 For
instance, we might specify Arturos and Baxter’s credence distributions using
the following probability table:
c H crA crB
τ T 1/4 99/200
τ F 1/4 1/200
F T 1/4 1/200
F F 1/4 99/200
Here crA represents Arturo’s credences and crB represents Baxter’s. Arturo’s
unconditional credence in C is identical to Baxter’s—the values on the first
two rows sum to 1 /2 for each of them. Similarly, Arturo and Baxter have the
same unconditional credence in H (the sum of the first and third rows). Yet
Arturo and Baxter disagree in their confidence that the coin will come up heads
(H) given that the clairvoyant predicts heads (C). Using the Ratio Formula, we
calculate this conditional credence by dividing the value on the first row of the
table by the sum of the values on the first two rows. This yields:
1/4 _ 1 _99_ _ 99/200

cr√H∣C) = = α⅛(H∣ C) (3-5)
1/2 “ 2 100 “ 100/200
Baxter has high confidence in the clairvoyant’s abilities. So on the supposition

that the clairvoyant predicts heads, Baxter is almost certain that the flip
comes up heads. Arturo, on the other hand, is skeptical, so supposing that
the clairvoyant predicts heads leaves his opinions about the flip outcome
unchanged.
3.1.2 Consequences of the Ratio Formula
Combining the Ratio Formula with the probability axioms yields further useful
probability rules. First we have the
Law of Total Probability: For any proposition P and finite partition

{Q1,Q2,...,Qπ}in^,
cr(P) = cr(P ∣ Q1) ∙ cr(Q1) + cr(P ∣ Q2) ∙ cr(Q2)+

... + cr(P ∣ Qn) ∙ cr(Qπ)
Suppose you’re trying to predict whether I will bike to work tomorrow, but
you’re unsure if the weather will rain, hail, or be clear. The Law of Total
Probability allows you to systematically work through the possibilities in that
partition. You multiply your confidence that it will rain by your confidence that
I’ll bike should it rain. Then you multiply your confidence that it’ll hail by your
confidence in my biking given hail. Finally you multiply your unconditional
credence that it’ll be clear by your conditional credence that I’ll bike given
that it’s clear. Adding these three products together yields your unconditional
credence that I’ll bike. (In the formula, the proposition that I’ll bike plays the
role of P and the three weather possibilities are Q1, Q2, and Q3.)
Next, the Ratio Formula connects conditional credences to Kolmogorov’s
axioms in a special way. Conditional credence is a two-place function, taking
in an ordered pair of propositions and yielding a real number. Now suppose we
designate some particular proposition R as our condition, and look at all of an
agent’s credences conditional on R. We now have a one-place function (because
the second place has been filled by R) that we can think of as a distribution
over the propositions in £. Remarkably, if the agent’s unconditional credences
satisfy the probability axioms, then the Ratio Formula requires this conditional
distribution cr(∙ ∣ R) to satisfy those axioms as well. More formally, for any
proposition R in £ such that cr(R) > 0, the following will all be true:
• For any proposition P in £, cr(P ∣ R) ≥ 0.

• For any tautology T in £, cr(T ∣ R) = 1.
• For any mutually exclusive propositions P and Q in £,
cr(P V Q ∣ R) = cr(P ∣ R) + cr(Q ∣ R).
(You’ll prove these three facts in Exercise 3.4.)

Knowing that a conditional credence distribution is a probability distribu
tion can be a handy shortcut. (It also has a significance for updating credences
that we’ll discuss in Chapter 4.) Because it’s a probability distribution, a
conditional credence distribution must satisfy all the consequences of the
probability axioms we saw in Section 2.2.1. For example, if I tell you that
cr(P∣R) = 0.7, you can immediately tell that cr(~P ∣ R) = 0.3, by the following
conditional implementation of the Negation rule:
cr(~P ∣ R) = 1 - cr(P ∣ R) (3.6)
Similarly, Entailment tells us that if P 1= Q, then cr(P ∣ R) < cr(Q ∣ R).

One special conditional distribution is worth investigating at this point:

What happens when the condition R is a tautology? Imagine I ask you to
report your unconditional credences in a bunch of propositions. Then I ask
you to assign credences to those same propositions conditional on the further
supposition of... nothing. I give you nothing more to suppose. Clearly you’ll
just report back to me the same credences. Bayesians represent vacuous
information as a tautology, so this means that a rational agents credences
conditional on a tautology equal her unconditional credences. In other words,
for any Pin/3,
cr(P∣T) = cr(P) (3.7)
This fact (whose proof I’ll leave to the reader) will be important to our theory
of updating later on.3
3.1.3 Bayes’s Theorem
The most famous consequence of the Ratio Formula and Kolmogorov’s

axioms is
Bayes’s Theorem: For any H and E in £,
cr(P∣H)∙cr(H)
Cr(H|£) =------ cτ(E)-------
The first thing to say about Bayes’s Theorem is that it is a theorem—it can
be proven straightforwardly from the axioms and Ratio Formula. This is
worth remembering, because there is a great deal of controversy about how
Bayesians apply the theorem. (The significance they attach to this theorem is
why Bayesians came to be called “Bayesians”.)
What philosophical significance could attach to an equation that is, in the
end, just a truth of mathematics? The theorem was first articulated by the Rev
erend Thomas Bayes in the 1700s.4 Prior to Bayes, much of probability theory
was concerned with problems of direct inference. Direct inference starts with
the supposition of some probabilistic hypothesis, then asks how likely that
hypothesis makes a particular experimental result. You probably learned to
solve many direct inference problems in school, such as “Suppose I flip a fair
coin 20 times; how likely am I to get exactly 19 heads?” Here the probabilistic
hypothesis H says that the coin is fair, while the experimental result E is that
20 flips yield exactly 19 heads. Your credence that the experimental result will
occur on the supposition that the hypothesis is true—cr(T ∣ H)—is called the
likelihood.5
Yet Bayes was also interested in inverse inference. Instead of making
suppositions about hypotheses and determining probabilities of courses of
evidence, his theorem allows us to calculate probabilities of hypotheses from
suppositions about evidence. Instead of calculating the likelihood cr(E ∣ H),
Bayes’s Theorem shows us how to calculate cr(H∣E). A problem of inverse
inference might ask, “Suppose a coin comes up heads on exactly 19 of 20 flips;
how probable is it that the coin is fair?”
Assessing the significance of Bayes’s Theorem, Hans Reichenbach wrote:
The method of indirect evidence, as this form of inquiry is called, consists

of inferences that on closer analysis can be shown to follow the structure
of the rule of Bayes. The physician’s inferences, leading from the observed
symptoms to the diagnosis of a specified disease, are of this type; so are
the inferences of the historian determining the historical events that must
be assumed for the explanation of recorded observations; and, likewise, the
inferences of the detective concluding criminal actions from inconspicuous
observable data.... Similarly, the general inductive inference from observa
tional data to the validity of a given scientific theory must be regarded as an
inference in terms of Bayes’ rule. (Reichenbach 1935/1949, pp. 94-5)6
Here’s an example of inverse inference: You’re a biologist studying a particular

species of fish, and you want to know whether the genetic allele coding for
blue fins is dominant or recessive. Based on some other work you’ve done
on fish, you’re leaning toward recessive—initially you assign a 0.4 credence
that the blue-fin allele is dominant. Given some background assumptions we
won’t worry about here,7 a direct inference from the theory of genetics tells
you that if the allele is dominant, roughly three out of four species members
will have blue fins; if the allele is recessive blue fins will appear on roughly
25% of the fish. But you’re going to perform an inverse inference, making
experimental observations to decide between genetic hypotheses. You will
capture fish from the species at random and examine their fins. How significant
will your first observation be to your credences in dominant versus recessive?
When you contemplate various ways that observation might turn out, how
should supposing one outcome or the other affect your credences about the
allele? Before we do the calculation, try estimating how confident you should
3-1 CONDITIONAL CREDENCES AND THE RATIO FORMULA 63
be that the allele is dominant on the supposition that the first fish you observe
has blue fins.
In this example our hypothesis H will be that the blue-fin allele is dominant.
The evidence E to be supposed is that a randomly drawn fish has blue fins.
We want to calculate the posterior value cr(H ∣ E). This value is called the
“posterior” because it’s your credence in the hypothesis H after the evidence
E has been supposed. In order to calculate this posterior, Bayes’s Theorem
requires the values of cr(E ∣ H), cr(H), and cr(B).
cr(E ∣ H) is the likelihood of drawing a blue-finned fish on the hypothesis
that the allele is dominant. On the supposition that the allele is dominant, 75%
of the fish have blue fins, so your cr(E ∣ H) value should be 0.75. The other
two values are known as priors; they are your unconditional credences in the
hypothesis and the evidence before anything is supposed. We already said that
your prior in the blue-fin dominant hypothesis H is 0.4. So cr(H) is 0.4. But
what about the prior in the evidence? How confident are you before observing
any fish that the first one you draw will have blue fins?
Here we can apply the Law of Total Probability to the partition containing
H and ~H. This yields:
cr(B) = cr(B ∣ H) ∙ cr(H) + cr(B ∣ ~H) ∙ cr(~H) (3.8)
The values on the right-hand side are all either likelihoods, or priors related to
the hypothesis. These values we can easily calculate. So
cr(B) = 0.75 ∙ 0.4 + 0.25 ∙ 0.6 = 0.45 (3.9)
Plugging all these values into Bayes’s Theorem gives us
, . cr(B ∣ H) ∙ cr(H) 0.75 ∙ 0.4

(3.10)
cr(H 1 £) =--- ⅛e)--- = =2/3
Observing a single fish has the potential to change your credences substan
tially. On the supposition that the fish you draw has blue fins, your credence
that the blue-fin allele is dominant goes from its prior value of 2/5 to a posterior
of 2/3.
Again, all of this is pure mathematics from a set of axioms that are rarely
disputed. So why has Bayes’s Theorem been the focus of controversy? One
issue is the role Bayesians give the theorem in updating attitudes over time;
we’ll return to that application in Chapter 4. But the main idea Bayesians
take from Bayes—the idea that has proven controversial—is that probabilistic
inverse inference is the key to induction. Bayesians think the primary way we
ought to draw conclusions from data—how we ought to reason about scientific
hypotheses, say, on the basis of experimental evidence—is by calculating
posterior credences using Bayes’s Theorem. This view stands in direct conflict
with other statistical methods, such as frequentism and likelihoodism. Advo
cates of those methods also have deep concerns about where Bayesians get
the priors that Bayes’s Theorem requires. Once we’ve considerably deepened
our understanding of Bayesian epistemology, we will discuss those concerns
in Chapter 13, and assess frequentism and likelihoodism as alternatives to
Bayesianism.
Before moving on, Γd like to highlight two useful alternative forms of Bayes’s
Theorem. We’ve just seen that calculating the prior of the evidence—cr(E)—
can be easier if we break it up using the Law of Total Probability. Incorporating
that manuever into Bayes’s Theorem yields
cr(H∖E) = cr(E ∣ ⅛) - cr(¾)

(3.11)
cr(E ∣ H) ∙ cr(H) + cr(E ∣ ~H) ∙ cr(~H)
When a particular hypothesis H is under consideration, its negation ~H is

known as the catchall hypothesis. So this form of Bayes’s Theorem calculates
the posterior in the hypothesis from the priors and likelihoods of the hypoth
esis and its catchall.
In other situations we have multiple hypotheses under consideration instead
of just one. Given a finite partition of n hypotheses {Hl,H2, ■. , Hn}, the Law
of Total Probability transforms the denominator of Bayes’s Theorem to yield
cr(H. IE) =___________________ cr(B∣Hi).cr(⅞)___________________

' cr(E ∣ H1) ∙ cr(H1) + cr(E ∣ ¾) ■ cr(¾) +... + cr(E ∣ ¾) ■ cr(Hj
(3∙12)
This version allows you to calculate the posterior of one particular hypothesis
Hi in the partition from the priors and likelihoods of all the hypotheses.
3.2 Relevance and independence
Arturo doesn’t believe in hocus pocus; from his point of view, information
about what a clairvoyant predicts is irrelevant to determining how a coin
flip will come out. So supposing that a clairvoyant predicts heads makes no
3.2 RELEVANCE AND INDEPENDENCE 65
difference to Arturos confidence in a heads outcome. If C says the clairvoyant

predicts heads, H says the coin lands heads, and crA is Arturos credence
distribution, we have
crλ(H∣ C) = 1/2 = crλ(H) (3.13)
Generalizing this idea yields a key definition: Proposition P is probabilisti

cally independent of proposition Q relative to distribution cr just in case
cr(P ∣ Q) = cr(P) (3.14)
In this case Bayesians also say that Q is irrelevant to P. When Q is irrelevant

to P, supposing Q leaves an agents credence in P unchanged.8
Notice that probabilistic independence is always relative to a distribution
cr. The very same propositions P and Q might be independent relative to one
distribution but dependent relative to another. (Relative to Arturos credences
the clairvoyants prediction is irrelevant to the flip outcome, but relative to
the credences of his friend Baxter—who believes in psychic powers—it is
not.) In what follows I may omit reference to a particular distribution when
context makes it clear, but you should keep the relativity of independence to a
probability distribution in the back of your mind.
While Equation (3.14) will be our official definition of probabilistic indepen
dence, there are many equivalent tests for independence. Given the probability
axioms and Ratio Formula, the following equations are all true just when
Equation (3.14) is:
cr(P) = cr(P∣~Q) (3.15)

cr(P∣Q) = cr(P∣~Q) (3.16)
cr(Q ∣ P) = cr(Q) = cr(Q ∣ ~P) (3.17)
cr(P & Q) = cr(P) ∙ cr(Q) (3.18)
The equivalence of Equations (3.14) and (3.15) tells us that Q is probabilisti

cally independent of P just in case ~Q is. The equivalence of (3.14) and (3.17)
shows us that independence is symmetric: if supposing Q makes no difference
to an agents credence in P, then supposing P wont change that agents attitude
toward Q. Finally, Equation (3.18) embodies a useful probability rule:
Multiplication: P and Q are probabilistically independent relative to cr if and

only if cr(P & Q) = cr(P) ∙ cr(Q).
(Some authors define probabilistic independence using this biconditional, but

we will define independence using Equation (3.14), then treat Multiplication
as a consequence.)
We can calculate the probability of a conjunction by multiplying the prob
abilities of its conjuncts only when those conjuncts are independent. This
trick will not work for any arbitrary propositions. The general formula for
probability in a conjunction can be derived quickly from the Ratio Formula:
cr(P & Q) = cr(P ∣ Q) ∙ cr(Q) (3.19)
When P and Q are probabilistically independent, the first term on the right
hand side equals cr(P).
It’s important not to get Multiplication and Finite Additivity confused. Finite
Additivity says that the credence of a disjunction is the sum of the credences
of its mutually exclusive disjuncts. Multiplication says that the credence of a
conjunction is the product of the credences of its independent conjuncts. If I flip
a fair coin twice in succession, heads on the first flip and heads on the second
flip are independent, while heads on the first flip and tails on the first flip are
mutually exclusive.
When two propositions fail to be probabilistically independent (relative to a
particular distribution), we say those propositions are relevant to each other.
Replace the “=” signs in Equations (3.14) through (3.18) with “>” signs and
you have tests for Q s being positively relevant to P. Once more the tests are
equivalent—if any of the resulting inequalities is true, all of them are. Q is
positively relevant to P when assuming Q makes you more confident in P.
For example, since Baxter believes in mysticism, he takes the clairvoyant’s
predictions to be highly relevant to the outcome of the coin flip—supposing
that the clairvoyant has predicted heads takes him from equanimity to near
certainty in a heads outcome. Baxter assigns
crβ(H ∣ C) = 99/100 > 1/2 = crβ(H) (3.20)
Like independence, positive relevance is symmetric. Supposing that the coin

came up heads will make Baxter highly confident that the clairvoyant predicted
it would.
Similarly, replacing the “=” signs with “<” signs above yields tests for
negative relevance. For Baxter, the clairvoyant’s predicting heads is negatively
relevant to the coin’s coming up tails. Like positive correlation, negative
correlation is symmetric (supposing a tails outcome makes Baxter less
confident in a heads prediction). Note also that there are many synonyms
in the statistics community for “relevance”. Instead of finding “positively/
negatively relevant” terminology, you’ll sometimes find “positively/negatively
dependent”, “positively/negatively correlated”, or even “correlated/
anti-correlated”.
The strongest forms of positive and negative relevance are entailment and
refutation. Suppose a hypothesis H has nonextreme prior credence. If a par
ticular piece of evidence E entails the hypothesis, the probability axioms and
Ratio Formula tell us that
cr(H∣T) = 1 (3.21)
Supposing E takes H from a middling credence to the highest credence

allowed. Similarly, if E refutes H (what philosophers of science call falsifica
tion), then
cr(H∣-E) = 0 (3.22)
Relevance will be most important to us because of its connection to confirma

tion, the Bayesian notion of evidential support. A piece of evidence confirms
a hypothesis only if it’s relevant to that hypothesis. Put another way, learning
a piece of evidence changes a rational agent’s credence in a hypothesis only if
that evidence is relevant to the hypothesis. (Much more on this later.)
3.2.1 Conditional independence and screening off
The definition of probabilistic independence compares an agent’s conditional

credence in a proposition to her unconditional credence in that proposition.
But we can also compare conditional credences. When Baxter, who believes
in the occult, hears a clairvoyant’s prediction about the outcome of a fair coin
flip, he takes it to be highly correlated with the true flip outcome. But what if
we ask Baxter to suppose that this particular clairvoyant is an impostor? Once
he supposes the clairvoyant is an impostor, Baxter may take the clairvoyant’s
predictions to be completely irrelevant to the flip outcome. Let C be the
proposition that the clairvoyant predicts heads, H be the proposition that
the coin comes up heads, and I be the proposition that the clairvoyant is an
impostor. It’s possible for Baxter’s credences to satisfy both of the following
equations at once:
cr(H∣ C) > cr(H) (3.23)

cr(H∣C⅛7) = cr(H∣I) (3.24)
Inequality (3.23) tells us that unconditionally, Baxter takes C to be relevant

to H. But conditional on the supposition of I, C becomes independent of H
(Equation (3.24)); once Baxter has supposed I, adding C to his suppositions
doesn’t affect his confidence in H.
Generalizing this idea yields the following definition of conditional inde
pendence: P is probabilistically independent of Q conditional on R just in case
cr(P∖Q8cR') = cr(P∖R') (3.25)
If this equality fails to hold, we say that Q is relevant to P conditional on R.

One more piece of terminology: We will say that R screens off P from Q
when Q is unconditionally relevant to P, but irrelevant to P conditional on
each of R and ~R. That is, R screens off P from Q just in case all three of the
following are satisfied:
cr(P ∣ Q) ≠ cr(P) (3.26)

cr(P∣Q<⅛P) = cr(P∣P) (3.27)
cr(P∣Q⅛~P) = cr(P∣~P) (3.28)
When these equations are met, P and Q are correlated but supposing either R
or ~R makes that correlation disappear.9
Conditional independence and screening off are both best understood
through real-world examples. We’ll see a number of those in the next few
sections.
3.2.2 The Gambler’s Fallacy
People often act as if future chancy events will “compensate” for unexpected
past results. When a good hitter strikes out many times in a row, someone will
say he’s “due” for a hit. If a fair coin comes up heads nineteen times in a row,
many people become more confident that the next outcome will be tails.
This mistake is known as the Gambler’s Fallacy.10 A person who makes the
mistake is thinking along something like the following lines: In twenty flips of
a fair coin, it’s more probable to get nineteen heads and one tail than it is to
get twenty heads. So having seen nineteen heads, it’s much more likely that the
twentieth flip will come up tails.
This person is providing the right answer to the wrong question. If the
question is “When a fair coin is flipped twenty times, is it more likely that
you’ll get a total of nineteen heads and one tail than it is that you’ll get twenty
heads?”, the answer to that question is “yes”—in fact, it’s twenty times as likely!
But that’s the wrong question to ask in this case. Instead of wondering what
sorts of total outcomes are probable when one flips a fair coin twenty times,
in this case it’s more appropriate to ask: given that the coin has already come
up heads nineteen times, how confident are we that the twentieth flip will be
tails? This is a question about our conditional credence
cr(20th flip tails ∣ first 19 flips heads) (3.29)
How should we calculate this conditional credence? Ironically, it might be

more reasonable to make a mistake in the opposite direction from the Gam
bler’s Fallacy If I see a coin come up heads nineteen times, shouldn’t that make
me suspect that it’s biased toward heads? If anything, shouldn’t supposing
nineteen consecutive heads make me less confident that the twentieth flip will
come up tails?
This line of reasoning would be appropriate to the present case if we hadn’t
stipulated that the coin is fair. For a rational agent, the outcome of the twentieth
flip is probabilistically independent of the outcomes of the first nineteen flips
conditional on the fact that the coin is fair. That is,
cr(20th flip tails ∣ first 19 flips heads & fair coin) =

cr(20th flip tails ∣ fair coin)
We can justify this equation as follows: Typically, information that a coin

came up heads nineteen times in a row would alter your opinion about whether
it’s a fair coin. Changing your opinion about whether it’s a fair coin would then
affect your prediction for the twentieth flip. So typically, information about
the first nineteen flips alters your credences about the twentieth flip by way of
your opinion about whether the coin is fair. But if you’ve already established
that the coin is fair, information about the first nineteen flips has no further
significance for your prediction about the twentieth. So conditional on the
coin’s being fair, the first nineteen flips’ outcomes are irrelevant to the outcome
of the twentieth flip.
The left-hand side of Equation (3.30) captures the correct question to ask
about the Gambler’s Fallacy case. The right-hand side is easy to calculate; it’s
1/2. So after seeing a coin known to be fair come up heads nineteen times, we
should be 1/2 confident that the twentieth flip will be tails.11
3.2.3 Probabilities are weird! Simpsons Paradox
Perhaps you’re too much of a probabilistic sophisticate to ever commit the

Gambler’s Fallacy. Perhaps you successfully navigated Tversky and Kahne-
man’s Conjunction Fallacy (Section 2.2.4) as well. But even probability experts
sometimes have trouble with the counterintuitive relations that arise between
conditional and unconditional dependence.
Here’s an example of how odd things can get: In a famous case, the University
of California, Berkeley’s graduate departments were investigated for gender
bias in admissions. The concern arose because in 1973 about 44% of overall
male applicants were admitted to graduate school at Berkeley, while only
35% of female applicants were. Yet when the graduate departments (where
admissions decisions are made) were studied one at a time, it turned out that
individual departments either were admitting men and women at roughly
equal rates, or in some cases were admitting a higher percentage of female
applicants.
This is an example of Simpson’s Paradox, in which probabilistic depen
dencies point in one direction conditional on each member of a partition, yet
point the opposite way unconditionally. A Simpson’s Paradox case involves
a collection with a number of subgroups. Each of the subgroups displays the
same correlation between two traits. Yet when we examine the collection as a
whole, that correlation is reversed!12
To see how this can happen, consider another example: Over the course of
the 2016-2017 NBA season, Houston Rockets player James Harden made a
higher percentage of his two-point shots than Toronto Raptors player DeMar
DeRozan did. Harden also made a higher percentage of his three-point shots
than DeRozan. Yet when we look at all the shots attempted (both two- and
three-pointers), DeRozan made a higher percentage than Harden overall.13
Here are the data for the two players:
Two-pointers Three-pointers Combined

DeRozan 688/1421 48.4% 33/124 26.6% 721/1545 46.7%
Harden 412/777 53.0% 262/756 34.7% 674/1533 44.0%
The second number in each box is the number of attempts; the first is the
number of makes; the third is the percentage (makes divided by attempts).
Looking at the table, you can see how Harden managed to shoot better than
DeRozan from each distance yet have a worse shooting percentage overall.
Since three-pointers are more difficult to make than two-pointers, each player
made a much higher percentage of his two-point attempts than his three-
point attempts. DeRozan shot over 90% of his shots from the easier-to-
make two-point distance. Harden, on the other hand, shot almost half of his
shots from downtown. Harden was taking many more low-percentage shots
than DeRozan, so even though Harden was better at those shots, his overall
percentage suffered.
Scrutiny revealed a similar effect in Berkeleys 1973 admissions data. Bickel,
Hammel, and O’Connell (1975) concluded, “The proportion of women appli
cants tends to be high in departments that are hard to get into and low in those
that are easy to get into.” Although individual departments were admitting
women at comparable rates to men, female applications were less successful
overall because more were directed at departments with low admission rates.14
Simpsons Paradox can be thought of entirely in terms of numerical pro
portions, as we’ve just done with the basketball and admissions examples. But
these examples can also be analyzed using conditional probabilities. Suppose,
for instance, that you are going to select a Harden or DeRozan shot attempt
at random from the 2016-2017 season, making your selection so that each of
the 3,078 attempts they put up together is equally likely to be selected. How
confident should you be that the selected attempt will be a make? How should
that confidence change on the supposition that a DeRozan attempt is selected,
or a two-point attempt?
Below is a probability table for your credences, assembled from the real-
life statistics above. Here D says that it’s a DeRozan attempt; 2 says it’s a two-
pointer; and M says it’s a make. (Given the pool from which we’re sampling,
~D means a Harden attempt and ~2 means it’s a three-pointer.)
D 2 M cr
T T T 688/3078
T T F 733/3078
T F T 33/3078
τ F F 91/3078
F T T 412/3078
F T F 365/3078
F F T 262/3078
F F F 494/3078
A bit of calculation with this probability table reveals the following:
cr(M∣D) >cr(M∣~D) (3∙31)

cr(M∣ D & 2) < cr(M∣ ~D & 2) (3.32)
cr(M ∣ D & -2) < cr(M ∣ ~D & ~2) (3.33)
If you’re selecting an attempt from the total sample, DeRozan is more likely
to make it than Harden. Put another way, DeRozan’s taking the attempt is
unconditionally positively relevant to its being made (Equation (3.31)). But
DeRozan’s shooting is negatively relevant to a make conditional on each of
the two distances (Equations (3.32) and (3.33)). If you’re selecting from only
the two-pointers, or from only the three-pointers, the shot is more likely to be
made if it’s attempted by Harden.
3.2.4 Correlation and causation
You may have heard the expression “correlation is not causation.” People
typically use this expression to point out that just because two events have
both occurred—and maybe occurred in close spatio-temporal proximity—
that doesn’t mean they had anything to do with each other. But “correlation”
is a technical term in probability discussions. The propositions describing two
events may both be true, or you might have high credence in both of them,
yet they still might not be probabilistically correlated. For the propositions
to be correlated, supposing one to be true must change the probability of the
other. Γm confident that Γm under 6 feet tall and that my eyes are blue, but
that doesn’t mean I take those facts to be correlated.
Once we’ve understood probabilistic correlation correctly, does its presence
always indicate a causal connection? When two propositions about empir
ical events are correlated, must the event described by one cause the event
described by the other? Hans Reichenbach offered a classic counterexample
to this proposal. He wrote:
Suppose two geysers which are not far apart spout irregularly, but throw
up their columns of water always at the same time. The existence of a
subterranean connection of the two geysers with a common reservoir of hot
water is then practically certain. (1956, p. 158)
addictive personality (P)
smoker (S) drinker (D)
Figure 3.2 A causal fork
If you’ve noticed that two nearby geysers always spout simultaneously, seeing
one spout will increase your confidence that the other is spouting as well.
So your credences about the geysers are correlated. But you don’t think
one geyser’s spouting causes the other to spout. Instead, you hypothesize an
unobserved reservoir of hot water that is the common cause of both spouts.
Reichenbach proposed a famous principle about empirically correlated
events:
Principle of the Common Cause: When event outcomes are probabilisti

cally correlated, either one causes the other or they have a common
cause.15
In addition to this principle, he offered a key mathematical insight about

causation: a common cause screens its effects off from each other.
Let’s work through an example of this insight concerning causation and
screening off. Suppose the proposition that a particular individual is a drinker
is positively relevant to the proposition that she’s a smoker. According to the
Principle of the Common Cause, there must be some causal link between these
propositions. Perhaps drinking causes smoking—drinking creates situations
in which one is more likely to smoke—or vice versa. Or they may be linked
through a common cause: maybe being a smoker and being a drinker are both
promoted by an addictive personality, which we can imagine results from a
genetic endowment unaffected by one’s behavior. (See Figure 3.2; the arrows
indicate causal influence.)
Imagine the latter explanation is true, and moreover is the only true expla
nation of the correlation between drinking and smoking. That is, being a
smoker and being a drinker are positively correlated only due to their both
being caused by an addictive personality. Given this assumption, let’s take a
particular subject whose personality you’re unsure about, and consider what
happens to your credences when you make various suppositions about her.
If you begin by supposing that the subject drinks, this will make you more
confident that she smokes—but only because it makes you more confident
parents’ genes (G)
smoker (S)
Figure 3.3 A causal chain
that the subject has an addictive personality. On the other hand, you might
start by supposing that the subject has an addictive personality. That will
certainly make you more confident that she’s a smoker. But once you’ve made
that adjustment, going on to suppose that she’s a drinker won’t affect your
confidence in smoking. Information about drinking affects your smoking
opinions only by way of helping you figure out whether she has an addictive
personality, and the answer to the personality question was filled in by your
initial supposition. Once an addictive personality is supposed, drinking has
no further relevance to smoking. (Compare: Once a coin is supposed to be
fair, the outcomes of its first nineteen flips have no relevance to the outcome
of the twentieth.) Drinking becomes probabilistically independent of smok
ing conditional on suppositions about whether the subject has an addictive
personality. That is,
cr(S ∣ Dj > cr(S) (3.34)

cr(S ∣ D & P) = cr(S ∣ P) (3.35)
cr(S ∣ D & ~P) = cr(S ∣ ~P) (3.36)
Causal forks (as in Figure 3.2) give rise to screening off. P is a common cause
of S and D, so P screens off S from D.
But that’s not the only way screening off can occur. Consider Figure 3.3.
Here we’ve focused on a different portion of the causal structure. Imagine that
the subject’s parents’ genes causally influence whether she has an addictive per
sonality, which in turn causally promotes smoking. Now her parents’ genetics
are probabilistically relevant to the subject’s smoking, but that correlation is
screened off by facts about her personality. Again, if you’re uncertain whether
the subject’s personality is addictive, facts about her parents’ genes will affect
your opinion of whether she’s a smoker. But once you’ve made a firm suppo
sition about the subject’s personality, suppositions about her parents’ genetics
have no further influence on your smoking opinions. In equation form:
3.3 CONDITIONAL CREDENCES AND CONDITIONALS 75
cr(S ∣ G) > cr(S) (3.37)

cr(S ∣ G & P) = cr(S ∣ P) (3.38)
cr(S ∣ G & ~P) = cr(S ∣ ~P) (3.39)
P screens off S from G.16

Relevance, conditional relevance, and causation can interact in very com
plex ways.17 My goal here has been to introduce the main ideas and termi
nology employed in their analysis. The state of the art in this field has come
a long way since Reichenbach; computational tools now available can look at
statistical correlations among a large number of variables and hypothesize a
causal structure lying beneath them. The resulting causal diagrams are known
as Bayes Nets, and have practical applications from satellites to health care to
car insurance to college admissions.
These causal methods all start from Reichenbachs insight that common
causes screen off their effects. And what of his more metaphysically radical
Principle of the Common Cause? It remains highly controversial.
3.3 Conditional credences and conditionals
I now want to circle back and get clearer on the nature of conditional cre
dence. First, it’s important to note that the conditional credences we’ve been
discussing are indicative, not subjunctive. This distinction is familiar from the
theory of conditional propositions. Compare:
If Shakespeare didn’t write Hamlet, then someone else did.

If Shakespeare hadn’t written Hamlet, then someone else would have.
The former conditional is indicative, while the latter is subjunctive. The

traditional distinction between these two types of conditional begins with
the assumption that a conditional is evaluated by considering possible worlds
in which the antecedent is satisfied, then checking whether the consequent
is true in those worlds as well. In evaluating an indicative conditional, the
antecedent worlds are restricted to those among the agent’s doxastic possi
bilities.18 Evaluating a subjunctive conditional, on the other hand, permits
counterfactual reasoning involving antecedent worlds considered non-actual.
So when you assess the subjunctive conditional above, you are allowed to
consider worlds that make the antecedent true by making Hamlet never exist.
But when evaluating the indicative conditional, you have to take into account
that Hamlet actually does exist, and entertain only worlds in which that’s true.
So you consider bizarre “author-conspiracy” worlds that, while far-fetched,
satisfy the antecedent and are among your current doxastic possibilities. In
the end, Γm guessing you take the indicative conditional to be true but the
subjunctive to be false.
Now suppose I ask for your credence in the proposition that someone wrote
Hamlet, conditional on the supposition that Shakespeare didn’t. This value will
be high, again because you take Hamlet to exist. In assigning this conditional
credence, you aren’t bringing into consideration possible worlds you’d other
wise ruled out (such as Hamlet-free worlds). Instead, you’re focusing in on the
narrow set of author-conspiracy worlds you currently entertain. As we saw in
Figure 3.1, assigning a conditional credence strictly narrows the worlds under
consideration; it’s doesn’t expand your attention to worlds previously ruled
out. Thus the conditional credences discussed in this book—and typically
discussed in the Bayesian literature—are indicative rather than subjunctive.19
Are there more features of conditional propositions that can help us under
stand conditional credences? Might we understand conditional credences in
terms of conditionals? Initiating his study of conditional degrees of belief, EP.
Ramsey warned against assimilating them to conditional propositions:
We are also able to define a very useful new idea—“the degree of belief in p
given q”. This does not mean the degree of belief in “If p then q”, or that in
“p entails q”, or that which the subject would have in p if he knew q, or that
which he ought to have. (1931, p. 82)2°
Yet many authors failed to heed Ramsey’s warning. It’s very tempting to
equate conditional credences with some simple combination of conditional
propositions and unconditional credences. For example, when I ask, “How
confident are you in P given Q?”, it’s easy to hear that as “Given Q, how
confident are you in P?” or just “If Q is true, how confident are you in P?”
This simple slide might suggest that for any real number r and propositions
P and Q,
“cr(P ∣ Q) = r” is equivalent to “Q → cr(P) = r” (3.40)
Here Γm using the symbol to represent some kind of conditional. For the
reasons discussed above, it should be an indicative conditional. But it need
not be the material conditional symbolized by “d”; many authors think the
material conditional’s truth-function fails to accurately represent the meaning
of natural-language indicative conditionals.
3∙3 CONDITIONAL CREDENCES AND CONDITIONALS 77
Endorsing the equivalence in (3.40) would require serious changes to the

traditional logic of conditionals. We can demonstrate this in two ways. First,
we usually take indicative conditionals to satisfy the disjunctive syllogism rule.
(The material conditional certainly does!) This rule tells us that
“X → Z” and “Y → Z” jointly entail “(X V Y) → Z” (3.41)
for any propositions X, Y, and Z. Thus for any propositions A, B, and C and
constant k we have
“A → [cr(C) = k]” and “B → [cr(C) = k]” entail “(A V B) → [cr(C) = k]”

(3.42)
Combining (3.40) and (3.42) yields
αcr(C ∣ A) = k” and “cr(C ∣ B) = k” entail “cr(C ∣ A V B) = k” (3.43)
(3.43) may look appealing, as a sort of probabilistic analog of disjunctive

syllogism. But it’s false. Not only can one design a credence distribution
satisfying the probability axioms and Ratio Formula such that cr(C ∣ A) = k
and cr(C ∣ B) = k but cr(C ∣ A V B) ≠ k; one can even describe real-life
examples in which it’s rational for an agent to assign such a distribution.
(See Exercise 3.14.) The failure of (3.43) is another case in which credences
confound expectations developed by our experiences with classificatory states.
Second, we usually take indicative conditionals to satisfy modus tollens. But
consider the following facts about me: Unconditionally, I am highly confident
that I will be alive tomorrow. But conditional on the proposition that the sun
just exploded, my confidence that I will be alive tomorrow is very low. Given
these facts, modus tollens, and (3.40), I could run the following argument:
cr(alive tomorrow ∣ sun exploded) is low. [given] (3.44)

If the sun exploded, cr(alive tomorrow) is low. [(3.44), (3.40)] (3.45)
cr(alive tomorrow) is high. [given] (3.46)
The sun did not explode. [modus tollens] (3.47)
While intriguing for its promise of astronomy by introspection, this argument

is unsound. So I conclude that as long as indicative conditionals satisfy classical
logical rules such as disjunctive syllogism and modus tollens, any analysis of
conditional credences in terms of conditionals that uses (3.40) must be false.21
Perhaps we’ve mangled the transition from conditional credences to

conditional propositions. Perhaps we should hear “How confident are you
in P given Q?” as “How confident are you in ‘P, given Q’?”, which is in turn
“How confident are you in ‘If Q, then P’?” Maybe a conditional credence
is a credence in a conditional. Or perhaps more weakly: an agent assigns a
particular conditional credence value whenever she unconditionally assigns
that value to a conditional. In symbols, the proposal is that
“cr(P ∣ Q) = r” is equivalent to “cr(Q → P) = r” (3.48)
for any real r, any propositions P and Q, any credence distribution cr, and
some indicative conditional →. If true, this equivalence would offer another
possibility for analyzing conditional credences in terms of unconditional
credences and conditionals.
We can quickly show that (3.48) fails if a→n is read as the material condi
tional D. Under the material reading, the proposal entails that
cr(P∣Q) = cr(Q⊃P) (3.49)
Using the probability calculus and Ratio Formula, we can show that Equation
(3.49) holds only when cr(Q)= 1 or cr(QDP) = 1. (See Exercise 3.15.) This
is a triviality result: It shows that Equation (3.49) can hold only in trivial
cases, namely over the narrow range of conditionals for which the agent is
either certain of the antecedent or certain of the conditional itself. Equation
(3.49) does not express a truth that holds for all conditional credences in all
propositions; nor does (3.48) when cc→" is read materially.
Perhaps the equivalence in (3.48) can be saved from this objection by
construing its as something other than a material conditional. But David
Lewis (1976) provided a clever objection that works whichever conditional →
we choose. Begin by selecting arbitrary propositions P and Q. We then derive
the following from the proposal in Equation (3.48):
cr(Q-÷P) = cr(P∣Q) [from (3.48)] (3.50)

cr(Q -÷ P∣P) = cr(P∣ Q&P) [see below] (3.51)
cr(Q -÷P∣P) = 1 [Q & P entails P] (3.52)
cr(Q -÷P∣~P) = cr(P∣Q<fe~P) [see below] (3.53)
cr(Q-⅜ p ∣ ~p) = o [Q & ~P refutes P] (3.54)
3∙3 CONDITIONAL CREDENCES AND CONDITIONALS 79
cr(Q→ P) = cr(Q →>P∣P)∙cr(P) +

cr(Q -→ P ∣ ~P) ∙ cr(~P) [Law of Total Prob.] (3.55)
cr(Q→ P) = 1 ∙ cr(P) + 0 ∙ cr(~P) [(3.52), (3.54), (3.55)] (3.56)
cr(Q→ P) = cr(P) (3.57)
cr(P∣Q) = cr(P) [(3.50)] (3.58)
Some of these lines require explanation. The idea of lines (3.51) and (3.53) is
this: We’ve already seen that a credence distribution conditional on a particular
proposition satisfies the probability axioms. This suggests that we should think
of a distribution conditional on a proposition as being just like any other
credence distribution. (We’ll see more reason to think this in Chapter 4,
note 3.) So a distribution conditional on a proposition should satisfy the
proposal of (3.48) as well. If you conditionally suppose X, then under that
supposition you should assign Y → Z the same credence you would assign
Z were you to further suppose Y. In other words, anyone who maintains (3.48)
should also maintain that for any X, Y, and Z,
cr(y → ZIX) = cr(Z ∣ Y& X) (3.59)
In line (3.51) the roles of X, Y, and Z are played by P, Q, and P; in line (3.53)
it’s ~P, Q, and P.
Lewis has given us another triviality result. Assuming the probability axioms
and Ratio Formula, the proposal in (3.48) can hold only for propositions P and
Q such that cr(P ∣ Q) = cr(P). In other words, it can hold only for propositions
the agent takes to be independent.22 Or (taking things from the other end), the
proposed equivalence can hold for all the conditionals in an agent’s language
only if the agent treats every pair of propositions in £ as independent!23
So a rational agent’s conditional credence will not in general equal her
unconditional credence in a conditional. This is not to say that conditional
credences have nothing to do with conditionals. A popular idea now usually
called “Adams’s Thesis” (Adams 1965) holds that an indicative conditional
Q → P is acceptable to a degree equal to cr(P ∣ Q).24 But we cannot maintain
that an agent’s conditional credence is always equal to her credence that some
conditional is true.
This brings us back to a proposal I discussed in Chapter 1. One might try to
relate degrees of belief to binary beliefs by suggesting that whenever an agent
has an r-valued credence, she has a binary belief in a traditional proposition
with r as part of its content. Working out this proposal for conditional
credences reveals how hopeless it is. Suppose an agent assigns cr(P ∣ Q) = r.

Would we suggest that the agent believes that if Q, then the probability of P is r?
This proposal mangles the logic of conditional credences. Perhaps the agent
believes that the probability of “if Q, then P” is r? Lewis’s argument dooms this
idea.
I said in Chapter 1 that the numerical value of an unconditional degree of
belief is an attribute of the attitude taken toward a proposition, not a constituent
of that proposition itself. As for conditional credences, cr(P ∣ Q) = r does not
say that an agent takes some attitude toward a conditional proposition with
a probability value in its consequent. Nor does it say that the agent takes
some attitude toward a single, conditional proposition composed of P and Q.
cr(P ∣ Q) = r says that the agent takes an r-valued attitude toward an ordered
pair of propositions—neither of which need involve the number r.
3.4 Exercises
Unless otherwise noted, you should assume when completing these exercises
that the credence distributions under discussion satisfy the probability axioms
and Ratio Formula. You may also assume that whenever a conditional credence
expression occurs, the condition has a nonzero unconditional credence so that
the conditional credence is well defined.
Problem 3.1. A family has two children of different ages. Assume that each
child has a probability of 1/2 of being a girl, and that the probability that the
elder is a girl is independent of the probability that the younger is.
(a) Conditional on the older child’s being a girl, what’s the probability that
the younger one is?
(b) Conditional on at least one child’s being a girl, what’s the probability
that they both are?
Problem 3.2. Flip and Flop are playing a game. They have a fair coin that
they are going to keep flipping until one of two things happens: either the coin
comes up heads twice in a row, or it comes up tails followed by heads. The first
time one of these things happens, the game ends—if it ended with HH, Flip
wins; if it ended with TH, Flop wins.
(a) What’s the probability that Flip wins after the first two tosses of the coin?
What’s the probability that Flop wins after the first two tosses of the
coin?
3∙4 EXERCISES 81
(b) Flip and Flop play their game until it ends (at which point one of them
wins). What’s the probability that Flop is the winner?25
Problem 3.3. One might think that real humans only ever assign cre
dences that are rational numbers—and perhaps only rational numbers involv
ing relatively small whole-number numerators and denominators. But we
can construct simple conditions that require an irrational-valued credence
distribution. For example, consider the scenario below.
You have a biased coin that you are going to flip twice in a row. Suppose your
credence distribution satisfies all of the following conditions:
(i) You are equally confident that the first flip will come up heads and that
the second flip will come up heads.
(ii) You treat the outcomes of the two flips as probabilistically independent.
(iii) Given what you know about the bias, your confidence that the two
flips will both come up heads equals your confidence in all of the other
outcomes put together.
Assuming your credence distribution satisfies the three conditions above, how
confident are you that the first flip will come up heads?26
Problem 3.4. Prove that credences conditional on a particular proposi

tion form a probability distribution. That is, prove that for any proposition R
in 23 such that cr(R) > 0, the following three conditions hold:
(a) For any proposition P in 23, cr(P ∣ R) ≥ 0.
(b) For any tautology T in 23, cr(T ∣ R) = 1.
(c) For any mutually exclusive propositions P and Q in 23,
cr(P V Q ∣ R) = cr(P ∣ R) + cr(Q ∣ R).
Problem 3.5. Pink gumballs always make my sister sick. (They remind her
of Pepto Bismol.) Blue gumballs make her sick half of the time (they just look
unnatural), while white gumballs make her sick only one-tenth of the time.
Yesterday, my sister bought a single gumball randomly selected from a machine
that’s one-third pink gumballs, one-third blue, and one-third white. Applying
the version of Bayes’s Theorem in Equation (3.12), how confident should I be
that my sister’s gumball was pink conditional on the supposition that it made
her sick?
Problem 3.6.
(a) Prove Bayes’s Theorem from the probability axioms and Ratio Formula.
(Hint: Start by using the Ratio Formula to write down expressions
involving cr(H & E) and cr(E & H).)
(b) Exactly which unconditional credences must we assume to be positive

in order for your proof to go through?
(c) Where exactly does your proof rely on the probability axioms (and not
just the Ratio Formula)?
Problem 3.7. Once more, consider the probabilistic credence distribution

specified by this probability table (from Exercise 2.9):
P Q R cr
τ T T 0.1
τ T F 0.2
τ F T 0
τ F F 0.3
F T T 0.1
F T F 0.2
F F T 0
F F F 0.1
Answer the following questions about this distribution:

(a) What is cr(P ∣ Q)?
(b) Relative to this distribution, is Q positively relevant to P, negatively
relevant to P, or probabilistically independent of P?
(c) What is cr(P ∣ R)?
(d) What is cr(P ∣ Q & R)?
(e) Conditional on R, is Q positively relevant to P, negatively relevant to P,
or probabilistically independent of P?
(f) Does R screen off P from Q? Explain why or why not.
Problem 3.8. Prove that all the alternative statements of probabilistic

independence in Equations (3.15) through (3.18) follow from our original
independence definition. That is, prove that each equation (3.15) through
(3.18) follows from Equation (3.14), the probability axioms, and the Ratio
Formula. (Hint: Once you prove that a particular equation follows from
Equation (3.14), you may use it in subsequent proofs.)
Problem 3.9. Show that probabilistic independence is not transitive. That

is, provide a single probability distribution on which all of the following are
true: Xis independent of Y, and Yis independent of Z, but Xis not independent
3.4 EXERCISES 83
of Z. Show that your distribution satisfies all three conditions. (For an added
chili pepper of difficulty, have your distribution assign every state-description
a nonzero unconditional credence.)
Problem 3.10. fy) In the text we discussed what makes a pair of propositions
probabilistically independent. If we have a larger collection of propositions,
what does it take to make them all independent of each other? You might think
all that’s necessary is pairwise independence—for each pair within the set of
propositions to be independent. But pairwise independence doesn’t guarantee
that each proposition will be independent of combinations of the others.
To demonstrate this fact, describe a real-world example (spelling out the
propositions represented by X, Y, and Z) in which it would be rational for an
agent to assign credences meeting all four of the following conditions:
(i) cr(X∣ Y) = cr(X)
(ii) cr(X∣Z) = cr(X)
(iii) cr(Y∣Z) = cr(Y)
(iv) cr(X∣ Y⅛Z)≠cr(X)
Show that your example satisfies all four conditions.
Problem 3.11. Using the program PrSAT referenced in the Further

Readings for Chapter 2, find a probability distribution satisfying all the
conditions in Exercise 3.10, plus the following additional condition: Every
state-description expressible in terms of X, Y, and Z must have a nonzero
unconditional cr-value.
Problem 3.12.
(a) The 2016-2017 NBA season has just ended, and you’re standing on
a basketball court. Suddenly aliens appear, point to a spot on the
court, and say that unless someone makes the next shot attempted
from that spot, they will end your life. You’re highly interested in self
preservation but terrible at basketball; luckily James Harden and DeMar
DeRozan are standing right there. DeRozan says, “I had a better overall
shooting percentage than Harden this year, so I should attempt the
shot.” Given the statistics on page 70, explain why DeRozan’s argument
is unconvincing.
(b) Suppose the aliens pointed to a spot that would yield a three-point
attempt. You’re about to hand the ball to Harden, when DeRozan says,
“I know that’s a three-pointer, and Harden shot better from three-point

range in general than I did this year. But from that particular spot, I had
a better percentage than him.” Is DeRozan’s claim consistent with the
statistics on page 70? (That is, could DeRozan’s claim be true while those
statistics are also accurate?) Explain why or why not.
Problem 3.13. After laying down probabilistic conditions for a causal fork,
Reichenbach demonstrated that a causal fork induces correlation. Consider
the following four conditions:
(i) cr(A ∣ C) > cr(A ∣ ~C)
(ii) cr(B ∣ C) > cr(B ∣ ~C)
(iii) cr(A & B ∣ C) = cr(A ∣ C) ∙ cr(B ∣ C)
(iv) cr(A & B ∣ ~C) = cr(A ∣ ~C) ∙ cr(B ∣ ~C)
(a) Assuming C is the common cause of A and B, explain what each
of the four conditions means in terms of relevance, independence,
conditional relevance, or conditional independence.
(b) Prove that if all four conditions hold, then cr(A & B) > cr(A) ■
cr(B).
Problem 3.14. In Section 3.3 I pointed out that the following statement
(labeled Equation (3.43) there) does not hold for every constant k and propo
sitions A, B, and C:
“cr(C I A) = k” and “cr(C ∣ B) = k” entail “cr(C ∣ A V B) = k”
(a) Describe a real-world example (involving dice, or cards, or something

more interesting) in which it’s rational for an agent to assign cr(C ∣ A) =
k and cr(C ∣ B) = k but cr(C ∣ A VB) ≠ k. Show that your example meets
this description.
(b) Prove that if A and B are mutually exclusive, then whenever cr(C ∣ A) =
k and cr(C ∣ B) = k it’s also the case that cr(C ∣ A V B) = k.
Problem 3.15. Fact: For any propositions P and Q, if cr(Q)>0 then

cr(Q⊃P) ≥cr(P∣Q).
(a) Starting from a language £ with atomic propositions P and Q, build a
probability table on its state-descriptions and use that table to prove the
fact above.
(b) Show that Equation (3.49) in Section 3.3 entails that either cr(Q) = 1
or cr(Q D P) = 1.
3∙5 FURTHER READING 85
3.5 Further reading
Alan Hajek (201 la). Conditional Probability. In: Philosophy of Statistics. Ed.
by Prasanta S. Bandyopadhyay and Malcolm R. Forster. Vol. 7. Handbook
of the Philosophy of Science. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 99-136
Describes the Ratio Formula and its motivations. Then works through a
number of philosophical applications of conditional probability, and a number
of objections to the Ratio Formula. Also discusses conditional-probability-first
formalizations (as described in note 3 of this chapter).
Todd A. Stephenson (2000). An Introduction to Bayesian Network Theory

and Usage. Tech. rep. 03. IDIAP
Section 1 provides a nice, concise overview of what a Bayes Net is and how
it interacts with conditional probabilities. (Note that the author uses A, B to
express the conjunction of A and B.) Things get fairly technical after that as he
covers algorithms for creating and using Bayes Nets. Sections 6 and 7, though,
contain real-life examples of Bayes Nets for speech recognition, Microsoft
Windows troubleshooting, and medical diagnosis.
Christopher R. Hitchcock (2021). Probabilistic Causation. In: The Stanford

Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. by Edward N. Zalta. Spring 2021
While this entry is primarily about analyses of the concept of causation using
probability theory, along the way Hitchcock includes impressive coverage of
the Principle of the Common Cause, Simpsons Paradox, causal modeling with
Bayes Nets, and related material.
Classic Texts
Hans Reichenbach (1956). The Principle of Common Cause. In: The Direc
tion of Time. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 157-60
Text in which Reichenbach introduces his account of common causes in terms

of screening off. (Note that Reichenbach uses a period to express conjunction,
and a comma rather than a vertical bar for conditional probabilities—what we
would write as cr(A ∣ Bj he writes as P(B, A).)
David David Lewis (1976). Probabilities of Conditionals and Conditional

Probabilities. The Philosophical Review 85, pp. 297-315
Article in which Lewis presents his triviality argument concerning probabili

ties of conditionals.
Extended Discussion
Bas C. van Fraassen (1982). Rational Belief and the Common Cause Prin
ciple. In: What? Where? When? Why? Ed. by Robert McLaughlin. Dor
drecht: Reidel, pp. 193-209
Frank Arntzenius (1993). The Common Cause Principle. PSA: Proceed
ings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 2,
pp. 227-37
Discuss the meaning and significance of Reichenbach’s Principle of the Com

mon Cause, then present possible counterexamples (including counterexam
ples from quantum mechanics).
Alan Hajek (201 lb). Triviality Pursuit. Topoi 30, pp. 3-15
Explains the plausibility and significance of the claim that probabilities of

conditionals are conditional probabilities. Then canvasses a variety of Lewis
style triviality arguments against that claim.
Notes
1. Here’s a good way to double-check that 6 & E is equivalent to 6: Remember that

equivalence is mutual entailment. Clearly 6&.E entails 6. Going in the other direction,
6 entails 6, but 6 also entails E. So 6 entails 6&E. When evaluating conditional credences
using the Ratio Formula, we’ll often find ourselves simplifying a conjunction down to
just one or two of its conjuncts. For this to work, the conjunct that remains has to entail
each of the conjuncts that was removed.
2. When I refer to an agent’s “credence distribution” going forward, I will often be
referring to both her unconditional and conditional credences. Strictly speaking this
extends our definition of a “distribution”, but since conditional credences supervene
on unconditional for rational agents, not much damage will be done.
3. Some authors take advantage of Equation (3.7) to formalize probability theory in
exactly the opposite order from the way I’ve been proceeding. They begin by introduc
ing conditional credences and subject them to a number of constraints somewhat like
NOTES 87
Kolmogorov’s axioms. The desired rules for unconditional credences are then obtained
by introducing the single constraint that for all P in £, cr(P) = cr(P ∣ T). For more on
this approach, its advocates, and its motivations, see Section 5.4.
4. Bayes never published the theorem; Richard Price found it in Bayes’s notes and pub
lished it after Bayes’s death in 1761. Pierre-Simon Laplace independently rediscovered
the theorem later on and was responsible for much of its early popularization.
5. In everyday English “likely” is a synonym for “probable”. Yet R.A. Fisher introduced
the technical term “likelihood” to represent a particular kind of probability—the
probability of some evidence given a hypothesis. This somewhat peculiar terminology
has stuck.
6. Quoted in Galavotti (2005, p. 51).
7. For instance, we have to assume that the base rates of the alleles are equal in the
population, none of the relevant phenotypes is fitter than any of the others, and the
blue-finned fish don’t assortatively mate with other blue-finned fish. (Thanks to Hayley
Clatterbuck for discussion.)
8. Throughout this section and Section 3.2.1,1 will assume that any proposition appearing
in the condition of a conditional cr-expression has a nonzero cr-value. Defining
probabilistic independence for propositions with probability 0 can get complicated.
(See e.g. Fitelson and Hajek (2014))
9. One will sometimes see “screening off” defined without Equation (3.28) or its analogue.
(That is, some authors define screening off in terms of R’s making the correlation
between P and Q disappear, without worrying whether ~R has the same effect.)
Equation (3.28) makes an important difference to our definition: in the Baxter example
I does not screen off H from C according to our definition because when ~I is supposed,
C becomes very relevant to H.
I have included Equation (3.28) in our definition because it connects our approach to
the more general notion of screening off used in the statistics community. In statistics
one often works with continuous random variables, and the idea is that random variable
Z screens off X from Y if X and Y become independent conditional on each possible
value of Z. Understanding proposition R as a dichotomous random variable (Chapter 2,
note 7) converts this general definition of screening off into the particular definition I’ve
given in the text.
Many authors also leave Equation (3.26) (or its analogue) implicit in their definitions
of “screening off”. But since examples of screening off always involve unconditional
correlations that disappear under conditioning, I’ve made this feature explicit in my
definition.
10. Not to be confused with the Rambler’s Fallacy: I’ve said so many false things in a row,
the next one must be true!
11. Twenty flips of a fair coin provide a good example of what statisticians call IID trials.
“HD” stands for “independent, identically distributed.” The flips are “independent”
because each is probabilistically independent of all the others; information about the
outcomes of other coin flips doesn’t change the probability that a particular flip will
come up heads. The flips are “identically distributed” because each flip has the same
probability of producing heads (as contrasted with a case in which some of the flips are
of a fair coin while others are flips of a biased coin).
12. This paradoxical phenomenon is named after E.H. Simpson because of a number of
striking examples he gave in his (1951). Yet the phenomenon had been known to
statisticians as early as Pearson, Lee, and Bramley-Moore (1899) and Yule (1903).
13. I learned about the Harden/DeRozan example from Reuben Stern, who in turn learned
about it from a reddit post by a user named Jerome Williams. (I copied the specific data
for the two players from stats.nba.com.) The UC Berkeley example was brought to the
attention of philosophers by Cartwright (1979).
14. Notice that these findings only address one potential form of bias that might have
been present in Berkeley’s graduate admissions. For instance, they’re consistent with
the possibility that women were being actively discouraged from applying to the less
selective departments.
15. Γm playing a bit fast and loose with the objects of discussion here. Throughout this
chapter we’re considering correlations in an agent’s credence distribution. Reichenbach
was concerned not with probabilistic correlations in an agent’s credences but instead
with correlations in objective frequencies or chance distributions (about which more in
Chapter 5). But presumably if the Principle of the Common Cause holds for objective
probability distributions, that provides an agent who views particular propositions as
empirically correlated with some reason to suppose that the events described in those
propositions either stand as cause to effect or share a common cause.
16. You might worry that Figure 3.3 presents a counterexample to Reichenbach’s Principle
of the Common Cause, because G and S are unconditionally correlated yet G doesn’t
cause S and they have no common cause. It’s important to the principle that the causal
relations need not be direct1 , for Reichenbach’s purposes G counts as a cause of S even
though it’s not the immediate cause of S.
17. Just to indicate a few more complexities that may arise: While our discussion in the
text concerns “direct” common causes, one can have an “indirect” common cause that
doesn’t screen off its effects from each other. For example, if we imagine merging
Figures 3.2 and 3.3 to show how the subject’s parents’ genes are a common cause of
both smoking and drinking by way of her addictive personality, it is possible to arrange
the numbers so that her parents’ genetics don’t screen off smoker from drinker. Even
more complications arise if some causal arrows do end-arounds past others—what if in
addition to the causal structure just described, the parents’ genetics tend to make them
smokers, which in turn directly influences the subject’s smoking behavior?
18. Here I assume that a rational agent will entertain an indicative conditional only if
she takes its antecedent to be possible. For arguments in favor of this position, and
citations to the relevant literature, see Moss (2018, Sect. 4.3) and Titelbaum (2013a, Sect.
5.3.2). The analogous assumption for conditional credences is that an agent assigns a
conditional credence only when its condition is true in at least one of her doxastically
possible worlds.
19. One could study a kind of attitude different from the conditional credences considered
in this book—something like a subjunctive degree of belief. Joyce (1999) does exactly
that, but is careful to distinguish his analysandum from standard conditional degrees
of belief. (For instance, the arguments for the Ratio Formula given earlier in this
chapter do not extend to Joycean subjunctive credences.) Schwarz (2018) then evaluates
triviality arguments for subjunctive conditional credences much like the triviality
arguments for indicatives I will go on to consider in this section.
NOTES 89
20. I realize some of the “p”s and “q”s in this quote are flipped around from what one might
expect, but that’s how it’s printed in my copy of Ramsey (1931). Context makes clear
that the ordering is not why Ramsey rejects the proposed equivalents to “the degree of
belief in p given q”; he’d still reject them were the order inverted.
21. A variety of recent positions in linguistics and the philosophy of language suggest
that indicative conditionals with modal expressions in their consequents do not obey
classical logical rules. Yalcin (2012), among others, classes probability locutions with
these modals and so argues that, inter alia, indicative conditionals with probabilistic
consequents do not keep modus tollens truth-preserving. (His argument could easily
be extended to disjunctive syllogism as well.) Yet the alternative positive theory of
indicative conditionals Yalcin offers does not analyze conditional credences in terms
of conditionals either, so even if he’s correct, we would still need an independent
understanding of what conditional credences are. (Thanks to Fabrizio Cariani for
discussion of these points.)
22. A careful reader will note that the proof given fails when cr(P ∣ Q) takes an extreme
value. If cr(P ∣ Q) = 0, the condition in cr(P ∣ Q & P) will have unconditional credence
0, while if cr(P ∣ Q) = 1, the condition in cr(P ∣ Q& ~P) will have credence 0. So strictly
speaking the triviality result is that (3.48) can hold only when the agent takes P and
Q to be independent, or dependent in the strongest possible fashion. This is no more
plausible than the less careful version I’ve given in the text. (Thanks to Glauber de Bona
for being the careful reader who caught this for me!)
23. Fitelson (2015) proves a triviality result like Lewis’s using probability tables (instead
of proceeding axiomatically). Moreover, he traces the triviality specifically to the
combination of (3.48) with the assumption that the conditional → satisfies what’s
known as the “import-export” condition.
24. Interestingly, this idea is often traced back to a suggestion in Ramsey, known as
“Ramsey’s test” (Ramsey 1929/1990, p. 155n).
25. Thanks to Irving Lubliner for inspiring this problem.
26. This problem was inspired by a problem of Branden Fitelson’s. Thanks to Catrin
Campbell-Moore for devising this particularly elegant set of conditions.
Updating by Conditionalization
Up to this point we have discussed synchronic credence constraints—rationally

required relations among the degrees of belief an agent assigns at a given
time. This chapter introduces the fifth (and final) core normative Bayesian
rule, Conditionalization. Conditionalization is a diachronic rule, requiring an
agents degrees of belief to line up in particular ways across times.
I begin by laying out the rule and some of its immediate consequences. We
will then practice applying Conditionalization using Bayes’s Theorem. Some
of Conditionalization’s consequences will prompt us to ask what notions of
learning and evidence pair most naturally with the rule. I will also explain why
it’s important to attend to an agent’s total evidence in evaluating her responses
to learning.
Finally, we will see how Conditionalization helps Bayesians distinguish
two influences on an agent’s opinions: the content of her evidence, and
her tendencies to respond to evidence in particular ways. This will lead to
Chapter 5’s discussion of whether multiple distinct responses to the same
evidence might ever be rationally permissible. Differing answers to that
question provide a crucial distinction between Subjective and Objective
Bayesianism.
4.1 Conditionalization
Suppose I tell you I just rolled a fair six-sided die, and give you no fur
ther information about how the roll came out. Presumably you assign equal
unconditional credence to each of the six possible outcomes, so your credence
that the die came up six will be 1/6.1 then ask you to suppose that the roll
came up even (while being very clear that this is just a supposition—Γm
still not revealing anything about the actual outcome). Applying the Ratio
Formula to your unconditional distribution, we find that rationality requires
your credence in six conditional on the supposition of even to be 1/3. Finally,
I break down and tell you that the roll actually did come up even. Now how
confident should you be that it came up six?
4∙1 CONDITIONALIZATION 91
I hope the obvious answer is 1/3. When you learn that the die actually came
up even, the effect on your confidence in a six is identical to the effect of
merely supposing evenness. This relationship between learning and supposing
is captured in Bayesians’ credence-updating rule:
Conditionalization: For any time ti and later time t7∙, if proposition E in

£ represents everything the agent learns between ti and ty∙, and
cη∙(B) > 0, then for any H in £,
crj(H) = cr j(H∣E)
where cr,∙ and cr7∙ are the agents credence distributions at the two times.
Conditionalization captures the idea that an agents credence in H at tj—
after learning E— should equal her earlier ti credence in H had she merely
supposed E. If we label the two times in the die-roll case tl and t2> and let 6
represent the die’s coming up six and E represent its coming up even, then
Conditionalization tells us
cr2(6) = cr1(6∣E) (4.1)
which equals 1/3 (given what we know about your unconditional distribution
at t1).
Warning
Some theorists take Conditionalization to define conditional credence. For

them, to assign the conditional credence cη∙(H ∣ B) = rjust is to be disposed
to assign crz∙(H) = r should you learn E. As I said in Chapter 3, I take
conditional credence to be a genuine mental state, manifested by the agent
in various ways at ti (what she’ll say in conversation, what sorts of bets she’ll
accept, etc.) beyond just her dispositions to update. For us, Conditional
ization represents a normative constraint relating the agent’s unconditional
credences at a later time to her conditional credences earlier on.
Combining Conditionalization with the Ratio Formula gives us
0^ = 0«=»
(4.2)
92 UPDATING BY CONDITIONALIZATION
(when crf(E) > 0). A Venn diagram shows why dividing these particular ti
credences should yield the agent’s credence in H at tj. In Chapter 3 we used a
diagram like Figure 4.1 to understand conditional credences. There the white
circle represented a set of possibilities to which the agent had temporarily
narrowed her focus in order to entertain a supposition.
Now let’s imagine the rectangle represents all the possible worlds the agent
entertains at ti (her doxastically possible worlds at that time). The size of the
H-circle represents the agent’s unconditional ti credence in H. Between ti and
tj the agent learns that E is true. Among the worlds she had entertained before,
the agent now excludes all the non-E worlds. Her set of doxastic possibilities
narrows down to the E-circle; in effect, the E-circle becomes the agents new
rectangle. How unconditionally confident is the agent in H now? That depends
what fraction of her new doxastic space is occupied by H-worlds. And this
is what Equation (4.2) calculates: it tells us what fraction of the E-circle is
occupied by H & E worlds.
As stated, the Conditionalization rule is useful for calculating a single
unconditional credence value after an agent has gained evidence. But what if
you want to generate the agent’s entire tj credence distribution at once? We
saw in Chapter 2 that a rational agent’s entire ti credence distribution can be
specified by a probability table that gives the agent’s unconditional ti credence
in each state-description of 23. To satisfy the probability axioms, the credence
values in a probability table must be non-negative and sum to 1. The agent’s
unconditional credence in any (non-contradictory) proposition can then be
determined by summing her credences in the state-descriptions on which that
proposition is true.
When an agent updates her credence distribution by applying Conditional
ization to some learned proposition E, we will say that she “conditionalizes on
E”. (Some authors say she “conditions on E”.) To calculate the probability table
resulting from such an update, we apply a two-step process:
1. Assign credence 0 to all state-descriptions inconsistent with the evidence

learned.
2. Multiply each remaining nonzero credence by the same constant so that
they all sum to 1.
As an example, let’s consider what happens to your confidence that the fair die
roll came up prime1 when you learn that it came up even:
P E crι cr2
τ T 1/6 1/3
τ F 1/3 0
F T 1/3 2/3
F F 1/6 0
Here we’ve used a language £ with atomic propositions P and E representing

“prime” and “even”. The cr1 column represents your unconditional credences
at time t1, while the cr2 column represents your t2 credences. Between t1 and
t2 you learn that the die came up even. That’s inconsistent with the second
and fourth state-descriptions, so in the first step of our update process their
cr2-values go to 0. The cr1-values of the first and third state-descriptions (1/6
and 1/3 respectively) add up to only 1/2. So we multiply both of these values
by 2 to obtain unconditional t2-credences summing to 1.2
In this manner, we generate your unconditional state-description credences
at t2 from your state-description credences at t1. We can then calculate cr2-
values for other propositions. For instance, adding up the cr2-values on the
lines that make P true, we find that
cr2(P) = 1/3 (4.3)
Given your initial distribution, your credence that the die came up prime after
learning that it came up even is required to be 1/3. Hopefully that squares with
your intuitions about what’s rationally required in this case!
One final note: Our two-step process for updating probability tables yields
a handy fact. Notice that in the second step of the process, every state
description that hasn’t been set to zero is multiplied by the same constant.
When two values are multipled by the same constant, the ratio between
them remains intact. This means that if two state-descriptions have nonzero
credence values after an update by Conditionalization, those values will stand
in the same ratio as they did before the update. This fact will prove useful
for problem-solving later on. (Notice that it applies only to state-descriptions;

propositions that are not state-descriptions may not maintain their credence
ratios after a conditionalization.)
4.1.1 Consequences of Conditionalization
If we adopt Conditionalization as our updating norm, what follows? When an

agent updates by conditionalizing on E, her new credence distribution is just
her earlier distribution conditional on E. In Section 3.1.2 we saw that if an
agent’s credence distribution obeys the probability axioms and Ratio Formula,
then the distribution she assigns conditional on any particular proposition (in
which she has nonzero credence) will be probabilistic as well. This yields the
important result that if an agent starts off obeying the probability axioms and
Ratio Formula and then updates by Conditionalization, her resulting credence
distribution will satisfy the probability axioms as well.3
The process may then iterate. Having conditionalized her probabilistic dis
tribution cr1 on some evidence E to obtain probabilistic credence distribution
cr2, the agent may then gain further evidence E', which she conditionalizes
upon to obtain cr3 (and so on). Moreover, conditionalization has the elegant
mathematical property of being cumulative: Instead of obtaining cr3 from cr1
in two steps—first conditionalizing cr1 on E to obtain cr2, then conditional
izing cr2 on E' to obtain cr3—we can generate the same cr3 distribution by
conditionalizing cr1 on E & Er, a conjunction representing all the propositions
learned between t1 and t3. (You’ll prove this in Exercise 4.3.) Because condi
tionalization is cumulative it is also commutative: Conditionalizing first on E
and then E, has the same effect as conditionalizing in the opposite order.
Besides being mathematically elegant, cumulativity and commutativity
are intuitively plausible features of a learning process. Suppose a detective
investigating a crime learns that the perpetrator was an Italian accordionist,
and updates her credences accordingly. Intuitively, it shouldn’t matter if we
describe this episode as the detective’s learning first one piece of evidence and
then another (first that the perpetrator was Italian, and then that he was an
accordionist) or as the detective’s learning a single conjunction containing
both. Because conditionalization is cumulative, it will prescribe the same
ultimate credences for the detective on either construal. Similarly, it shouldn’t
matter whether we take her to have learned that the perpetrator was an Italian
accordionist or an accordion-playing Italian. Because conditionalization is
commutative, the order in which pieces of evidence are presented makes no
difference to an agent’s ultimate credences.4
When an agent conditionalizes on evidence E, what happens to her uncon

ditional credence in that very evidence? Substituting E for H in Equation (4.2)
(and recalling that E & E is equivalent to E), we can see that if an agent learns
E between ti and tz∙ then
crj(E) = 1 (4.4)
Conditionalization creates certainties; conditionalizing on a piece of evidence

makes an agent certain of that evidence. Moreover, any proposition entailed
by that evidence must receive at least as high a credence as the evidence (by
our Entailment rule). So an agent who conditionalizes also becomes certain of
any proposition entailed by the evidence she learns.
And conditionalization doesn’t just create certainties; it also retains them.
If an agent is certain of a proposition at ti and updates by Conditionalization,
she will remain certain of that proposition at tj. That is, if cri∙(H) = 1 then
Conditionalization yields crz∙(H) = 1 as well. On a probability table, this means
that once a state-description receives credence 0 at a particular time (the agent
has ruled out that possible state of the world), it will receive credence 0 at all
subsequent times as well.
In Exercise 4.2 you’ll prove that conditionalizing retains certainties from
the probability axioms and Ratio Formula. But it’s easy to see why this occurs
on a Venn diagram. You’re certain of H at ti when H is true in every world
you consider a live doxastic possibility. Conditionalizing on E strictly narrows
the set of possible worlds you entertain. So if H was true in every world you
entertained before conditionalizing, it’ll be true in every world you entertain
afterwards as well.
Combining these consequences of Conditionalization yields a somewhat
counterintuitive result, to which we’ll return in later discussions. Condition
alizing on E between two times makes that proposition (and any proposition
it entails) certain. Future updates by Conditionalization will then retain that
certainty. So if an agent updates by conditionalizing throughout her life, any
piece of evidence she learns at any point will remain certain for her ever after.
What if an agent doesn’t learn anything between two times? Bayesians
represent an empty evidence set as a tautology. So when an agent gains no
information between ti and t7∙, Conditionalization yields
cry(H) = cη(H∣T) = cr1∙(H) (4.5)
for any H in £. (The latter half of this equation comes from Equation (3.7),
which noted that credences conditional on a tautology equal unconditional
credences.) If an agent learns nothing between two times and updates by

Conditionalization, her degrees of confidence remain unchanged.
4.1.2 Probabilities are weird! The Base Rate Fallacy
Bayes’s Theorem expresses a purely synchronic relation; as we saw in Section

3.1.3, for any time ti it calculates cri(H ∣ B) in terms of other credences assigned
at that time. Nevertheless, our diachronic Conditionalization rule gives Bayes’s
Theorem added significance. Conditionalization says that your unconditional
tj credence in hypothesis H after learning E should equal crz∙(H ∣ E). Bayes’s
Theorem is a tool for calculating this crucial value (your “posterior” at ti) from
other credences you assign at ti. As new evidence comes in over time and we
repeatedly update by conditionalizing, Bayes’s Theorem can be a handy tool
for generating new credences from old.
For example, we could’ve used Bayes’s Theorem to answer our earlier
question of what happens to your credence in six when you learn that a fair
die roll has come up even. The hypothesis is 6, and the evidence is E (for even).
By Conditionalization and then Bayes’s Theorem,
cr2(6) = cr1(6 ∣ E~) = (4.6)
cr1(6), your prior credence in a six, is 1/6, and cr1(E), your prior credence in
even, is 1/2. The likelihood of E, cr1(E ∣ 6), is easy—it’s 1. So the numerator is
1/6, the denominator is 1/2, and the posterior cr1(6 ∣ E) = cr2(6) = 1/3 as we
saw before.5
Let’s apply Bayes’s Theorem to a more interesting case:
One in 1,000 people have a particular disease. You have a test for the presence
of the disease that is 90% accurate, in the following sense: If you apply the
test to a subject who has the disease it will yield a positive result 90% of the
time, and if you apply the test to a subject who lacks the disease it will yield a
negative result 90% of the time.
You randomly select a person and apply the test. The test yields a positive
result. How confident should you be that this subject actually has the disease?
Most people—including trained medical professionals!—answer this question

with a value around 80% or 90%. But if you set your credences by the statistics
given in the problem, the rationally required degree of confidence that the
subject has the disease is less than 1%.
We’ll use Bayes’s Theorem to work that out. Let D be the proposition that the
subject has the disease and P the proposition that when applied to the subject,
the test yields a positive result. Here D is our hypothesis, and P is the evidence
acquired between t1 and t2- At tl (before applying the test) we take the subject
to be representative of the population, giving us priors for the hypothesis and
the catchall:
cr1(D) = 0.001 cr1(~D) = 0.999
The accuracy profile of the test gives us likelihoods for the hypothesis and
catchall:
cr1(P ∣ D) = 0.9 cr1(P ∣ ~D) = 0.1
In words, you’re 90% confident that the test will yield a positive result given that
the subject has the disease, and 10% confident that we’ll get a “false positive”
on the supposition that the subject lacks the disease.
Now we’ll apply a version of Bayes’s Theorem from Section 3.1.3, in which
the Law of Total Probability has been used to expand the denominator:
cr (D} = cr1(P∣D)∙cr1(D)
2 cr1 (P ∣ D) ∙ cr1 (D) + cr 1 (P ∣ ~D) ∙ cr 1 (~D)
0.9 ∙ 0.001 (4.7)
“ 0.9 ∙ 0.001+0.1 ∙ 0.999
≈ 0.009 = 0.9%
So there’s the calculation. After learning of the positive test result, your
credence that the subject has the disease should be a little bit less than 1%.
But even having seen this calculation, most people find it hard to believe. Why
shouldn’t we be more confident that the subject has the disease? Wasn’t the
test 90% accurate?
Tversky and Kahneman (1974) suggested that in cases like this one, people’s
intuitive responses ignore the “base rate” of a phenomenon. The base rate in
our example is the prior credence that the subject has the disease. In this case,
that base rate is extremely low (1 in 1,000). But people tend to forget about
the base rate and be overwhelmed by accuracy statistics (such as likelihoods)
about the test. This is known as the Base Rate Fallacy.
Why is the base rate so important? To illustrate, let’s suppose you applied this
test to 10,000 people. Using the base rate statistics, we would expect about ten
of those people to have the disease. Since the test gives a positive result for 90%
of people who have the disease, we would expect these ten diseased people to
yield about nine positive results—so-called “true positives”. Then there would
be about 9,990 people lacking the disease. Since crz∙(P ∣ ~D)-the false positive
rate—is 10%, we’d expect to get about 999 false positive results. Out of 1,008
positive results the test would yield, only nine of those subjects (or about 0.9%)
would actually have the disease. This particular disease is so rare—its base rate
is so tiny—that even with an accurate test we should expect the false positives
to swamp the true positives. So when a single randomly selected individual
takes the test and gets a positive result, we should be much more confident
that this is a false positive than a true one.
Another way to see what’s going on is to consider the Bayes factor of the
evidence you receive in this case. Using Conditionalization and the Ratio
Formula, we can derive
cri(H) _ cr,(H⅝E) cr,(H) cri(E∣H)

crf(~H) cri(~H∣E) cri(~H) ' crj(E ∣ ~H) tl ’ ’
That last fraction on the right—the ratio of the likelihood of the hypothesis
to the likelihood of the catchall—is the Bayes factor. Personally, I found this
equation fairly impenetrable until I remembered that cr(H)∕cr(~H) is an
agent’s odds for the proposition H (Section 2.3.4). That means we can rewrite
Equation (4.8) as
odds for H after update = odds for H before update ∙ Bayes factor (4.9)
If you update by Conditionalization, learning E multiplies your odds for H by

the Bayes factor. The Bayes factor thus provides a handy way to measure how
much learning E affects your opinion about the hypothesis.
In our disease example, the Bayes factor is
cr1(P∣D) _ 0.9
(4.10)
cr1(P∣~D) " 04
At t1, your odds for D are 1:999. Applying the test has a substantial influence
on these odds; as the Bayes factor reveals, a positive test result multiplies the
odds by 9. This reflects the high accuracy of the test. Yet since the odds were so
small initially, multiplying them by 9 only brings them up to 9:999. So even
after seeing the test outcome, you should be much more confident that the
subject doesn’t have the disease than you are that she does.6
4∙2 EVIDENCE AND CERTAINTY 99
4.2 Evidence and certainty
Combining Conditionalization with the probability axioms and Ratio Formula

creates a Bayesian approach to evidence that many have found troubling.
Conditionalization works with a proposition E representing everything the
agent learns between two times. (If many propositions are learned, E is their
conjunction.) We also speak of E as the evidence the agent gains between those
two times. Yet Conditionalization gives E properties that epistemologists don’t
typically attribute to evidence.
We’ve already seen that a piece of evidence E (along with anything it entails)
becomes certain once conditionalized upon. When an agent learns E, the set
of doxastically possible worlds she entertains shrinks to a set of worlds that all
make E true; on the Venn diagram, what once was merely an E-circle within
her rectangle of worlds now becomes the entire rectangle. And as we saw in
Section 4.1.1, this change is permanent: as long as the agent keeps updating
by Conditionalization, any evidence she once learned remains certain and
possible worlds inconsistent with it remain ruled out.
Is there any realistic conception of evidence—and of learning—that satisfies
these conditions? When I learn that my sister is coming over for Thanksgiving
dinner, I become highly confident in that proposition. But do I become 100%
certain? Do I rule out all possible worlds in which she doesn’t show, refusing
to consider them ever after? As Richard C. Jeffrey put it:
Certainty is quite demanding. It rules out not only the far-fetched uncertain
ties associated with philosophical skepticism, but also the familiar uncertain
ties that affect real empirical inquiry in science and everyday life.
(2004, p. 53)
This concern about certainties motivates the
Regularity Principle: In a rational credence distribution, no logically con

tingent proposition receives unconditional credence 0.
The Regularity Principle captures the common-sense idea that one’s evidence
is never so strong as to entirely rule out any logical possibility. (Recall that
a logically contingent proposition is neither a logical contradiction nor a
logical tautology.)7 As damning evidence against a contingent proposition
mounts up, we may keep decreasing and decreasing our credence in it, but our
unconditional credence distribution should always remain regular—it should
assign each logically contingent proposition at least a tiny bit of confidence.8
The Regularity Principle adds to the synchronic Bayesian rules we have seen
so far—it is not entailed by the probability axioms, the Ratio Formula, or any
combination of them. As our Contradiction result showed in Section 2.2.1,
those rules do entail that all logical contradictions receive credence 0. But
Regularity is the converse of Contradiction; instead of saying that all contra
dictions receive credence 0, it entails that only contradictions do. Similarly,
Regularity (along with the probability axioms) entails the converse of Nor
mality: instead of saying that all tautologies receive credence 1, it entails that
only tautologies do. (The negation of a contingent proposition is contingent;
if we were to assign a contingent proposition credence 1 its negation would
receive credence 0, in violation of Regularity.) This captures the common
sense idea that one should never be absolutely certain of a proposition that’s
not logically true.9
Conditionalization conflicts with Regularity; the moment an agent condi-
tionalizes on contingent evidence, she assigns credence 1 to a non-tautology.
As we saw earlier, conditionalizing on contingent evidence rules out doxastic
possibilities the agent had previously entertained; on the Venn diagram, it
narrows the set of worlds under consideration. Regularity, on the other hand,
fixes an agents doxastic possibility set as the full set of logical possibilities.
While evidence might shift the agents credences around among various pos
sible worlds, an agent who satisfies Regularity will never eliminate a possible
world outright.
We might defend Conditionalization by claiming that whenever agents
receive contingent evidence, it is of a highly specific kind, and Regularity is
false for this kind of evidence. Perhaps I don’t actually learn that my sister is
coming over for Thanksgiving—I learn that she told me she’s coming; or that it
seemed to me that she said that; or that I had a phenomenal experience as of....
Surely I can be certain what phenomenal experiences I’ve had, or at least what
experiences Γm having right now. While in the midst of having a particular
phenomenal experience, can’t I entirely rule out the logical possibility that
I am having a different experience instead? C.I. Lewis defended this approach
as follows:
If anything is to be probable, then something must be certain. The data which

themselves support a genuine probability, must themselves be certainties. We
do have such absolute certainties, in the sense data initiating belief and in
those passages of experience which later may confirm it. (1946, p. 186)
Yet foundationalist epistemologies based on sense data and indubitable phe

nomenology have become unpopular in recent years. So it’s worth considering
other ways to make sense of Conditionalizations conception of evidence.

Levi (1980) took credence-1 propositions to represent “standards of serious
possibility”:
When witnessing the toss of a coin, [an agent] will normally envisage as
possibly true the hypothesis that the coin will land heads up and that it will
land tails up. He may also envisage other possibilities—e.g., its landing on its
edge. However, if he takes for granted even the crudest folklore of modern
physics, he will rule out as impossible the coin’s moving upward to outer space
in the direction of Alpha Centauri. He will also rule out the hypothesis that
the Earth will explode, (p. 3)
However, Levi formalized his standards of serious possibility so that they could
change—growing either stronger or weaker—for a given agent over time. So
his approach did not fully embrace Conditionalization.
Alternatively, we could represent agents as ruling out contingent possibil
ities only relative to a particular inquiry. Consider a scientist who has just
received a batch of experimental data and wants to weigh its import for a set
of hypotheses. There are always outlandish possibilities to consider: the data
might have been faked; the laws of physics might have changed a moment
ago; she might be a brain in a vat. But to focus on the problem at hand, she
might conditionalize on the data and see where that takes her credences in
the hypotheses. Updating by Conditionalization might fail as a big-picture,
permanent strategy, but nevertheless could be useful in carefully delimited
contexts. (I mentioned this possibility in Section 2.2.3.)
Perhaps these interpretations of evidence conditionalized-upon remain
unsatisfying. We will return to this problem in Chapter 5, and consider a
generalized updating rule (Jeffrey Conditionalization) that allows agents to
redistribute their credences over contingent possibilities without eliminating
any of them entirely. For the rest of this chapter we will simply assume that
Conditionalization on some kind of contingent evidence is a rational updating
rule, so as to draw out further features of such updates.
4.2.1 Probabilities are weird! Total Evidence

and the Monty Hall Problem
Classical entailment is monotonic in the following sense: If a piece of evidence

E entails H, any augmentation of that evidence (any conjunction that includes
E as a conjunct) will entail H as well. Probabilistic relations, however, can be
nonmonotonic: H might be highly probable given E, but improbable given

E8cE,. For this reason, it’s important for an agent assigning credences on the
basis of her evidence to consider all of that evidence, and not simply draw
conclusions from a subset of it. Carnap (1947) articulated the Principle of
Total Evidence that a rational agent’s credence distribution takes into account
all of the evidence she possesses.
An agent may violate the Principle of Total Evidence by failing to take into
account the manner in which she gained particular information. If the agent is
aware of the mechanism by which a piece of information was received, it can
be important to recognize facts about that mechanism as a component of her
total evidence (along with the information itself). In Eddington’s (1939) classic
example, you draw a sample of fish from a lake, and all the fish you draw are
longer than six inches. Normally, updating on this information would increase
your confidence that every fish in the lake is at least that long. But if you know
the net used to draw the sample has big holes through which shorter fish fall, a
confidence increase is unwarranted. Here it’s important to conditionalize not
only on the lengths of the fish but also on how they were caught. The method
by which your sample was collected has introduced an observation selection
effect into the data.10
Observation selection effects are crucial to a famously counterintuitive
probability puzzle, the Monty Hall Problem (Selvin 1975):
In one of the games played on Let’s Make a Deal, a prize is randomly hidden
behind one of three doors. The contestant selects one door, then the host
(Monty Hall) opens one of the doors the contestant didn’t pick. Monty knows
where the prize is, and makes sure to always open a door that doesn’t have the
prize behind it. (If both the unselected doors are empty, he randomly chooses
which one to open.) After he opens an empty door, Monty asks the contestant
if she wants what’s behind the door she initially selected, or what’s behind
the other remaining closed door. Assuming she understands the details of
Monty’s procedure, how confident should the contestant be that the door she
initially selected contains the prize?
Most people’s initial reaction is to answer 1/2: the contestant originally spread
her credence equally among the three doors; one of them has been revealed
to be empty; so she should be equally confident that the prize is behind each
of the remaining two. This analysis is illustrated by the following probability
table:
crι cr2
Prize behind door A 1/3 1/2
Prize behind door B 1/3 0
Prize behind door C 1/3 1/2
Here we’ve used the obvious partition of three locations where the prize
might be. Without loss of generality, I’ve imagined that the contestant initially
selects door A and Monty then opens door B. At time tl-after the contestant
has selected door A but before Monty has opened anything—she is equally
confident that the prize is hidden behind each of the three doors. When Monty
opens door B at t2, the contestant should conditionalize on the prize’s not being
behind that door. This yields the cr2 distribution listed above, which matches
most people’s intuitions.
Yet the contestant’s total evidence at t2 includes not only the fact that the
prize isn’t behind door B but also the fact that Monty chose that door to
open for her. These two propositions aren’t equivalent among the agent’s
doxastically possible worlds at tl∙, there are possible worlds consistent with
what the contestant knows about Monty’s procedure in which door B is empty
yet Monty opens door C. That door B was not only empty but was revealed to
be empty is not expressible in the partition used above. So we need a richer
partition, containing information both about the location of the prize and
about what Monty does:
cr1 cr2
Prize behind door A & Monty reveals B 1/6 1/3
Prize behind door A & Monty reveals C 1/6 0
Prize behind door B & Monty reveals C 1/3 0
Prize behind door C & Monty reveals B 1/3 2/3
Given what the agent knows of Monty’s procedure, these four propositions
partition her doxastic possibilities at t1. At that time she doesn’t know where
the prize is, but she has initially selected door A (and Monty hasn’t opened
anything yet). If the prize is indeed behind door A, Monty randomly chooses
whether to open B or C. So the contestant divides her 1/3 credence that the
prize is behind door A equally between those two options. If the prize is behind
door B, Monty is forbidden to open that door as well as the door the contestant
selected, so Monty must open C. Similarly, if the prize is behind door C, Monty
must open B.
At t2 Monty has opened door B, so the contestant conditionalizes by setting

her credences in the second and third partition members to 0, then multiplying
the remaining values by a constant so that they sum to 1. This maintains the
ratio between her credences on the first and fourth lines; initially she was twice
as confident of the fourth as the first, so she remains twice as confident after
the update. She is now 2/3 confident that the prize isn’t behind the door she
initially selected, and 1/3 confident that her initial selection was correct. If she
wants the prize, the contestant should switch doors.
This is the correct analysis. If you find that surprising, the following expla
nation may help: When the contestant originally selected her door, she was
1/3 confident that the prize was behind it and 2/3 confident that the prize
was somewhere else. If her initial pick was correct, she claims the prize just
in case she sticks with that pick. But if her initial selection was wrong, she wins
by switching to the other remaining closed door, because it must contain the
prize. So there’s a 1/3 chance that sticking is the winning strategy, and a 2/3
chance that switching will earn her the prize. Clearly switching is a better idea!
When I first heard the Monty Hall Problem, even that explanation didn’t
convince me. I only became convinced after I simulated the scenario over
and over and found that sticking made me miss the prize roughly two out of
three times. If you’re not convinced, try writing a quick computer program
or finding a friend with a free afternoon to act as Monty Hall for you a few
hundred times. You’ll eventually find that the probability table taking total
evidence into account provides the correct analysis.11
One final note about total evidence: I may have convinced you that taking
your total evidence into account is a good idea, but you might be concerned
that it’s impossible. After all, at each conscious moment an agent receives
torrents of information from her environment. How can she take it all into
account when assigning a credence to a particular proposition—say, the propo
sition that the cheese sandwich on the counter in front of her has not yet gone
bad?
The nonmonotonicity of probabilistic relations means that a rational agent
cannot afford to ignore any of her evidence. But many of the propositions
an agent learns in a given moment will be irrelevant to the matter under
consideration relative to her current credence distribution. That is, for many
pieces of evidence her credence in the proposition at issue would be the same
whether she conditionalized on that particular piece of evidence or not. As
the agent ponders her cheese sandwich, information about the color of the
bird that just flew by or the current position of her right hand makes no
difference to her credence that the sandwich is edible. So while a rational
4∙3 PRIORS AND STANDARDS 105
agent doesn’t ignore any of her total evidence, the irrelevance of much of that
evidence permits her to focus in on the few pieces of evidence that are relevant
to the proposition under consideration. For this reason, Bayesians often bypass
discussion of an agents total evidence in favor of discussing her total relevant
evidence.12
4.3 Priors and standards
4.3.1 Initial priors
Consider a rational agent with probabilistic credences who updates by Condi-

tionalization each time she gains new evidence, for her entire life. At a given
moment ti she has a credence distribution crf. She then gains new evidence
E and updates by Conditionalization. Her unconditional crl∙ values provide
the priors for that update, and her cη values conditional on E provide the
posteriors. By Conditionalization, these posteriors become her unconditional
credences at the next time, tj. Then she receives a new piece of evidence E,. Her
unconditional cry∙ values supply the priors for a new update, and her cry∙ values
conditional on E' are the posteriors.
And so it goes. We have already seen that if this agent updates by Condi
tionalization every time she learns something new, she will gain contingent
certainties over time and never lose any of them. So her entire doxastic life
will be a process of accumulating empirical evidence from her environment,
building a snowball of information that never loses any of its parts.
What happens if we view that process backwards, working from the agents
present doxastic state back through the states she assigned in the past? Her
current unconditional credences resulted from an earlier update by Condition
alization. Relative to that update, her current credences were the posteriors
and some other distribution provided the priors. But those priors, in turn,
came from a conditionalization. So they were once the posteriors of an even
earlier set of priors. As we go backwards in time, we find a sequence of cre
dence distributions, each of which was conditionalized to form the next. And
since each conditionalization strictly added evidence, the earlier distributions
contain successively less and less contingent information as we travel back.
Bayesian epistemologists often imagine marching backwards in this fashion
until there’s no farther back to go. They imagine that if you went back far
enough, you would find a point at which the agent possessed literally no
contingent information. This was the starting point from which she gained her
cr0 ---------- > .. ∙ ----------> cr; ---------- > cry ----------> crk ---------- >
E E'
Figure 4.2 An initial prior?
very first piece of evidence, and made her first update by Conditionalization.
The agents credence distribution at this earliest point is sometimes called her
initial prior distribution (or her “ur-prior”).
Let’s think about the properties an initial prior distribution would have.
First, since the credence distributions that develop from an initial prior by
Conditionalization are probability distributions, it’s generally assumed that
the initial prior satisfies the Kolmogorov axioms (and Ratio Formula) as well.
Second, it’s thought that since at the imagined initial moment (call it t0) the
agent possessed no contingent information, she should not have been certain
of any contingent propositions. In other words, the initial prior distribution
cr0 should be regular (should assign nonextreme values to all contingent
propositions). Finally, think about how cr0 relates to a credence distribution
our agent assigns at some arbitrary moment ti later on. We could recover cη by
conditionalizing cr0 on the first piece of evidence the agent ever learned, then
conditionalizing the result of that update on the second piece of evidence she
learned, and so on until we reach cri. But since conditionalizing is cumulative,
we could also roll up together all of these intermediate steps and get from
cr0 to crz∙ in one move. Suppose the proposition Ei represents the agent’s total
evidence at ti-the conjunction of all the individual pieces of evidence she’s
learned since t0. Then as long as the agent has updated by conditionalizing at
every step between t0 and ti, cumulativity guarantees that cη(∙) = cr0(∙ ∣ Ei).
A rational agent’s credence distribution at any given time is her initial prior
distribution conditional on her total evidence at that time.
This idea is illustrated in Figure 4.2. Each credence distribution is generated
from the previous one by conditionalizing on the evidence learned (solid
arrows). But we can also derive each distribution directly (dashed arrows) by
conditionalizing cr0 on the agent’s total evidence at the relevant time (Ei for
crz∙, Ej for crj∙, etc.).
The initial-priors picture is an attractive one, and bears a certain mathe
matical elegance. The trouble is that it can at best be a myth. Was there ever
a time in a real agent’s life when she possessed no contingent information?
Since cr0 satisfies the probability axioms, it must be perfectly attuned to logical
4.3 PRIORS AND STANDARDS 107
relations (such as mutual exclusivity and entailment) and assign a value of 1 to

all tautologies. So the agent who assigns this initial prior must be omniscient
logically while totally ignorant empirically. In seminars, David Lewis used to
call such highly intelligent, blank creatures “superbabies”; while some Bayesian
artificial intelligence systems may be like this, I doubt any human has ever
been.13 Moreover, Γm not sure it even makes sense for an agent with no
contingent information to assign precise numerical credences to the kinds of
elaborate, highly detailed empirical claims that are real humans’ stock in trade.
4.3.2 Epistemic standards
Yet the formal mechanism employed by the initial priors myth—a regular
probability distribution conditionalized on total evidence to generate credence
distributions at arbitrary times—can be repurposed to represent something
important in epistemology. To get a sense of what Γm talking about, let’s
consider an example:
Question: When playing a hand of five-card stud, how confident should you
become that you’ll win the hand upon learning that your last card will be the
two of clubs?
Answer: Depends how far you are in the game, and what’s happened up to that
point.
Five-card stud is a poker game in which you receive a total of five cards, one at
a time. Four of a kind (four out of five cards showing the same number) is an
excellent, almost unbeatable hand in this game. So let’s suppose that your first
four cards in this particular hand of five-card stud were the jack of spades, the
two of diamonds, the two of hearts, and then the two of spades. With that
background information, discovering that your last card will be the two of
clubs should make you almost certain that you’ll win. (Depending in part on
what you know of the other players’ hands.)
An agent’s epistemic standards govern how she reacts to particular pieces
of news. These epistemic standards are determined in part by an agent’s total
evidence, and as such evolve over time. At the beginning of a hand of five-
card stud, before any cards are dealt, learning that your last card will be the
two of clubs (perhaps by peeking into the deck) would not make you very
confident of winning the hand. Similarly, after seeing your first card (the jack
of spades), a final two of clubs wouldn’t seem like very good news. But for each
successive two you receive after that point, your ongoing epistemic standards
change such that learning the final card will be a two would make you more
and more confident of a win.
When two people react differently to acquiring the same piece of infor
mation, they are applying different epistemic standards. We usually attribute
the difference in their standards to differences in their previous experience.
When one student in a class insists on answering every question, pontificates
at length, and refuses to consider others’ ideas, some of his fellow students
might conclude that this person is the most knowledgeable in the room. But
the teacher (or other students with more experience) might draw the opposite
conclusion, informed by a broader pool of evidence about how particular
personality types behave in conversation.
Yet how should we understand cases in which agents draw different con
clusions despite sharing the same total evidence? Hiring committees form
different beliefs about candidates’ suitability from the same application files;
jurors disagree about a defendant’s guilt after witnessing the same trial; sci
entists embrace different hypotheses consistent with the same experimental
data. These seem to be cases in which agents share a common body of total
evidence, or at least total evidence relevant to the question at hand. So it can’t
be some further, unshared piece of extra evidence that’s leading the agents to
draw differing conclusions.
One could stubbornly maintain that in every real-life case in which agents
interpret a piece of evidence differently, that difference is entirely attributable
to the vagaries of their background information. But I think this would be a
mistake. In addition to variations in their total evidence, agents have varying
ways of interpreting their total evidence. Some people are naturally more
skeptical than others, and so require more evidence to become confident
of a particular proposition (that humans actually landed on the moon, that
a lone gunman shot JFK, that the material world exists). Some people are
interested in avoiding high confidence in falsehoods, while others are more
interested in achieving high confidence in truths. (The former will tend to
prefer noncommittal credences, while the latter will be more willing to adopt
credence values near 0 and 1.) Some scientists are more inclined to believe
elegant theories, while others incline toward the theory that hews closest to the
data. (When the Copernican theory was first proposed, heliocentrism fit the
available astronomical data worse than Ptolemaic approaches (Kuhn 1957).)
The five-card stud example illustrated what I will call ongoing epistemic
standards. Ongoing epistemic standards reflect how an agent is disposed at
a given time to assign attitudes in light of particular pieces of evidence she
might receive. At any given time, an agent’s credences can be determined
from the last piece of evidence she acquired and the ongoing standards she
possessed just before she acquired it (with the latter having been influenced by
pieces of evidence she acquired even earlier than that). Yet there’s another way
to think about the influences on an agents attitudes at a given time: we can
separate out the influence of her total evidence from the influence of whatever
additional, non-evidential factors dictate how she assesses that evidence. I refer
to the latter as the agents ultimate epistemic standards. An agents ultimate
epistemic standards capture her evidence-independent tendencies to respond
to whatever package of total evidence might come her way.14
Warning
Don’t take the talk of “standards” in “epistemic standards” too literally.

It’s not as if agents have a clearly defined set of principles that they apply
to evidence whenever they interpret its significance, each of which is “an
epistemic standard”. Most of the time we draw conclusions from evidence
without much deliberate thought at all, through a variety of methods that
are scarcely systematic. Still, epistemologists need a way to refer to an
agent’s entire, disorganized bundle of dispositions to interpret evidence in
particular ways—that bundle, taken as a unified whole, is what we mean by
“her epistemic standards”.15
In the next section we’ll develop a formal, Bayesian representation of
an agent’s epistemic standards. Again, don’t read the math as a report of
what’s going on in the agent’s psychology—I don’t do a bunch of probability
calculations every time I try to figure out where my earbuds are. Instead,
think of it as a succinct way to summarize what the agent would conclude
from a variety of bodies of total evidence, regardless of how the agent
actually goes about drawing such conclusions.
4.3.3 Hypothetical priors
How might we formally represent an agent’s ultimate epistemic standards? A

moment ago, I said that the attitudes an agent adopts at any given time combine
two influences: her total evidence and her ultimate epistemic standards. So
we can think of the agent’s epistemic standards as a function from possible
bodies of evidence to sets of attitudes adopted in response. This function can
be represented in many ways—as a table listing outputs for specific inputs, as a
complicated graph, etc. But Bayesians have a particularly useful representation

already to hand. We can represent an agents ultimate epistemic standards
using a regular probability distribution P⅛ over her language £, which we call
her hypothetical prior distribution. I’ll presently give an example of how to
build such a representation from information about an agent’s credences. The
key point for now is that once we’ve constructed a hypothetical prior for an
agent, we can recover from it her credence distribution cri at any given time ti,
as long as we know her total evidence Ei at that time. We simply conditionalize
PrH on Ei, and the result is crz∙. Combining the agent’s ultimate epistemic
standards (P⅛) with her total evidence (Ei) recovers her set of attitudes (cri).
Once we’ve constructed a hypothetical prior PrH for an agent, we can
conditionalize it not only on bodies of total evidence she’s possessed in the
past but also on bodies of evidence she might possess in the future. The
hypothetical prior is thus a highly efficient summary of all the attitudes an
agent might ever adopt in response to bodies of evidence at various times of
her life. Almost miraculously, such a compact summary will be available for
any agent whose lifelong credences satisfy the five core Bayesian rules. This is
guaranteed by the
Hypothetical Priors Theorem: Given any finite series of credence distri

butions {cr1, cr2, ..., crn}, each of which satisfies the probability
axioms and Ratio Formula, let Ei be a conjunction of the agent’s
total evidence at ti. If each crz∙ is related to crj∙+1 as specified by
Conditionalization, then there exists at least one regular probability
distribution PrH such that for all 1 ≤ i ≤ n,
cη(∙) = P⅛(∙ ∣ Ei)
In other words, if at each time in an agent’s life her credence distribution

satisfies the probability axioms and Ratio Formula, and if she updates those
distributions from one time to the next according to Conditionalization, then
there will necessarily exist at least one hypothetical prior P⅛ that relates to
every credence distribution she ever assigns according to the formula above.
(You’ll prove this theorem in Exercise 4.8.)
Notice that the Hypothetical Priors Theorem specifies the existence of a
regular probability distribution PrH. Given any rational Bayesian agent, we
can recover her credence distribution at a given time by conditionalizing her
hypothethical prior on her total contingent evidence at that time. Yet being
regular, the hypothetical prior does not assign any contingent certainties itself.
_ χp⅛
Ei ∖Ek ∖X''^
x I x "^" ""
V 'κχ
-------- > cτ. > cq > crfc > cη > ■■■ -------- >
E--------------------- E'-------------------- E"---------------------E",
Figure 4.3 A hypothetical prior
So when we are confronted with the agents credences at a particular time,

we can cleanly factor out the two distinct influences on those credences: her
total evidence (a set of contingent propositions in her language she takes for
certain at that time) and her epistemic standards (represented by a hypothetical
prior distribution assigning no contingent certainties). This is how a Bayesian
represents the idea that ultimate epistemic standards are extra-evidential;
instead of containing any contingent information about the world, epistemic
standards express whatever the agent brings to bear on her evidence that isn’t
based on evidence itself.16
Hypothetical priors are convenient because they have a mathematical form
with which were already familiar: a regular probability distribution over
language £. Yet a hypothetical prior distribution is not a credence distribu
tion.17 An agent’s hypothetical priors are not degrees of belief we imagine she
espoused at some particular point in her life, or would espouse under some
hypothetical conditions. This is what distinguishes them from the mythical
initial priors.18 Hypothetical priors summarize an agent’s abstract evidential
assessment tendencies, and stay constant throughout her life as long as she
obeys the Conditionalization update rule. Instead of appearing somewhere
within the series of credence distributions the agent assigns over time, the
hypothetical prior “floats above” that series, combining with the agent’s total
evidence to create members of the series at each given time. As de Finetti puts
it, “If we reason according to Bayes’ theorem we do not change opinion. We
keep the same opinion and we update it to the new situation” (de Finetti 1995,
p. 100, translated by and quoted in Galavotti 2005, p. 215).
This arrangement is depicted in Figure 4.3. Again, the solid arrows repre
sent conditionalizations from one time to the next, while the dashed arrows
represent the possibility of generating an agent’s distribution at any given time
by conditionalizing P⅛ on her total evidence at that time.
Now let’s show how we can construct a hypothetical prior from information
about the credences an agent assigns over time. Suppose Ava has drawn two
coins from a bin that contains only fair coins and coins biased toward heads.
Prior to time t1 she has inspected both coins and determined them to be fair.
Between f1 and t2 she flips the first coin, which comes up heads. Between t2
and t3, the second coin comes up tails.
Our language 23 will contain three atomic propositions: N, that neither coin
Ava picked is biased; Ha, that the first flip comes up heads; and Hb, that the
second flip is heads. Presumably the following probability table describes Ava’s
credences over time:
N Ha Hb crι cr2 cr3

T T T 1/4 1/2 0
T T F 1/4 1/2 1
τ F T 1/4 0 0
τ F F 1/4 0 0
F T T 0 0 0
F T F 0 0 0
F F T 0 0 0
F F F 0 0 0
In this example, Ava’s total evidence at t1 (or at least her total evidence
representable in language 23) is N. We’ll call this proposition El. Between tl
and t2, Ava learns Ha. So cr2 is cr1 conditionalized on Ha, and Ava’s total
evidence at t2 (which we’ll call E2) is N & Ha. After t2 Ava learns ~Hb, so cr3
is cr2 conditionalized on ~Hb, and E3 is N&Ha 8c ~Hb. Notice that since N is
part of Ava’s evidence at all times reflected in this table, she assigns credence 0
throughout the table to any state-description on which N is false.
Since Ava’s credence distributions cr1 through cr3 are probabilistic, and
update by Conditionalization, the Hypothetical Priors Theorem guarantees
the existence of at least one hypothetical prior PrH standing in a particular
relation to Ava’s credences. I’ve added a column to the probability table below
representing one such hypothetical prior:
N Ha Hb crι cr2 cr3 P⅛

τ T T 1/4 1/2 0 1/16
τ T F 1/4 1/2 1 1/16
τ F T 1/4 0 0 1/16
τ F F 1/4 0 0 1/16
F T T 0 0 0 21/64
F T F 0 0 0 11/64
F F T 0 0 0 11/64
F F F 0 0 0 5/64
As the Hypothetical Priors Theorem requires, P⅛ is a probability distribution

(the values in the P⅛ column are non-negative and sum to 1), and it’s regular
(no contingent proposition receives a 0). P⅛ stands in the desired relationship
to each of cr1, cr2, and cr3: each of those distributions can be obtained from
P⅛ by conditionalizing on Ava’s total evidence at the relevant time. To take one
example, consider cr2. E2 is N& Ha. To conditionalize P⅛ on N&. Ha, we write
a zero on each line whose state-description is inconsistent with N & Ha. That
puts zeroes on the third through eighth lines of the table. We then multiply the
P⅛ values on the first and second lines by a constant (in this case, 8) so that
the results sum to 1. This yields the cr2 distribution in the table. With a bit of
work you can verify that cr1 results from conditionalizing P⅛ on E1, and cr3
is the result of conditionalizing P⅛ on E3.
The hypothetical prior I wrote down isn’t unique. I could have written down
(infinitely) many other regular, probabilistic distributions that stand in the
required relation to cr1 through cr3. This reveals that the information in the
original table underdescribes Ava’s ultimate epistemic standards, even over our
fairly limited language £>. For instance, the original table doesn’t tell us what
credences Ava would’ve assigned had she learned before t1 that at least one of
the coins was biased. The P⅛ I’ve provided makes very specific assumptions
about Ava’s tendencies for that case. (For a fun exercise, figure out what that
P⅛ assumes about the biased coins in the bin.) But I could’ve made different
assumptions, and generated a different hypothetical prior consistent with cr1
through cr3.
Interestingly, those assumptions don’t matter much for practical purposes.
Suppose you’re working with the series of credence distributions an agent
assigned up to some designated time. Typically there will be multiple hypo
thetical priors consistent with that series of distributions. Those hypothetical
priors will differ on what attitudes the agent would have assigned had she
received different bodies of total evidence prior to the designated time. But
given the course of evidence the agent actually received and series of credence
distributions she actually assigned, every hypothetical prior consistent with
that series of distributions will make the same predictions about how she will
respond to particular pieces of evidence after the designated time. (Assuming
she continues to conditionalize.) For instance, every hypothetical prior con
sistent with Ava’s cr1 and cr2 distributions will predict the same response to
her learning ~Hb between t2 and t3. So which of the available hypothetical
priors we use to represent a particular agent’s epistemic standards turns out to
be irrelevant going forward.
On the other hand, when distinct agents have different hypothetical priors,
those differences can be important. Plugging an agents total evidence at a given
time into her hypothetical prior yields her credence distribution at that time.
When two agents have different hypothetical priors, plugging in the same body
of total evidence may yield different results. So two agents may assign different
credences to the same proposition in light of the same total evidence. The
difference in hypothetical priors is a Bayesian’s way of representing that these
agents interpret evidence differently, and so may draw different conclusions
from the same total body of information.
The obvious next question is whether they can both be rational in doing
so. Evidence and epistemic standards come up in a variety of contexts in
epistemology. As we’ve just seen, Bayesian epistemology provides an elegant
formal apparatus for separating out these two elements. But once we’ve isolated
them, the next question to ask about ultimate epistemic standards is whether
anything goes. Is any hypothetical prior rational, so long as it’s probabilistic?
Some probabilistic hypothetical priors will be anti-inductive, or will recom
mend highly skeptical attitudes in the face of everyday bodies of total evidence.
Can we rule out such hypothetical priors as rationally impermissible? Can we
go even farther than that, laying down enough rational constraints on ultimate
epistemic standards so that any time two agents interpret the same evidence
differently, at least one of them must be interpreting it irrationally? This will
be our first topic in Chapter 5, as we distinguish Objective from Subjective
Bayesianism.
4.4 Exercises
expression occurs or a proposition is conditionalized upon, the needed propo
sition has nonzero unconditional credence so that conditional credences are
well-defined.
Problem 4.1. Galileo intends to determine whether gravitational accelera

tion is affected by mass by dropping two cannonballs with differing masses
off the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Conditional on there being no effect, he is
95% confident that the cannonballs will land within 0.1 seconds of each other.
(The experiment isn’t perfect—one ball might hit a bird.) Conditional on mass
4∙4 EXERCISES 115
affecting acceleration, he is 80% confident that the balls wont land within
0.1 seconds of each other. (There’s some chance that although mass affects
acceleration, it doesn’t have much of an effect.)19
(a) Before performing the experiment, Galileo is 30% confident that mass
does not affect acceleration. How confident is he that the cannonballs
will land within 0.1 seconds of each other?
(b) After Galileo conditionalizes on the evidence that the cannonballs
landed within 0.1 seconds of each other, how confident is he in each
hypothesis?
Problem 4.2. Prove that conditionalizing retains certainties. In other

words, prove that if crz(Jf) = 1 and cr7∙ is generated from crz∙ by Condition
alization, then crz∙(H) = 1 as well.
Problem 4.3. Prove that conditionalization is cumulative. That is, prove

that for any crz∙, cry, and crfc, conditions 1 and 2 below entail condition 3.
1. For any proposition X in £, cry∙(X) = crz∙(X ∣ E).
2. For any proposition Tin £, cr⅛(Y) = cr7∙(Y∣ E').
3. For any proposition Z in £, crfc(Z) = crz∙(Z ∣ E & E').
Problem 4.4.
(a) Provide a real-life example in which an agent conditionalizes on new
evidence, yet her credence in a proposition compatible with the evidence
decreases. That is, provide an example in which H and E are consistent,
yet cr2(Ji) < cr1(H) when E is learned between t1 and t2.
(b) Prove that when an agent conditionalizes on new evidence, her cre
dence in a proposition that entails the evidence cannot decrease. That
is, when H 1= E, it must be the case that cr2(Jf) ≥ cr1(H) when E is
learned between tl and t2.
(c) Prove that as long as cr1 (H) and cr1 (E) are both nonextreme, condition
alizing on E increases the agent’s credence in H when H 1= E.2q
Problem 4.5. Reread the details of the Base Rate Fallacy example in
Section 4.1.2. After you apply the diagnostic test once and it yields a positive
result, your odds for D should be 9 : 999.
(a) Suppose you apply the test a second time to the same subject, and
it yields a positive result once more. What should your odds for the
subject’s having the disease be now? (Assume that D screens off the
results of the first test from the results of the second.)
(b) How many consecutive tests (each independent of all the prior test
results conditional on both D and ~D) would have to yield positive
results before your confidence that the subject has the disease exceeded
50%?
(c) Does this shed any light on why patients diagnosed with rare diseases
are often advised to seek a second opinion? Explain.
Problem 4.6. Your friend Jones is a gambler. He even gambles about whether
to gamble! Every time he goes to the track, he flips a fair coin to determine
whether to bet that day. If it comes up heads he bets on his favorite horse,
Speedy. If it comes up tails he doesn’t bet at all.
On your way to the track today, you were 1/6 confident that out of the six
horses running, Speedy would win. You were 1/2 confident that Jones’s coin
would come up heads. And you considered the outcome of the horse race
independent of the outcome of the coin flip. But then you saw Jones leaving
the track with a smile on his face. The smile tells you that either Jones bet on
Speedy and won, or Jones didn’t bet and Speedy didn’t win.21
(a) Using a language with the atomic propositions H (for heads on the
coin) and S (for a Speedy win), express the information you learn when
you see Jones smiling.
(b) After updating on this information by conditionalizing, how con
fident are you that Speedy won? How confident are you that the coin
came up heads?
(c) Explain why one of the unconditional credences you calculated
in part (b) differs from its prior value and the other one doesn’t. Be sure
to include an explanation of why that unconditional credence was the
one that changed out of the two. (“Because that’s what the math says” is
not an adequate explanation—we want to know why the mathematical
outcome makes sense.)
(d) Evaluate the following claim: “If an agent starts off viewing proposi
tion X as irrelevant to proposition Y, then learning that X and Yhave the
same truth-value shouldn’t change that agent’s credence in Y.” Explain
your answer.
Problem 4.7. At t1, t2, and t3, Jane assigns credences over the language
,£ constructed from atomic propositions P and Q. Jane’s distributions satisfy
constraints 1 through 6:
1. At t1, Jane is certain of QdP, anything that proposition entails, and
nothing else.
4.4 EXERCISES 117
2. Between tl and t2 Jane learns P and nothing else. She updates by condi-
tionalizing between those two times.
3. cr1(Q∣P) = 2∕3.
4. cr3(Q ∣ ~P) = 1/2.
5. cr3(P D Q) = cr2(P D Q).
6. At t3, Jane is certain of ~(P & Q), anything that proposition entails, and
nothing else.
(a) Completely specify Janes credence distributions at t2 and t3.

(b) Create a hypothetical prior for Jane. In other words, specify a regular
probabilistic distribution P⅛ over £ such that cr1 can be generated
from P⅛ by conditionalizing on Jane’s set of certainties at t1∙, cr2 is P⅛
conditionalized on Jane’s certainties at t2, and cr3 is Prfj conditionalized
on Jane’s t3 certainties.
(c) Does Jane update by Conditionalization between t2 and t3 ? Explain how
you know.
(d) The Hypothetical Priors Theorem says that if an agent always updates
by conditionalizing, then her credences can be represented by a hypo
thetical prior distribution. Is the converse of this theorem true?
Problem 4.8. frfy) In this exercise we’ll prove the Hypothetical Priors The
orem, by showing how to construct the needed PrH for any given series of
credences.
Start by supposing we have a finite series of credence distributions
{cr1,cr2, ... ,crn}, each of which satisfies the probability axioms and Ratio
Formula. Suppose also that each crz∙ is related to crz∙+1 as specified by
Conditionalization. Then, for each crz∙, define Ei as a proposition logically
equivalent to the conjunction of all the propositions receiving crz∙ values of I.22
(a) Let’s start by focusing only on cr1, the first credence distribution in
the series. Describe how, given cr1, to construct a regular probability
distribution P⅛ such that cr1 results from conditionalizing PrH on E1.
(It might help here to review the Ava example from page 11 Iff.)
(b) Now, using the cumulativity of conditionalization, explain why the fact
that cr1 results from conditionalizing P⅛ on El guarantees that for
every crz∙ in the series, cri(∙) = P⅛(∙ ∣ Ei).
Problem Suppose you have a finite partition {B1,B2, ...Bn} of

propositions from £. Suppose also that between tl and t2 you conditionalize
on evidence equivalent to a disjunction of some of the Bs. Prove that for any
A in £ and any Bi such that cr2(Bi) > 0,
cr2(A ∣ Bi) = cr1(A ∣ Bi)
Problem 4.10. 0 Do you think only one set of ultimate epistemic standards is
rationally permissible? Put another way: If two agents’ series of credence dis
tributions cannot be represented by the same hypothetical prior distribution,
must at least one of them have assigned irrational credences at some point?
4.5 Further reading
Ian Hacking (2001). An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Chapter 15 works through many excellent examples of applying Bayes’s Theo

rem to manage complex updates.
Classic Texts
Rudolf Carnap (1947). On the Application of Inductive Logic. Philosophy

and Phenomenological Research 8, pp. 133-48
Section 3 contains Carnap’s original discussion of the Principle of Total

Evidence.
Extended Discussion
Paul Teller (1973). Conditionalization and Observation. Synthese 26,

pp. 218-58
Offers a number of arguments for the Conditionalization updating norm. (In

Chapter 9 we’ll discuss the Dutch Book argument for Conditionalization that
Teller provides.)
Isaac Levi (1980). The Enterprise of Knowledge. Boston: The MIT Press
Though Levi’s notation and terminology are somewhat different from mine,
Chapter 4 thoroughly works through the mathematics of hypothetical priors.
NOTES 119
Levi also discusses various historically important Bayesians’ positions on how

many distinct hypothetical priors are rationally permissible.
Christopher J.G. Meacham (2016). Ur-Priors, Conditionalization, and Ur-

Prior Conditionalization. Ergo 3, pp. 444-92
Meacham considers a number of possible interpretations of hypothetical

priors, and how they might be linked to an agents credences at specific times
by Conditionalization.
Notes
1. Remember that 1 is not a prime number, while 2 is!

2. A bit of reflection on Equation (4.2) will reveal that the constant by which we multiply
in the second step of our process—the normalization factor—is always the reciprocal
of the agent’s initial unconditional credence in the evidence. In other words, the second
step divides all nonzero state-description credences by crz∙(E).
3. We can also now see an alternate explanation for steps (3.51) and (3.53) of Lewis’s trivi
ality proof from Section 3.3. The proposal assessed there is that for some conditional →,
the agent’s conditional credence cr(Z ∣ Y) for any Y and Z in £ equals her unconditional
credence in Y → Z. Whatever motivates that proposal, we should want the proposal to
remain true even after the agent learns some information X. If the relevant values are
going to match after conditionalization on X, it must be true before conditionalization
that cr(y → Z ∣ X) = cr(Z ∣ Y & X), which is just Equation (3.59).
4. Thanks to Joel Velasco for discussion, and for the example.
5. For reasons we are now in a position to understand, the term “posterior” is sometimes
used ambiguously in the Bayesian literature. I have defined “posterior” as an agent’s
conditional credence in the hypothesis given the evidence—cr(H∣E). If the agent
updates by conditionalizing on E, this will equal her unconditional credence in the
hypothesis after the update. The terms “prior” and “posterior” come from the fact that
on an orthodox Bayesian position, those quantities pick out the agent’s unconditional
credences in the hypothesis before and after the update. But unorthodox Bayesians who
prefer an alternative updating rule to Conditionalization nevertheless sometimes refer
to an agent’s post-update credence in a hypothesis as her “posterior”. As I’ve defined the
term, this is strictly speaking incorrect.
6. An acquaintance involved with neuroscientific research once claimed that when a
prisoner in the American penal system comes up for parole, a particular kind of brain
scan can predict with greater than 90% accuracy whether that prisoner will, if released,
be sent back to jail within a specified period of time. He suggested that we use this
brain scan in place of traditional parole board hearings, whose predictive accuracy is
much lower. To get at some of my ethical concerns with this proposal, I asked why we
don’t just apply the brain scan to everyone in America, rather than waiting to see if a
person winds up in jail. He replied that the base rates make this impractical: While the
recidivism rate among prisoners is fairly high, the percentage of Americans who wind
up in jail is much lower, so the scan would generate far too many false positives if used
on the general population.
7. In Section 2.2.31 mentioned that Bayesians often work with an agents set of doxastically
possible worlds instead of the full set of logically possible worlds, understanding “mutu
ally exclusive” and “tautology” in the Kolmogorov axioms in terms of this restricted
doxastic set. The Regularity Principle concerns thefull set of logically possible worlds—
it forbids assigning credence 0 to any proposition that is true in at least one of them.
So for the rest of this section, references to “contingent propositions”, “tautologies”, etc.
should be read against that full logical set of possibilities.
8. What most of us call the “Regularity Principle” Dennis Lindley dubbed “Cromwell’s
Rule”. He wrote, “A simple result that follows from Bayes’ theorem is that it is inadvisable
to attach probabilities of zero to uncertain events, for if the prior probability is zero so
is the posterior, whatever be the data.... In other words, if a decision-maker thinks
something cannot be true and interprets this to mean it has zero probability, he will
never be influenced by any data, which is surely absurd. So leave a little probability for
the moon being made of green cheese; it can be as small as 1 in a million, but have it
there since otherwise an army of astronauts returning with samples of the said cheese
will leave you unmoved.... As Oliver Cromwell told the Church of Scotland, T beseech
you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken’ ” (Lindley 1985,
p. 104, emphasis in original). (Thanks to Patrick Cronin for bringing this to my attention
and to Wikipedia for the reference.)
9. Throughout this section I identify credence 1 with absolute certainty in a proposition
and credence 0 with ruling that proposition out. This becomes more complicated when
we consider events with infinitely many possible outcomes; the relevant complications
will be addressed in Chapter 5.
10. Observation selection effects pop up all over the place in real life—perhaps you
think the refrigerator light is always on because it’s on whenever you open the door
to look. Here’s my favorite example: During World War II, the American military
showed mathematician Abraham Wald data indicating that planes returning from
dogfights had more bullet holes in the fuselage than in the engine. The military was
considering shifting armor from the engine to the fuselage. Wald recommended exactly
the opposite, on grounds that it was the returning planes that had holes in the fuselage
but not the engines (Wainer 2011, recounted in Ellenberg 2014, pp. 12-3).
11. A similar situation occurs in Bradley (2010): Colin Howson argued that a so-called
“Thomason case” provides a counterexample to Conditionalization. Bradley replies that
if we analyze the agent’s total evidence in the case—including evidence about how he
came to have his evidence—the supposed counterexample disappears.
12. You may have noticed that in the Monty Hall Problem, accounting for the agent’s total
relevant evidence required us to move from a coarser-grained partition of her doxastic
possibilities (Prize behind door A∕B∕C) to a finer-grained partition (Prize behind A &
Monty reveals B, Prize behind A 8< Monty reveals C, etc.). Whether a conditionalization
yields the right results often depends on the richness of the language in which the agent
represents her doxastic possibilities; a language without enough detail may miss aspects
NOTES 121
of her total relevant evidence. For more on selecting an appropriately detailed language
for updating, and some formal results on how one can know when one’s language is rich
enough, see Titelbaum (2013a, Ch. 8).
13. I learned of Lewis’s “superbaby” talk from Alan Hajek. Susan Vineberg suggested to me
that Lewis’s inspiration for the term may have been I. J. Good’s (1968) discussion of “an
infinitely intelligent newborn baby having built-in neural circuits enabling him to deal
with formal logic, English syntax, and subjective probability”—a discussion to which
we shall return in Chapter 6.
14. The earliest sustained usage I can find of the phrase “epistemic standards” occurs in
Foley (1987, p. 33ff.). While Foley may have coined the name, he wasn’t the first to
discuss the notion Γm calling “ultimate epistemic standards”—Levi (1980) has a similar
notion of “confirmational commitments”, and in Chapter 6 we’ll see Carnap proposing
a similar thing much earlier. Levi’s discussion is particularly important because it lays
out the mathematical formalism for epistemic standards Γm about to present.
While we’re discussing terminology: Given the choice, Γd prefer the term “evidential
standards” to “epistemic standards”, because the former emphasizes the standards’
taking evidence as their inputs, while the latter introduces an unwanted association with
knowledge. Yet the “epistemic standards” terminology is so entrenched at this point that
I’ve given up fighting against it. (Thanks to Laura Callahan for the pointer to Foley.)
15. Compare: When we speak admiringly of someone’s “high moral standards”, I don’t think
we’re necessarily attributing the possession of systematic moral principles. This way of
talking seems as compatible with virtue ethics as any other moral approach.
16. Catrin Campbell-Moore pointed out to me that the Hypothetical Priors Theorem
assumes that a contingent proposition receives credence 1 at ti only if it is entailed by Ei.
If this assumption fails, we will still be able find at least one hypothetical prior PrH for
the series of credence distributions, but no regular hypothetical prior will be available.
The assumption reflects the idea that the only thing that can justify certainty in
a contingent proposition is empirical evidence. It’s interesting to think about cases
in which this assumption might fail. It might be that particular propositions, despite
being logically contingent, nevertheless merit rational a priori certainty. Or another
way the assumption could fail is if credence 1 doesn’t always represent certainty. We’ll
see examples where this might occur in Section 5.4.
17. This is why defining hypothetical priors as regular does not commit us to the Regularity
Principle as a constraint on rational agents’ credences. We make hypothetical priors reg
ular so they will remain independent of contingent evidence, and therefore capable of
representing extra-evidential influences on an agent’s attitudes. But since hypothetical
priors aren’t credences, this doesn’t say anything about whether credences should be
regular or not. Moreover, the Hypothetical Priors Theorem applies only to agents who
update by Conditionalization, while Conditionalization conflicts with the Regularity
Principle.
18. In the Bayesian literature, the terms “initial prior”, “ur-prior”, and “hypothetical prior”
are often used interchangeably. To me, the former two connote that the prior was
assigned by the agent at some early time. So I’ve selected “hypothetical prior” to
emphasize the use of a mathematical representation that does not correspond to any
credences the agent ever actually assigned. Unfortunately, the term “hypothetical prior”
has also been used for a very specific notion within the literature on the Problem of Old
Evidence (as in Bartha and Hitchcock 1999, p. S349). Here I simply note the distinction
between that usage and the one I intend; 1*11 explain the alternate usage in Section 12.1.3.
19. This is a version of a problem from Julia Staffel.
20. This problem was inspired by a problem of Sarah Moss’s.
21. This story is adapted from Hart and Titelbaum (2015).
22. We define Ei this way for reasons discussed in note 16.
5
Further Rational Constraints
The previous three chapters have discussed five core normative Bayesian rules:
Kolmogorov’s three probability axioms, the Ratio Formula, and Condition-
alization. Bayesians offer these rules as necessary conditions for an agents
credences to be rational. We have not discussed whether these five rules are
jointly sufficient for rational credence.
Agents can satisfy the core rules and still have wildly divergent attitudes.
Suppose 1,000 balls have been drawn from an urn and every one of them
has been black. In light of this evidence, I might be highly confident that the
next ball drawn will be black. But I might also have a friend Mina, whose
credences satisfy all the rational constraints we have considered so far, yet who
nevertheless responds to the same evidence by being 99% confident that the
next ball will be white. Similarly, if you tell me you rolled a fair die but don’t
say how the roll came out, I might assign credence 1/6 that it came up six.
Mina, however, could be 5/6 confident of that proposition, without violating
the core Bayesian rules in any way.
If we think Mina’s credences in these examples are irrational, we need to
identify additional rational requirements beyond the Bayesian core that rule
them out. We have already seen one potential requirement that goes beyond
the core: the Regularity Principle (Section 4.2) prohibits assigning credence
0 to logically contingent propositions. What other requirements on rational
credence might there be? When all the requirements are put together, are they
strong enough to dictate a single rationally permissible credence distribution
for each possible body of total evidence?
The answer to this last question is sometimes taken to separate Subjec
tive from Objective Bayesians. Unfortunately, “Objective/Subjective Bayesian”
terminology is used ambiguously, so this chapter begins by clarifying two
different ways in which those terms are used. In the course of doing so
we’ll discuss various interpretations of probability, including frequency and
propensity views.
Then we will consider a number of additional rational credence constraints
proposed in the Bayesian literature. We’ll begin with synchronic constraints:
the Principal Principle (relating credences to chances); the Reflection Principle
124 FURTHER RATIONAL CONSTRAINTS
(concerning one’s current credences about one’s future credences); principles

for deferring to experts; indifference principles (for distributing credences
in the absence of evidence); and principles for distributing credences over
infinitely many possibilities. Finally, we will turn to Jeffrey Conditionalization,
a diachronic updating principle proposed as a generalization of standard
Conditionalization.
Most of these constraints are usually offered as supplements to the five core
Bayesian rules we’ve seen already. You may not have noticed, but in discussing
Conditionalization and drawing out its consequences, we assumed throughout
that the updating agents satisfied the probability axioms and Ratio Formula.
Similarly, most of the principles we will discuss in this chapter build upon
the five core rules, and only have their intended effects if those five rules are
assumed in the background. Jeffrey Conditionalization, on the other hand,
is sometimes proposed as a substitute for Conditionalization—though it still
assumes the other four, synchronic core rules.
5.1 Subjective and Objective Bayesianism
When a weather forecaster comes on television and says, “The probability

of snow tomorrow is 30%,” what does that mean? What exactly has this
forecaster communicated to her audience? Such questions have been asked
throughout the history of mathematical probability theory; in the twentieth
century, rival answers became known as intepretations of probability. There
is an excellent literature devoted to this topic and its history (see the Further
Reading of this chapter for recommendations), so I don’t intend to let it
take over this book. But for our purposes it’s important to touch on some of
the main interpretations, and at least mention some of their advantages and
disadvantages.
5.1.1 Frequencies and propensities
The earliest European practitioners of mathematical probability theory applied

what we now call the classical interpretation of probability. This interpre
tation, championed most famously by Pierre-Simon Laplace, calculates the
probability of a proposition by counting up the number of possible event
outcomes consistent with that proposition, then dividing by the total number
of outcomes possible. For example, if I roll a six-sided die, there are six possible
5.1 SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE BAYESIANISM 125
outcomes, and three of them are consistent with the proposition that the
die came up even. So the classical probability of even is 1/2. (This is almost
certainly the kind of probability you first encountered in school.)
Laplace advocated this procedure for any situation in which “nothing leads
us to believe that one of [the outcomes] will happen rather than the others”
(Laplace 1814/1995, p. 3). Applying what Jacob Bernoulli (1713) had earlier
called the “principle of insufficient reason”, Laplace declared that in such
cases we should view the outcomes as “equally possible”, and calculate the
probabilities as described above.
The notion of “equally possible” at the crux of this approach clearly needs
more philosophical elucidation. But even setting that aside, the classical inter
pretation leaves us adrift the moment someone learns to shave a die. With the
shape of the die changed, our interpretation of probability needs to allow the
possibility that some faces are more probable than others. For instance, it might
now be 20% probable that you will roll a six. While Laplace recognized and
discussed such cases, it’s unclear hθw his view can interpret the probabilities
involved. There are no longer possible outcomes of the roll that can be tallied
up and put into a ratio equaling 20%.
So suppose a shady confederate offers to sell you a shaved die with “a
20% probability of landing six”. How might she explain—or back up—that
probability claim? Well, if an event has a 20% probability of producing a certain
outcome, we expect that were the event repeated it would produce that type
of outcome roughly 20% of the time. The frequency theory of probability
uses this fact to analyze “probability” talk. On this interpretation, when your
confederate claims the die has a 20% probability of landing six on a given roll,
she means that repeated rolls of the die will produce a six about 20% of the time.
According to the frequency theory, the probability is x that event A will have
outcome B just in case proportion x of events like A have outcomes like B.1 The
frequency theory originated in work by Robert Leslie Ellis (1849) and John
Venn (1866), then was famously developed by the logical positivist Richard
von Mises (1928/1957).
The frequency theory has a number of problems; I will mention only a few.2
Suppose my sixteen-year-old daughter asks for the keys to my car; I wonder
what the probability is that she will get into an accident should I give her the
keys. According to the frequency theory, the probability that the event of my
giving her the keys will have the outcome of an accident is determined by how
frequently this type of event leads to accidents. But what type of event is it? Is
the frequency in question how often people who go driving get into accidents?
How often sixteen-year-olds get into accidents? How often sixteen-year-olds
with the courage to ask their fathers for the keys get into accidents? How often
my daughter gets into accidents? Presumably these frequencies will differ—
which one is the probability of an accident should I give my daughter the keys
right now?
Any event can be subsumed under many types, and the frequency theory
leaves it unclear which event-types determine probability values. Event types
are sometimes known as reference classes, so this is the reference class
problem. In response, one might suggest that outcomes have frequencies—and
therefore probabilities—only relative to the specification of a particular refer
ence class (either implicitly or explicitly). But it seems we can meaningfully
inquire about the probabilities of particular event outcomes (or of propositions
simpliciter) without specifying a reference class. I need to decide whether to
give the keys to my daughter; I want to know how probable it is that she will
crash. That probability doesn’t seem relative to any particular reference class.
Or if it is (covertly) relative to some reference class, which reference class does
the job?
Frequency information about specific event-types seems more relevant to
determining probabilities than information about general types. (The prob
ability that my daughter will get into an accident on this occasion seems
much closer to her frequency of accidents than to the accident frequency of
drivers in general.) Perhaps probabilities are frequencies in the maximally
specific reference class? But the maximally specific reference class containing a
particular event contains only that individual event. The frequency with which
my daughter gets into an accident when I give her my keys on this occasion is
either 0 or 1 —but we often think probabilities for such events have nonextreme
values.
This brings us to another problem for frequency theories. Suppose I have a
penny, and think that if I flip it, the probability that the flip will come out heads
is 1/2. Let’s just grant arguendo that the correct reference class for this event
is penny flips. According to the frequency theory, the probability that this flip
will come up heads is the fraction of all penny flips that ever occur which come
up heads. Yet while Γdbe willing to bet that fraction is close to 1/2, Γdbe willing
to bet even more that the fraction is not exactly 1/2. (For one thing, the number
of penny flips that will ever occur in the history of the universe might be an
odd number!) For any finite run of trials of a particular event-type, it seems
perfectly coherent to imagine—indeed, to expect—that a particular outcome
will occur with a frequency not precisely equal to that outcome’s probability.
Yet if the frequency theory is correct, this is conceptually impossible when the
run in question encompasses every event trial that will ever occur.
5.1 SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE BAYESIANISM 127
One might respond that the probability of heads on the flip of a penny is
not the frequency with which penny flips actually come up heads over the finite
history of our universe; instead, it’s the frequency in the limit—were pennies to
continue being flipped forever. This gives us hypothetical frequency theory,
on which the probability of an outcome is the frequency it would approach
were the event repeated indefinitely. Yet this move undermines one of the
original appeals of the frequency approach: its empiricism. The proportion
of event repetitions that produce a particular outcome in the actual world is
the sort of thing that could be observed (at least in principle)—providing a
sound empirical base for otherwise-mysterious “probability” talk. Empirically
grounding hypothetical frequencies is a much more difficult task.
Moreover, there seem to be events that couldn’t possibly be repeated many
many times, and even events that couldn’t be repeated once. Before the Large
Hadron Collider was switched on, physicists were asked for the probability that
doing so would destroy the Earth. Were that to have happened, switching on
the Large Hadron Collider would not have been a repeatable event. Scientists
also sometimes discuss the probability that our universe began with a Big
Bang; arguably, that’s not an event that will happen over and over or even
could happen over and over. So it’s difficult to understand talk about how
frequently the universe would begin with a Bang were the number of times
the universe started increased toward the limit. This problem of assigning
meaningful nonextreme probabilities to individual, perhaps non-repeatable
events is called the problem of the single case.
The frequentist still has moves available. Faced with a single event that’s non
repeatable in the actual world, she might ask what proportion of times that
event produces a particular outcome across other possible worlds.3 But now
the prospects for analyzing “probability” talk in empirically observable terms
have grown fairly dim.
An alternate interpretation of probability admits that probabilities are
related to frequencies, but draws our attention to the features that cause
particular outcomes to appear with the frequencies that they do. What is
it about a penny that makes it come up heads about half the time? Presumably
something about its physical attributes, the symmetries with which it interacts
with surrounding air as it flips, etc. These traits lend the penny a certain
tendency to come up heads, and an equal tendency to come up tails. This
quantifiable disposition—or propensity—would generate certain frequencies
were a long run of trials to be staged. But the propensity is also at work in each
individual flip, whether that flip is ever repeated or could ever be repeated.
A non-repeatable experimental setup may possess a nonextreme propensity

to generate a particular outcome.
While an early propensity theory appeared in the work of Charles Sanders
Peirce (1910/1932), propensity’s most famous champion was Karl Popper
(1957). Popper was especially motivated by developments in quantum
mechanics. In quantum theory the Born rule calculates probabilities of
experimental outcomes from a particular quantity (the amplitude of the wave
function) with independent significance in the theory’s dynamics. Moreover,
this quantity can be determined for a particular experimental setup even if
that setup is never to be repeated (or couldn't be repeated) again. This gives
propensities a respectable place within an empirically established scientific
theory. Propensities may also figure in such theories as statistical mechanics
and population genetics.
Yet even if there are propensities in the world, it seems difficult to interpret
all probabilities as propensities. Suppose we’re discussing the likelihood that
a particular outcome occurs given that a quantum experiment is set up in
a particular fashion. This is a conditional probability, and it has a natu
ral interpretation in terms of physical propensities: the experimental setup
described in the condition of the conditional probability has a particular causal
tendency to produce the outcome. But where there is a likelihood, probability
mathematics suggests there will also be a posterior—if there’s a probability
of outcome given setup, there should also be a probability of setup given
outcome. Yet the latter hardly makes sense as a physical propensity—does
an experimental outcome have a quantifiable causal tendency to produce the
particular experimental setup from which it results?4
Some philosophers—especially those of a Humean bent—are also suspi
cious of the metaphysics of propensities. From their point of view, causes
are objectionable enough; even worse to admit propensities that seem to be
a kind of graded causation. Nowadays most philosophers of science agree
that we need some notion of physical probability that applies to the single
case. Call this notion objective chance. But whether objective chances are best
understood via propensity theory, a “best systems” analysis (Lewis 1994), or
some other approach is a hotly contested matter.
Finally, whatever objective chances turn out to be, they are governed by the
physical laws of our world. That means there can be no objective chance that
the physical laws are one way or another. (What set of laws beyond the physical
might determine such chances?) Yet it seems physicists can meaningfully
discuss the probability that the physical laws of the universe will turn out to be
5∙1 SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE BAYESIANISM 129
such-and-such. While the notion of objective chance makes sense of some of

our “probability” talk, it nevertheless seems to leave a remainder.
5.1.2 Two distinctions in Bayesianism
So what are physicists talking about when they discuss the probability that the
physical laws of the universe are one way rather than another? Perhaps they
are expressing their degrees of confidence in alternative physical hypotheses.
Perhaps there are no probabilities out in the world, independent of us, about
which our opinions change as we gain evidence. Instead, it may be that
facts in the world are simply true or false, probability-free, and “probability”
talk records our changing confidences in those facts in the face of changing
evidence.
Bayesian theories are often characterized as “Subjective” or “Objective”, but
this terminology can be used to draw two different distinctions. One of them
concerns the interpretation of “probability” talk. On this distinction—which
I’ll call the semantic distinction—Subjective Bayesians adopt the position
I proposed in the previous paragraph. For them, “probability” talk expresses
or reports the degrees of confidence of the individuals doing the talking,
or perhaps of communities to which they belong. Objective Bayesians, on
the other hand, interpret “probability” assertions as having truth-conditions
independent of the attitudes of particular agents or groups of agents.5 In
the twentieth century, talk of “Objective” and “Subjective” Bayesianism was
usually used to draw this semantic distinction.6
More recently the “Subjective Bayesian/Objective Bayesian” terminology
has been used to draw a different distinction, which I will call the normative
distinction. However we interpret the meaning of “probability” talk, we can
grant that agents assign different degrees of confidence to different proposi
tions (or, more weakly, that it is at least useful to model agents as if they do).
Once we grant that credences exist and are subject to rational constraints, we
may inquire about the strength of those constraints.
On one end of the spectrum, Objective Bayesians (in the normative
sense) endorse what Richard Feldman (2007) and Roger White (2005) have
called the
Uniqueness Thesis: Given any proposition and body of total evidence, there
is exactly one attitude it is rationally permissible for agents with that
body of total evidence to adopt toward that proposition.
Assuming the attitudes in question are degrees of belief, the Uniqueness Thesis
says that given any evidential situation, there’s exactly one credence that any
agent is rationally permitted to adopt toward a given proposition in that
situation. The Uniqueness Thesis entails evidentialism, according to which
the attitudes rationally permissible for an agent supervene on her evidence.
Suppose we have two agents with identical total evidence who adopt dif
ferent credences toward some propositions. Because Objective Bayesians (in
the normative sense) endorse the Uniqueness Thesis, they will maintain that
at least one of these agents is responding to her evidence irrationally. In most
real-life situations, different agents have different bodies of total evidence—
and even different bodies of relevant evidence—so many discrepancies in their
attitudes can be chalked up to evidential differences. But we have stipulated
in this case that the agents have identical evidence, so whatever causes the
differences in their attitudes, it can’t be the contents of their evidence. In
Section 4.3 we identified the extra-evidential factors that determine an agent’s
attitudes in light of her total evidence as her “ultimate epistemic standards”.
These epistemic standards might reflect pragmatic influences, a predilection
for hypotheses with certain features, a tendency toward mistrust or skepti
cism, etc.
The Hypothetical Priors Theorem tells us that whenever an agent’s credence
distributions over time satisfy the probability axioms, Ratio Formula, and
Conditionalization, her epistemic standards can be represented by a hypothet
ical prior distribution. This regular, probabilistic distribution stays constant
as the agent gains evidence over time. Yet we can always recover the agent’s
credence distribution at a given time by conditionalizing her hypothetical
prior on her total evidence at that time.
The core Bayesian rules (probability axioms, Ratio Formula, Conditional
ization) leave a wide variety of hypothetical priors available. Assuming they
satisfy the core rules, our two agents who assign different credences in response
to the same total evidence must have different hypothetical priors. According
to the Objective Bayesian (in the normative sense), any time such a situation
arises at least one of the agents must be violating rational requirements. Thus
the Objective Bayesian thinks there is exactly one set of rationally permissible
hypothetical priors—one set of correct epistemic standards embodying ratio
nal agents’ common responses to evidence.
How might the unique rational hypothetical prior be generated, and how
might we justify the claim that it is uniquely correct? Our ongoing epis
temic standards for responding to new pieces of empirical evidence are often
informed by other pieces of evidence we gained in the past. I react to a fire
5∙1 SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE BAYESIANISM 131
alarm in a particular way because I’ve experienced such alarms before; one
piece of evidence helps determine how we interpret the next. But ultimate
epistemic standards—the ones represented by our hypothetical priors—dictate
responses to our total evidence, and so must be rationally antecedent to all of
our evidence. If we are to select and justify a unique set of ultimate epistemic
standards, we must do so a priori.
Extending a tradition that dated back to Bolzano (1837/1973) and perhaps
even Leibniz,7 Keynes (1921) and Carnap (1950) argued that just as there are
objective facts about which propositions are logically entailed by a given body
of evidence, there are objective logical facts about the degree to which a body
of evidence probabilities a particular proposition. Carnap went on to offer a
mathematical algorithm for calculating the unique logical hypothetical priors
from which these facts could be determined; we will discuss that algorithm
in Chapter 6. (The logical interpretation of probability holds that an agents
“probability” talk concerns logical probabilities relative to her current total
evidence.)8 Many recent theorists, while backing away from Keynes’s and
Carnap’s position that these values are logical, nevertheless embrace the idea
of evidential probabilities reflecting the degree to which a proposition is
probabilified by a given body of evidence. If you think that rationality requires
an agent to assign credences equal to the unique, true evidential probabilities
on her current total evidence, you have an Objective Bayesian view in the
normative sense.9
At the other end of the spectrum from Objective Bayesians (in the normative
sense) are theorists who hold that the probability axioms and Ratio Formula
are the only rational constraints on hypothetical priors.10 The literature often
defines “Subjective Bayesians” as people who hold this view. But that terminol
ogy leaves no way to describe theorists in the middle of the spectrum—the vast
majority of Bayesian epistemologists who believe in rational constraints on
hypothetical priors that go beyond the core rules but are insufficient to narrow
things down to a single permissible standard. I will use the term “Subjective
Bayesian” (in the normative sense) to refer to anyone who thinks more than
one hypothetical prior is rationally permissible. I will call people who think
the Ratio Formula and probability axioms are the only rational constraints on
hypothetical priors “extreme Subjective Bayesians”.
Subjective Bayesians allow for what White calls permissive cases: situations
in which two agents reach different conclusions on the basis of the same total
evidence without either party’s making a rational mistake. This is because each
agent interprets the evidence according to different (yet rationally acceptable)
epistemic standards, which allow them to draw different conclusions.
I have distinguished the semantic and normative Objective/Subjective

Bayesian distinctions because they can cross-cut one another. Historically,
Ramsey (1931) and de Finetti (1931/1989) reacted to Keynes’s Objective
Bayesianism with groundbreaking theories that were Subjective in both the
semantic and normative senses. But one could be a Subjective Bayesian in
the semantic sense—taking agents’ “probability” talk to express their own
current credences—while maintaining that strictly speaking only one credence
distribution is rationally permitted in each situation (thereby adhering to
Objective Bayesianism in the normative sense). Going in the other direction,
one could admit the existence of degrees of belief while holding that they’re
not what “probability” talk concerns. This would give an Objective Bayesian
semantic view that combined with either Subjective or Objective Bayesianism
in the normative sense. Finally, probability semantics need not be monolithic;
many Bayesians now hold that some “probability” assertions in everyday life
express credences, others report objective chances, and still others indicate
what would be reasonable to believe given one’s evidence.11
Regardless of her position on the semantics, any Bayesian who isn’t an
extreme Subjective Bayesian in the normative sense will concede that there
are rational constraints on agents’ hypothetical priors beyond the probability
axioms and Ratio Formula. The rest of this chapter investigates what some of
those additional constraints might be. I should note at the outset, though, that
the more powerful and widely applicable these constraints get, the more they
seem to be beset by problems. Many Subjective Bayesians (in the normative
sense) would be happy to adopt an Objective position, if only they could
see past the numerous shortcomings of the principles Objective Bayesians
propose to generate unique hypothetical priors. Richard Jeffrey characterized
his Subjective Bayesian position as follows:
As a practical matter, I think one can give necessary conditions for rea
sonableness of a set of partial beliefs that go beyond mere [probabilistic]
coherence—in special cases. The result is a patch-work quilt, where the
patches have frayed edges, and there are large gaps where we lack patches
altogether. It is not the sort of seamless garment philosophers like to wear;
but (we ragged pragmatists say), the philosophers are naked! Indeed we have
no proof that no more elegant garb than our rags is available, or ever will
be, but we haven’t seen any, yet, as far as we know. We will be the first to
snatch it off the racks, when the shipments come in. But perhaps they never
will. Anyway, for the time being, we are dressed in rags, tied neatly at the
waist with a beautiful cord—probabilistic coherence. (It is the only cord that
visibly distinguishes us from the benighted masses.) (1970, p. 169)
5∙2 DEFERENCE PRINCIPLES 133
5.2 Deference principles
5.2.1 The Principal Principle
Bayesian epistemology concerns agents’ degrees of belief. Yet most contem

porary Bayesian epistemologists also believe that the world contains objective
chances of some sort—physical probabilities that particular events will pro
duce particular outcomes. This raises the question of how subjective credences
and objective chances should relate. One obvious response is a principle of
direct inference: roughly, rational agents set their credences in line with what
they know of the chances. If you’re certain a die is fair (has an equal objective
chance of landing on each of its faces), you should assign equal credence to
each possible roll outcome.
While direct inference principles have a long history, the most famous
such principle relating credence and chance is David Lewis’s (1980) Principal
Principle. The Principal Principle’s most straightforward consequence is that
if you are certain an event has objective chance x of producing a particular
outcome, and you have no other information about that event, then your
credence that the outcome will occur should be x. For many Bayesian purposes
this is all one needs to know about the Principal Principle. But in fact the
Principle is a more finely honed instrument, because Lewis wanted it to deal
with complications like the following: (1) What if you’re uncertain about the
objective chance of the outcome? (2) What if the outcome’s chance changes
over time? (3) What if you have additional information about the event besides
what you know of the chances? The rest of this section explains how the
Principal Principle deals with those eventualities. If you’re not interested in
the details, feel free to skip to Section 5.2.2.
So: Suppose it is now 1 p.m. on a Monday. I tell you that over the weekend
I found a coin from a foreign country that is somewhat irregular in shape.
Despite being foreign, one side of the coin is clearly the “Heads” side and the
other is “Tails”. I also tell you that I flipped the foreign coin today at noon.
Let Hbe the proposition that the noon coin flip landed heads. Consider each
of the propositions below one at a time, and decide what your credence in H
would be if that proposition was all you knew about the coin in addition to the
information in the previous paragraph:
E1∙. After discovering the coin I spent a good part of my weekend

flipping it, and out of my 100 weekend flips sixty-four came up
heads.
E2,. The coin was produced in a factory that advertises its coins as fair,
but also has a side business generating black-market coins biased
toward tails.
E3: The coin is fair (has a 1/2 chance of landing heads).
⅛ Your friend Amir was with me at noon when I flipped the coin, and
he told you it came up heads.
Hopefully it’s fairly clear how to respond to each of these pieces of evidence,
taken singly. For instance, in light of the frequency information in E1, it seems
rational to have a credence in H somewhere around 0.64. We might debate
whether precisely 0.64 is required,12 but certainly a credence in H of 0.01
(assuming E1 is your only evidence about the coin) seems unreasonable.
This point generalizes to a rational principle that whenever one’s evidence
includes the frequency with which events of type A have produced outcomes
of type B, one should set one’s credence that the next A-event will produce a
B-outcome equal to (or at least in the vicinity of) that frequency.13 While some
version of this principle ought to be right, working out the specifics creates
problems like those faced by the frequency interpretation of probability. For
instance, we have a reference class problem: Suppose my evidence includes
accident frequency data for drivers in general, for sixteen-year-old drivers
in general, and for my sixteen-year-old daughter in particular. Which value
should I use to set my credence that my daughter will get in a car accident
tonight? The more specific data seems more relevant, but the more general
data reflects a larger sample.14
There are statistical tools available for dealing with these problems, some
of which we will discuss in Chapter 13. But for now let’s focus on a different
question about frequency data: Why do we use known flip outcomes to predict
the outcome of unobserved flips? Perhaps because known outcomes indicate
something about the physical properties of the coin itself; they help us figure
out its objective chance of coming up heads. Known flip data influence our
unknown flip predictions because they make us think our coin has a particular
chance profile. In this case, frequency data influences predictions by way of our
opinions about objective chances.
This relationship between frequency and chance is revealed when we com
bine pieces of evidence listed above. We’ve already said that if your only
evidence about the coin is E1—it came up heads on sixty-four of 100 known
tosses—then your credence that the noon toss (of uncertain outcome) came
up heads should be around 0.64. On the other hand, if your only evidence is
E3, that the coin is fair, then I hope it’s plausible that your credence in H should
5.2 DEFERENCE PRINCIPLES 135
be 0.5. But what if you’re already certain of E3, and then learn E1l In that case
your credence in heads should still be 0.5.
Keep in mind were imagining you’re certain that the coin is fair before you
learn the frequency data; we’re not concerning ourselves with the possibility
that, say, learning about the frequencies makes you suspicious of the source
from which you learned that the coin is fair. If it’s a fixed, unquestionable
truth for you that the coin is fair, then learning that it came up sixty-four
heads on 100 flips will not change your credence in heads. If all you had
was the frequency information, that would support a different hypothesis
about the chances. But it’s not as if sixty-four heads on 100 flips is inconsistent
with the coin’s being fair—a fair coin usually won’t come up heads on exactly
half the flips in a given sample. So once you’re already certain of heads, the
frequency information becomes redundant, irrelevant to your opinions about
unknown flips. Frequencies help you learn about chances, so if you are already
certain of the chances there’s nothing more for frequency information to do.
David Lewis called information that can change your credences about
an event only by way of changing your opinions about its chances
admissible information. His main insight about admissible information was
that when the chance values for an event have already been established, admis
sible information becomes irrelevant to a rational agent’s opinions about the
outcome.
Here’s another example: Suppose your only evidence about the noon flip
outcome is E2, that the coin was produced in a factory that advertises its coins
as fair but has a side business in tails-biased coins. Given only this information
your credence in H should be somewhere below 0.5. (Exactly how far below
depends on how extensive you estimate the side business to be.) On the other
hand, suppose you learn E2 after already learning El3, that this particular coin is
fair. In that context, E2 becomes irrelevant, at least with respect to predicting
flips of this coin. E2 is relevant in isolation because it informs you about the
chances associated with the coin. But once you’re certain that the coin is fair,
information E2 only teaches you that you happened to get lucky not to have
a black-market coin; it doesn’t do anything to push your credence in H away
from 0.5. E2 is admissible information.
Contrast that with E4, your friend Amir’s report that he observed the flip
landing heads. Assuming you trust Amir, E4 should make you highly confident
in H. And this should be true even if you already possess information E3
that the coin is fair. Notice that E3 and E4 are consistent; the coin’s being
fair is consistent with its having landed heads on this particular flip, and
with Amir’s reporting that outcome. But E4 trumps the chance information; it
moves your credence in heads away from where it would be (0.5) if you knew
only E3. Information about this particular flip’s outcome does not change your
credences about the flip by way of influencing your opinions about the chances.
You still think the coin is fair, and was fair at the time it was flipped. You just
know now that the fair coin happened to corhe up heads on this occasion.
Information about this flip’s outcome is inadmissible with respect to H.
Lewis expressed his insight about the irrelevance of admissible information
in his famous chance-credence principle, the
Principal Principle: Let P⅛ be any reasonable initial credence function.

Let ti be any time. Let x be any real number in the unit interval.
Let Ch; (A) = x be the proposition that the chance, at time ti, of
As holding equals x. Let E be any proposition compatible with
Chz∙(A) = x that is admissible at time ti. Then
P⅛(A ∣ Chz∙(A) = x & E) = x
(I have copied this principle verbatim from Lewis 1980, p. 266, though I have
altered Lewis’s notation to match our own.) There’s a lot to unpack in the
Principal Principle, so we’ll take it one step at a time. First, Lewis’s “reasonable
initial credence function” sounds a lot like an initial prior distribution. Yet
we saw in Section 4.3 that the notion of an initial prior is problematic, and
there are passages in Lewis that make it sound more like he’s talking about
a hypothetical prior.15 So I will interpret the “reasonable initial credence
function” as your hypothetical prior distribution, and designate it with our
notation “PrH”.
The Principal Principle is proposed as a rational constraint on hypothetical
priors, one that goes beyond the probability axioms and Ratio Formula. Why
frame the Principal Principle around hypothetical priors, instead of focusing
on the credences of rational agents at particular times? One advantage of
the hypothetical-priors approach is that it makes the total evidence at work
explicit, and therefore easy to reference in the principle. Recall from Section
4.3 that a hypothetical prior is a probabilistic, regular distribution containing
no contingent evidence. A rational agent is associated with a particular hypo
thetical prior, in the sense that if you conditionalize that hypothetical prior
on the agent’s total evidence at any given time, you get the agent’s credence
distribution at that time.
In the Principal Principle we imagine that a real-life agent is consid
ering some proposition A about the outcome of a chance event. She has
chance of heads (Ch(H))
known flip unknown flip

frequencies outcome (Ji)
Figure 5.1 Chances screen off frequencies
some information about the chance of A, Chz∙(A) = x, and then some further
evidence E. So her total evidence is Chz(A) = x& E, and by the definition of
a hypothetical prior her credence in A equals P⅛(A ∣ Chf(A) = x&E). Lewis
claims that as long as E is both admissible for A, and is compatible (which we
can take to mean “logically consistent”) with Chf(A) = x, E should make no
difference to the agents credence in A. In other words, as long as E is admissible
and compatible, the agent should be just as confident in A as she would be if
all she knew were Chi∙(A) = x. That is, her credence in A should be x.
Return to our example about the noon coin flip, and the relationship
between chance and frequency information. Suppose that at 1 p.m. your
total evidence about the flip outcome consists of El and E3. E3, the chance
information, says that Ch(H) = 0.5. E1, the frequency information, comprises
the rest of your total evidence, which will play the role of E in the Principal
Principle. Because this additional evidence is both consistent with Ch(H) = 0.5
and admissible for H, the Principal Principle says your 1 p.m. credence in H
should be 0.5. Which is exactly the result we came to before.
We can gain further insight into this result by connecting it to our earlier
(Section 3.2.4) discussion of causation and screening off. Figure 5.1 illustrates
the causal relationships in the coin example between chances, frequencies, and
unknown results. The coin’s physical structure, associated with its objective
chances, causally influenced the frequency with which it came up heads in
the previous trials. The coins physical makeup also affects the outcome of
the unknown flip. Thus previous frequency information is relevant to the
unknown flip, but only by way of the chances.16 We saw in Section 3.2.4
that when this kind of causal fork structure obtains, the common cause
screens its effects off from each other.17 Conditional on the chances, frequency
information becomes irrelevant to flip predictions. That is,
P⅛(H∣ Ch(H) = 0.5 &£) = P⅛(H∣ Ch(H) = 0.5) (5.1)
and intuitively the expression on the right should equal 0.5.

A similar analysis applies if your total evidence about the coin flip contains
only Ch(H) = 0.5 and E2, the evidence about the coin factory. This time
coin factory details
chance of heads (Ch(H))
unknown flip outcome (H)
Figure 5.2 Chance in a causal chain
our structure is a causal chain, as depicted in Figure 5.2. The situation in

the coin factory causally affects the chance profile of the coin, which in turn
causally affects the unknown flip outcome. Thus the coin factory information
affects opinions about Hby way of the chances, and if the chances are already
determined then factory information becomes irrelevant. Letting the factory
information play the role of E in the Principal Principle, the chances screen off
E from H and we have the relation in Equation (5.1).
Finally, information E4, your friend Amir’s report, is not admissible infor
mation about H. E4 affects your opinions about H, but not by way of affecting
your opinions about the chances. The Principal Principle applies only when E,
the information possessed in addition to the chances, is admissible. Since E4 is
inadmissible, the Principal Principle supplies no guidance about setting your
credences in light of it.
There are still a few details in the principle to unpack. For instance, the
chance expression Chz∙(A) is indexed to a time ti. That’s because the chance
that a particular proposition will obtain can change as time goes on. For
instance, suppose that at 11am our foreign coin was fair, but at 11:30 I stuck
a particularly large, non-aerodynamic wad of chewing gum to one of its sides.
In that case, the proposition H that the coin comes up heads at noon would
have a chance of 0.5 at 1 lam but might have a different chance after 11:30. The
physical details of an experimental setup determine its chances, so as physical
conditions change chances may change as well.18
Finally, the Principal Principle’s formulation in terms of conditional cre
dences allows us to apply it even when an agent doesn’t have full information
about the chances. Suppose your total evidence about the outcome A of some
chance event is E. E influences your credences in A by way of informing you
about As chances (so E is admissible), but E does not tell you what the chances
are exactly. Instead, E tells you that the chance of A (at some specific time,
which I’ll suppress for the duration of this example) is either 0.7 or 0.4. E also
supplies you with a favorite among these two chance hypotheses: it sets your
credence that 0.7 is the true chance at 2/3, and your credence that 0.4 is the
true chance at 1/3.
5∙2 DEFERENCE PRINCIPLES 139
How can we analyze this situation using the Principal Principle? Since your
total evidence is E, the definition of a hypothetical prior distribution tells us
that your current credences cr should be related to your hypothetical prior P⅛
as follows:
cr(A) = P⅛(A∣E) (5.2)
This value is not dictated directly by the Principal Principle. However, the
Principal Principle does set
P⅛(A I Ch(A) = 0.7 8cE~) = 0.7 (5.3)
because we stipulated that E is admissible. Similarly, the Principal Principle

sets
P⅛(A ∣ Ch(A) = 0.4 8cE) = 0.4 (5.4)
Since E narrows the possibilities down to two mutually exclusive chance

hypotheses, those hypotheses (Ch(A) = 0.7andCh(A) = 0.4) form a partition
relative to E. Thus we can apply the Law of Total Probability (in its conditional
credence form)19 to obtain
P⅛(A ∣ E) = P⅛(A ∣ Ch(A) = 0.7 & E) ∙ P⅛(Ch(A) = 0.71E) +

P⅛(A ∣ Ch(A) = 0.4 & E~) ■ P⅛(Ch(A) = 0.41E)
By Equations (5.3) and (5.4), this is
P⅛(A ∣ E) = 0.7 ∙ P⅛(Ch(A) = 0.7 ∣ E) + 0.4 ∙ P⅛(Ch(A) = 0.41E) (5.6)
AsEquation (5.2) suggested, P⅛(∙ ∣ E) is just cr(∙). So this last equation

becomes
cr(A) = 0.7 ∙ cr(Ch(A) = 0.7) + 0.4 ∙ cr(Ch(A) = 0.4) (5.7)
Finally, we fill in the values stipulated in the problem to conclude
cr(A) = 0.7 ∙ 2/3 + 0.4 ∙ 1/3 = 0.6 (5.8)
That’s a lot of calculation, but the overall lesson comes to this: When your total
evidence is admissible and restricts you to a finite set of chance values for A,
the Principal Principle sets your credence in A equal to a weighted average of
those chance values (where each chance value is weighted by your credence
that it’s the true chance).
This is an extremely useful conclusion, provided we can discern what kinds
of evidence are admissible. Lewis writes that, “Admissible propositions are the
sort of information whose impact on credence about outcomes comes entirely
by way of credence about the chances of those .outcomes” (1980, p. 272). He
then sketches out some categories of information that we should expect to
be admissible, and inadmissible. For example, evidence about events causally
upstream from the chances will be admissible; such events will form the first
link in a causal chain like Figure 5.2. This includes information about the
physical laws that give rise to chances—information that affects our credences
about experimental outcomes by affecting our views about their chances. On
the other hand, evidence about effects of the chance outcome is inadmissible,
as we saw in the example of Amir’s report. Generally, then, it’s a good rule
of thumb that facts concerning events temporally before the chance outcome
are admissible, and inadmissible information is always about events after the
outcome. (Though Lewis does remark at one point (1980, p. 274) that if
backward causation is possible, seers of the future or time-travelers might give
us inadmissible information about chance events yet to come.)
Well close our discussion of the Principal Principle with a couple of
caveats.20 First, I have been talking about coin flips, die rolls, etc. as if
their outcomes have non-extreme objective chances. If you think that these
outcomes are fully determined by the physical state of the world prior to such
events, you might think these examples aren’t really chancy at all—or if there
are chances associated with their outcomes, the world’s determinism makes
those chances either 1 or 0. There are authors who think non-extreme chance
assignments are compatible with an event’s being fully deterministic. This will
be especially plausible if you think a single phenomenon may admit of causal
explanations at multiple levels of description. (Though the behavior of a gas
sample is fully determined by the positions and velocities of its constituent
particles, we might still apply a statistical thermodynamics that treats the
sample’s behavior as chancy.) In any case, if the compatibility of determinism
and non-extreme chance concerns you, you can replace my coin-flipping and
die-rolling examples with genuinely indeterministic quantum events.
Second, you might think frequency data can affect rational credences with
out operating through opinions about chances. Suppose a new patient walks
into a doctor’s office, and the doctor assigns a credence that the patient has a
particular disease equal to that disease’s frequency in the general population.
In order for this to make sense, must the doctor assume that physical chances
govern who gets the disease, or that the patient was somehow brought to her
through a physically chancy process? (That is, must the frequency affect the
doctor s credences by informing her opinions about chances?) This will depend
on how broadly we are willing to interpret macroscopic events as having objec
tive chances. But unless chances are literally everywhere, inferences governed
by the Principal Principle form a proper subset of the legitimate instances of
inductive reasoning. To move from frequencies in an observed population
to predictions about the unobserved when chances are not present, we may
need something like the frequency-credence principle (perhaps made more
plausible by incorporating statistical tools) with which this section began. Or
we may need a theory of inductive confirmation in general—something we
will try to construct in Chapter 6.
For the time being, the message of the Principal Principle is clear: Where
there are objective chances in the world, we should align our credences with
them to the extent we can determine what they are. While there are exceptions
to this rule, they can be worked out by thinking about the causal relations
between our information and the chances of which were aware.
5.2.2 Expert principles and Reflection
The Principal Principle is sometimes described as a deference principle: to the

extent you can determine what the objective chances are, the principle directs
you to defer to them by making your credences match. In a certain sense, you
treat the chances as authorities on what your credences should be. Might other
sorts of authorities demand such rational deference?
Testimonial evidence plays a large role in how we learn about the world.
Suppose an expert on some subject reveals her credences to you. Instead of
coming on television and talking about the “probability” of snow, the weather
forecaster simply tells you she’s 30% confident that it will snow tomorrow. It
seems intuitive that—absent other evidence about tomorrows weather—you
should set your credence in snow to 0.30 as well.
We can generalize this intuition with a principle for deference to experts
modeled on the Principal Principle:
P⅛(A I c⅛(A) = x) = x (5.9)

Here PrH is a rational agents hypothetical prior distribution, representing her

ultimate epistemic standards for assigning attitudes on the basis of total evi
dence. A is a proposition within some particular subject matter, and c⅛(A) = x
is the proposition that an expert on that subject matter assigns credence x to A.
As we’ve discussed before (Section 4.3), an agents credences at a given time
equal her hypothetical prior conditionalized on her total evidence at that
time. So Equation (5.9) has consequences similar to the Principal Principles:
When a rational agent is certain that an expert assigns credence x to A, and
that fact constitutes her total evidence relevant to A, satisfying Equation (5.9)
will leave her with an unconditional credence of cr(A) = x. On the other
hand, an agent who is uncertain of the expert’s opinion can use Equation
(5.9) to calculate a weighted average of all the values she thinks the expert
might assign.21
Equation (5.9) helps us figure out how to defer to someone we’ve identified
as an expert. But it doesn’t say anything about how to make that identification!
Ned Hall helpfully distinguishes two kinds of experts we might look for:
Let us call the first kind of expert a database-expert: she earns her epistemic
status simply because she possesses more information. Let us call the second
kind an analyst-expert: she earns her epistemic status because she is particu
larly good at evaluating the relevance of one proposition to another.
(2004, p. 100)
A database expert’s evidence (or at least, her evidence relevant to the matter
at hand) is a superset of mine. While she may not reveal the contents of her
evidence, I can still take advantage of it by assigning the credences she assigns
on its basis. On the other hand, I defer to an analyst expert not because she has
superior evidence but because she is particularly skilled at forming opinions
from the evidence we share. Clearly these categories can overlap; relative to me,
a weather forecaster is probably both an analyst expert and a database expert
with respect to the weather.
One particular database expert has garnered a great deal of attention in the
deference literature: an agent’s future self. Because Conditionalization retains
certainties (Section 4.1.1), at any given time a conditionalizing agent will
possess all the evidence possessed by each of her past selves—and typically
quite a bit more. So an agent who is certain she will update by conditionalizing
should treat her future self as a database expert.22 On the supposition that her
future self will assign credence x to a proposition A, she should now assign
credence x to A as well. This is van Fraassen’s (1984)
Reflection Principle: For any proposition A in £, real number x, and times

ti and tj with; > i, rationality requires
crz∙(A ∣ crz∙(A) = x) = x
Although the Reflection Principle mentions both the agent’s ti and tj∙ credences,
strictly speaking it is a synchronic principle, relating various credences the
agent assigns at ti. If we apply the Ratio Formula and then cross-mutiply,
Reflection gives us:
cη∙[A & cr7∙(A) = x] = x ■ cη[crj(A) = x] (5.10)
The two credences related by this equation are both assigned at ti∙, they just
happen to be credences in some propositions about tj.
Despite this synchronic nature, Reflection bears an intimate connection to
Conditionalization. If an agent is certain she will update by conditionalizing
between ti and tj—and meets a few other side conditions—Reflection follows.
For instance, the Reflection Principle can be proven from the following set of
conditions:
1. The agent is certain at ti that cry∙ will result from conditionalizing cri on
the total evidence she learns between ti and tj (call it E).
2. The agent is certain at ti that E (whatever it may be) is true.
3. crf(cry(A) = x) > 0
4. At ti the agent can identify a set of propositions S in £ such that:
(a) The members of S form a partition relative to the agents certainties
at ti.
(b) At ti the agent is certain that E is one of the propositions in S.
(c) For each member of S, the agent is certain at ti what crz∙-value she
assigns to A conditional on that member.
References to a proof can be found in the Further Reading. Here I’ll simply
provide an example that illustrates the connection between Conditionalization
and Reflection. Suppose that Γve rolled a die you’re certain is fair, but as of tl
have told you nothing about the outcome. However, at t1 you’re certain that
between t1 and t2 I’ll reveal to you whether the die came up odd or even. The
Reflection Principle suggests you should assign
cr1(61 cr2(6) = 1/3) = 1/3 (5.∏)

Assuming the enumerated conditions hold in this example, we can reason to

Equation (5.11) as follows: In this case the partition S contains the proposition
that the die came up odd and the proposition that it came up even. You are
certain at t1 that one of these propositions will provide the E you learn before
t2. You’re also certain that your cr2(6) value will result from conditionalizing
your t1 credences on E. So you’re certain at t1 that
cr2(6) = cr1(6 ∣ E) (5.12)
Equation (5.11) involves your t1 credence in 6 conditional on the suppo

sition that cr2(6) = 1/3. To determine this value, let’s see what conditional
reasoning you could do at t1, not yet certain what credences you will actually
assign at t2, but temporarily supposing that cr2(6) =1/3. We just said that
at tl you’re certain of Equation (5.12), so given the supposition you can
conclude that cr1 (61 E~) = 1/3. Then you can examine your current t1 credences
conditional on both odd and even, and find that cr1(6 ∣ E) will equal 1/3 only if
E is the proposition that the die came up even. (Conditional on the die’s coming
up odd, your credence in a 6 would be 0.) Thus you can conclude that E is the
proposition that the die came up even. You’re also certain at t1 that E (whatever
its content) is true, so concluding that E says the die came up even allows you
to conclude that the die did indeed come up even. And on the condition that
the die came up even, your t1 credence in a six is 1/3.
All of the reasoning in the previous paragraph was conditional, starting
with the supposition that cr2(6) = 1/3. We found that conditional on this
supposition, your rational credence in six would be 1/3. And that’s exactly
what the Reflection Principle gave us in Equation (5.11).23 Information about
your future credences tells you something about what evidence you’ll receive
between now and then. And information about what evidence you’ll receive
in the future should be incorporated into your credences in the present.
But how often do we really get information about our future opinions?
Approached the way I’ve just done, the Reflection Principle seems to have little
real-world applicability. But van Fraassen originally proposed Reflection in a
very different spirit. He saw the principle as stemming from basic commit
ments we undertake when we form opinions.
van Fraassen drew an analogy to making promises. Suppose I make a
promise at a particular time, but at the same time admit to being unsure
whether I will actually carry it out. van Fraassen writes that “To do so would
mean that I am now less than fully committed (a) to giving due regard to the
felicity conditions for this act, or (b) to standing by the commitments I shall
5∙3 THE PRINCIPLE OF INDIFFERENCE 145
overtly enter” (1984, p. 255). To fully stand behind a promise requires full
confidence that you will carry it out. And what goes for current promises goes
for future promises as well: if you know you’ll make a promise later on, failing
to be fully confident now that you’ll enact the future promise is a betrayal of
solidarity with your future promising self.
Now apply this lesson to the act of making judgments: assigning a different
credence now to a proposition than the credence you know you’ll assign in
the future is a failure to stand by the commitments implicit in that future
opinion. As van Fraassen puts it in a later publication, “Integrity requires me
to express my commitment to proceed in what I now classify as a rational
manner, to stand behind the ways in which I shall revise my values and
opinions” (1995, pp. 25-6). This is his motivation for endorsing the Reflection
Principle.24 For van Fraassen, Reflection brings out a substantive commitment
inherent in judgment, which underlies various other rational requirements.
For instance, since van Fraassen’s argument for Reflection does not rely on
Conditionalization, van Fraassen at one point (1999) uses Reflection to argue
for Conditionalization!
Of course, one might not agree with van Fraassen that assigning a credence
involves such strong commitments. And even if Reflection can be supported
as van Fraassen suggests, moving from that principle to Conditionalization is
going to require substantive further premises. As we’ve seen, Reflection is a
synchronic principle, relating an agent’s attitudes at one time to other attitudes
she assigns at the same time. By itself, Reflection may support a conclusion
to the effect that an agent with certain attitudes at a given time is required
to predict that she will update by Conditionalization. But to actually establish
Conditionalization as a diachronic norm, we would need a further principle
requiring rational agents to update in the manner they predict they will.25
5.3 The Principle of Indifference
The previous section discussed various deference principles (the Principal

Principle, expert principles, the Reflection Principle) that place additional
rational constraints on credence beyond the probability axioms, Ratio For
mula, and Conditionalization. Yet each of those deference principles works
with a particular kind of evidence—evidence about the chances, about an
expert’s credences, or about future attitudes. When an agent lacks these spe
cific sorts of evidence about a proposition she’s considering, the deference
principles will do little to constrain her credences. If an Objective Bayesian
(in the normative sense) wants to narrow what’s rationally permissible to a

single hypothetical prior, he is going to need a stronger principle than these.
The Principle of Indifference is often marketed to do the trick. This is
John Maynard Keynes’s name for what used to be known as the “principle of
insufficient reason”:
The Principle of Indifference asserts that if there is no known reason for

predicating of our subject one rather than another of several alternatives, then
relatively to such knowledge the assertions of each of these alternatives have
an equal probability. (Keynes 1921, p. 42, emphasis in original)
Applied to degrees of belief, the Principle of Indifference holds that if an agent

has no evidence favoring any proposition in a partition over any other, she
should spread her credence equally over the members of the partition. If I tell
you I have painted my house one of the seven colors of the rainbow but tell you
nothing more about my selection, the Principle of Indifference requires you to
assign credence 1/7 that my house is now violet.
The Principle of Indifference looks like it could settle all open questions
about rational credence. An agent could assign specific credences as dictated
by portions of her evidence (say, evidence that engages one of the deference
principles), then use the Principle of Indifference to settle all remaining
questions about her distribution. For example, suppose I tell you that I flipped
a fair coin to decide on a house color—heads meant gray, while tails meant
a color of the rainbow. You could follow the Principal Principle and assign
credence 1 /2 to my house’s being gray, then follow the Principle of Indifference
to distribute the remaining 1/2 credence equally among each of the rainbow
colors (so each would receive credence 1/14). This plan seems to dictate a
unique rational credence for every proposition in every evidential situation,
thereby specifying a unique hypothetical prior distribution.
Unfortunately, the Principle of Indifference has a serious flaw, which was
noted by Keynes (among others).26 Suppose I tell you only that I painted
my house some color—I don’t tell you what palette I chose from—and you
wonder whether it was violet. You might partition the possibilities into the
proposition that I painted the house violet and the proposition that I didn’t.
In that case, the Principle of Indifference will require you to assign credence
1/2 that the house is violet. But if you use the seven colors of the rainbow
as your partition, you will assign 1/7 credence that my house is now violet.
And if you use the colors in a box of crayons.... The trouble is that faced
with the same evidential situation and same proposition to be evaluated, the
5∙3 THE PRINCIPLE OF INDIFFERENCE 147
Principle of Indifference will recommend different credences depending on

which partition you consider.
Might one partition be superior to all the others, perhaps on grounds of
the naturalness with which it divides the space of possibilities? (The selection
of colors in a crayon box is pretty arbitrary!) Well, consider this example:
I just drove eighty miles to visit you. I tell you it took between two and four
hours to make the trip, and ask how confident you are that it took less than
three. Three hours seems to neatly divide the possibilities in half, so by the
Principle of Indifference you assign credence 1/2. Then I tell you I maintained
a constant speed throughout the drive, and that speed was between 20 and 40
miles per hour. You consider the proposition that I drove faster than 30mph,
and since that evenly divides the possible speeds the Indifference Principle
again recommends a credence of 1/2. But these two credence assignments
conflict. I drove over 30mph just in case it took me less than two hours and
forty minutes to make the trip. So are you 1/2 confident that it took me less
than three hours, or that it took me less than two hours forty minutes? If you
assign any positive credence that my travel time fell between those durations,
the two answers are inconsistent. So once more we need a specified partition
(time or velocity) to apply the Principle of Indifference against. But here the
decision can’t be made on grounds of naturalness: thinking about one’s speed
of travel is neither more nor less natural than thinking about how long the trip
took.27
This example is different from the painting example, in that time and
velocity require us to consider continuous ranges of possibilities. Infinite
possibility spaces introduce a number of complexities we will discuss in the
next section, but hopefully the intuitive difficulty is clear. Joseph Bertrand
(1888/1972) produced a number of infinite-possibility paradoxes for princi
ples like Indifference. His most famous puzzle (now usually called Bertrand’s
Paradox) asks how probable it is that a chord of a circle will be longer than
the side of an inscribed equilateral triangle. Indifference reasoning yields
conflicting answers depending on how one specifies the chord in question—by
specifying its endpoints, by specifying its orientation and length, by specifying
its midpoint, etc.
Since Keynes’s discussion, a number of authors have modified his Indiffer
ence Principle. Chapter 6 will look in detail at Carnap’s proposal. Another well-
known suggestion is E.T. Jaynes’s (1957a,b) Maximum Entropy Principle.
Given a partition of the space of possibilities, and a set of constraints on
allowable credence distributions over that partition, the Maximum Entropy
Principle selects the allowable distribution with the highest entropy. If the
Figure 5.3 Possible urn distributions
partition is finite, containing the propositions {Q1, Q2, ..., Qn}, the entropy
of a distribution is calculated as
n
~ ∑ cr(Qz∙) ∙ log cr(Qz∙) (5.13)
i=l
The technical details of Jaynes’s proposal are beyond the level of this book.
The intuitive idea, though, is that by maximizing entropy in a distribution we
minimize information.
To illustrate, suppose you know an urn contains 100 balls, each of which is
either black or white. Initially, you assign an equal credence to each available
hypothesis about how many black balls are in the urn. This “flat” distribution
over the urn hypotheses is reflected by the dashed line in Figure 5.3. Then I tell
you that the balls were created by a process that tends to produce roughly as
many white balls as black. This moves you to the more “peaked” distribution
of Figure 5.3 s solid curve. The peaked distribution reflects the fact that at the
later time you have more information about the contents of the urn. There
are various mathematical ways to measure the informational content of a
distribution, and it turns out that a distributions entropy goes down as its
information content goes up. So in Figure 5.3, the flat (dashed) distribution
has a higher entropy than the peaked (solid) distribution.
Maximizing entropy is thus a strategy for selecting the lowest-information
distribution consistent with what we already know. Jaynes’s principle says
that within the bounds imposed by your evidence, you should select the
“flattest” credence distribution available. In a sense, this is a directive not to
make any assumptions beyond what you know. As van Fraassen puts it, “one
should not jump to unwarranted conclusions, or add capricious assumptions,
5-4 CREDENCES FOR INFINITELY MANY POSSIBILITIES 149
when accommodating one’s belief state to the deliverances of experience”

(1981, p. 376). If all your evidence about my urn is that it contains 100 black
or white balls, it would be strange for you to peak your credences around any
particular number of black balls. What in your evidence would justify such a
maneuver? The flat distribution seems the most rational option available.28
The Maximum Entropy approach has a number of advantages. First, it can
easily be extended from finite partitions to infinite partitions by replacing the
summation in Equation (5.13) with an integral (and making a few further
adjustments). Second, for cases in which an agents evidence simply delineates
a space of doxastic possibilities (without favoring some of those possibilities
over others), the Principle of Maximum Entropy yields the same results as the
Principle of Indifference. But Maximum Entropy also handles cases involving
more complicated sorts of information. Besides restricting the set of possibil
ities, an agents evidence might require her credence in one possibility to be
twice that in another, or might require a particular conditional credence value
for some ordered pair of propositions. No matter the constraints, Maximum
Entropy chooses the “flattest” (most entropic) distribution consistent with
those constraints. Third, probability distributions selected by the Maximum
Entropy Principle have been highly useful in various scientific applications,
ranging from statistical mechanics to CT scans to natural language processing.
Yet the Maximum Entropy Principle also has flaws. It suffers from a ver
sion of the Indifference Principles partitioning problem. Maximum Entropy
requires us to first select a partition, then accept the most entropic distri
bution over that partition. But the probability value assigned to a particular
proposition by this process often depends on what other propositions appear
in the partition. Also, in some evidential situations satisfying the Maximum
Entropy Principle both before and after an update requires agents to violate
Conditionalization. You can learn more about these problems by studying this
chapter’s Further Reading.
5.4 Credences for infinitely many possibilities
Suppose I tell you a positive integer was just selected by some process, and tell
you nothing more about that process. You need to distribute your credence
across all the possible integers that might have been selected. Let’s further
suppose that you want to assign each positive integer the same credence. In the
last section we asked whether, given your scant evidence in this case about the
selection process, such an assignment is obligatory—whether you’re rationally
required to assign each positive integer an equal credence. In this section I want
to set aside the question of whether an equal distribution is required, and ask
whether it’s even possible.
We’re going to have a small, technical problem here with the propositional
language over which your credence distribution is assigned. In Chapter 2 we
set up propositional languages with a finite number of atomic propositions,
while a distribution over every positive integer requires infinitely many atomic
propositions. Yet there are standard logical methods for dealing with languages
containing infinitely many atomic propositions, and even for representing
them using a finite number of symbols. For example, we could use “1” to
represent the atomic proposition that the number one was selected, “2” to
represent two’s being selected, “12” to represent twelve’s being selected, etc.
This will allow us to represent infinitely many atomic propositions with only
the standard ten Arabic digits.
So the language isn’t the real problem; the real problem is what single
credence value you could possibly assign to each and every one of those
positive integers. To start seeing the problem, imagine you pick some positive
real number r and assign it as your unconditional credence in each positive
integer’s being picked. For any positive real r you pick, there exists an integer
n such that r > 1 ∕n. Select such an n, and consider the proposition that the
positive integer selected was less than or equal to n. By Finite Additivity
(Extended),
cr(l V 2 V ... V ri) = cr(l) + cr(2) + ... + cr(n) (5.14)
Each of the credences on the right-hand side equals r, so your credence in the
disjunction is r ∙ n. But we selected n such that r>l∕n,sor∙n>l. Which means
the credence on the left-hand side of this equation is greater than 1, and you’ve
violated the probability axioms.
This argument rules out assigning the same positive real credence to each
and every positive integer. What other options are there? Historically the most
popular proposal has been to assign each positive integer a credence of 0. Yet
this proposal creates its own problems.
The first problem with assigning each integer zero credence is that we
must reconceive what an unconditional credence of 0 means. So far in this
book we have equated assigning credence 0 to a proposition with ruling that
proposition out as a live possibility. In this case, though, we’ve proposed
assigning credence 0 to each positive integer while still treating each as a live
possibility. So while we will still assign credence 0 to propositions that have
5∙4 CREDENCES FOR INFINITELY MANY POSSIBILITIES 151
been ruled out, there will now be other types of propositions that receive
credence 0 as well. Similarly, we may assign credence 1 to propositions of
which we are not certain.
Among other things, this reconception of credence 0 will undermine argu
ments for the Regularity Principle. As stated (Section 4.2), Regularity forbids
assigning credence 0 to any logically contingent proposition. The argument
there was that one should never entirely rule out a proposition that’s logically
possible, so one should never assign such a proposition 0 credence. Now we’ve
opened up the possibility of assigning credence 0 to a proposition without
ruling it out. So while we can endorse the idea that no contingent proposition
should be ruled out, Regularity no longer follows. Moreover, the current
proposal provides infinitely many explicit counterexamples to Regularity: we
have proposed assigning credence 0 to the contingent proposition that the
positive integer selected was one, to the proposition that the integer was two,
that it was three, etc.
Once we’ve decided to think about credence 0 in this new way, we encounter
a second problem: the Ratio Formula. In Section 3.1.1 I framed the Ratio
Formula as follows:
Ratio Formula: For any P and Q in £, if cr(Q) > 0 then
This constraint relates an agent’s conditional credence cr(P ∣ Q) to her uncon

ditional credences only when cr(Q) > 0. As stated, it remains silent on how an
agent’s conditional and unconditional credences relate when cr(Q) = 0.
Yet we surely want to have some rational constraints on that relation for
cases in which an agent assigns credence 0 to a contingent proposition that
she hasn’t ruled out.29 For example, in the positive integer case consider your
conditional credence cr(21 2). Surely this conditional credence should equal 1.
Yet because the current proposal sets cr(2) = 0, the Ratio Formula cannot
tell us anything about cr(21 2). And since we’ve derived all of our rational
constraints on conditional credence from the Ratio Formula, the Bayesian
system we’ve set up isn’t going to deliver a requirement that cr(2 ∣ 2) = I.30
There are various ways to respond to this problem. One interesting sug
gestion is to reverse the order in which we proceeded with conditional and
unconditional credences: We began by laying down fairly substantive con
straints (Kolmogorov’s probability axioms) on unconditional credences, then
tied conditional credences to those via the Ratio Formula. On the reverse
approach, substantive constraints are first placed on conditional credences,
then some further rule relates unconditional to conditional. The simplest such
rule is that for any proposition P, cr(P) = cr(P ∣ T).
Some advocates of this approach describe it as making conditional credence
“basic”, but we should be careful not to read too much into debates about whats
basic. The way I’ve approached conditional and unconditional credences in
this book, neither is more fundamental than the other in any sense significant
to metaphysics or the philosophy of mind. Each is an independently existing
type of doxastic attitude, and any rules we offer relating them are strictly nor
mative constraints. The only sense in which our unconditionals-first approach
has made unconditional credences prior to conditionals is in its order of
normative explanation. The Ratio Formula helped us transform constraints
on unconditional credences into constraints on conditional credences (as in
Section 3.1.2). On the conditionals-first approach, the rule that cr(P) = cr(P ∣ T)
transforms constraints on conditionals into constraints on unconditionals.
Examples of the conditionals-first approach include Hosiasson-Lindenbaum
(1940), Popper (1955), Renyi (1970), and Roeper and Leblanc (1999).31 Like
many of these, Popper’s axiom system entails that cr(Q ∣ Q) = 1 for any Q that
the agent deems possible, regardless of its unconditional credence value. This
ensures that cr(2 ∣ 2) = 1.
The final problem I want to address with assigning each positive integer 0
unconditional credence of being selected has to do with your unconditional
credence that any integer was selected at all. The proposition that some integer
was selected is equivalent to the disjunction of the proposition that one was
selected, the proposition that two was selected, the proposition that three was
selected, etc. Finite Additivity directly governs unconditional credences in
disjunctions of two (mutually exclusive) disjuncts; iterating that rule gives us
Finite Additivity (Extended), which applies to disjunctions of finitely many
disjuncts. But this case concerns an infinite disjunction, and none of the
constraints we’ve seen so far relates the unconditional credence of an infinite
disjunction to the credences of its disjuncts.
It might seem natural to supplement our credence constraints with the
following:
Countable Additivity: For any countable set {Q1, Q2, Q3, ...} of mutually
exclusive propositions in
cr(Q1 V Q2 V Q3 V ...) = cr(Q1) + cr(Q2) + cr(Q3) + ...

Notice that Countable Additivity does not apply to sets of every infinite size; it
applies only to sets of countably many members. The set of positive integers is
countable, while the set of real numbers is not. (If you are unfamiliar with the
differing sizes of infinite sets, I would suggest studying the brief explanation
referenced in this chapter’s Further Reading.)
Countable Additivity naturally extends the idea behind Finite Additivity to
sets of (countably) infinite size. Many authors have found it attractive. Yet in
our example it rules out assigning credence 0 to each proposition stating that a
particular positive integer was selected. Taken together, the proposition that
one was selected, the proposition that two was selected, the proposition
that three was selected, etc. form a countable set of mutually exclusive propo
sitions (playing the role of Q1, Q2, Q3, etc. in Countable Additivity). Countable
Additivity therefore requires your credence in the disjunction of these propo
sitions to equal the sum of your credences in the individual disjuncts. Yet the
latter credences are each 0, while your credence in their disjunction (namely,
the proposition that some positive integer was selected) should be 1.
So perhaps Countable Additivity wasn’t such a good idea after all. The
trouble is, without Countable Additivity we lose a very desirable property:
Conglomerability: For each proposition P and partition {Q1, Q2, Q3, ...} in
cr(P) is no greater than the largest cr(P ∣ Qi) and no less than the
least cr(P ∣ Qz).
In other words, if Conglomerability holds then the largest cr(P ∣ Qj∙) and the
smallest cr(P ∣ Qi) provide bounds between which cr(P) must fall.
In defining Conglomerability I didn’t say how large the Q-partitions in
question are allowed to be. We might think of breaking up the general Con
glomerability principle into a number of sub-cases: Finite Conglomerability
applies to finite partitions, Countable Conglomerability applies to countable
partitions, Continuous Conglomerability applies to partitions of continuum-
many members, etc. Finite Conglomerability is guaranteed by the standard
probability axioms. You’ll prove this in Exercise 5.6, but the basic idea is
that by the Law of Total Probability cr(P) must be a weighted average of the
various cr(P ∣ Qz∙), so it can’t be greater than the largest of them or less than
the smallest. With the standard axioms in place, Countable Conglomerability
then stands or falls with our decision about Countable Additivity; without
Countable Additivity, Countable Conglomerability is false.32
We’ve already seen that the strategy of assigning 0 credence to each positive
integer’s being selected violates Countable Additivity; let’s see how it violates
(Countable) Conglomerability as well.33 Begin with the following definition:

For any positive integer n that’s not a multiple of 10, define the n-set as
the set of all positive integers that start with n, followed by some number
(perhaps 0) of zeroes. So the 1-set is {1,10,100,1000, ...}; the 11-set is
{11,110,1100,11000, ...}; the 36-set is {36,360,3600,36000, ...}; etc. Now
take the proposition that the integer selected was a member of the 1-set, and
the proposition that the integer selected was a member of the 2-set, and the
proposition that the integer selected was a member of the 3-set, etc. (Though
don’t include any ns that are multiples of 10.) The set of these propositions
forms a partition. (If you think about it carefully, you’ll see that any positive
integer that might have been selected belongs to exactly one of these sets.)
The distribution strategy we’re considering is going to want to assign
cr(the selected integer is not a multiple of 10 ∣

the selected integer is a member of the 1-set) = 0
(5.15)
Why is that? Well, the only number in the 1-set that is not a multiple of 10 is
the number one. The 1-set contains infinitely many positive integers; on the
supposition that one of those integers was selected you want to assign equal
credence to each one’s being selected; so you assign 0 credence to each one’s
being selected (including the number one) conditional on that supposition.
This gives us Equation (5.15). The argument then generalizes; for any n-set
you’ll have
cr(the selected integer is not a multiple of 10 ∣

the selected integer is a member of that n-set) = 0
(5.16)
Yet unconditionally it seems rational to have
cr(the selected integer is not a multiple of 10) = 9/10 (5.17)
Conditional on any particular member of our «-set partition, your credence

that the selected integer isn’t a multiple of 10 is 0. Yet unconditionally, you’re
highly confident that the integer selected is not a mutiple of 10. This is a flagrant
violation of (Countable) Conglomerability—your credences in a particular
proposition conditional on each member of a (countable) partition are all the
same, yet your unconditional credence in that partition has a very different
value!
Why is violating Conglomerability a problem? Well, imagine Γm about to

give you some evidence on which you’re going to conditionalize. In particular,
Γm about to tell you to which of the π-sets the selected integer belongs.
Whichever piece of evidence you’re about to get, your credence that the integer
isn’t a multiple of 10 conditional on that evidence is 0. So you can be certain
right now that immediately after receiving the evidence—whatever piece of
evidence it turns out to be!—your credence that the integer isn’t a multiple
of 10 will be 0. Yet despite being certain that your better-informed future self
will assign a particular proposition a credence of 0, you continue to assign
that proposition a credence of 9/10 right now. This is a flagrant violation
of the Reflection Principle, as well as generally good principles for attitude
management. Our opinions are usually compromises among the pieces of
evidence we think we might receive; we expect that some potential future
pieces of evidence would change our views in one direction, while others would
press in the other. If we know that no matter what evidence comes in we’re
going to be pulled away from our current opinion in the same direction, it
seems irrationally stubborn to maintain our current opinion and not move in
that direction right now. Conglomerability embodies these principles of good
evidential hygiene; without Conglomerability our interactions with evidence
begin to look absurd.
Where does this leave us? We wanted to find a way to assign an equal
credence to each positive integer’s being selected. We quickly concluded that
that equal credence could not be a positive real number. So we considered
assigning credence 0 to each integer’s being selected. Doing so violates Count
able Additivity (a natural extension of our finite principles for calculating
credences in disjunctions) and Conglomerability, which looks desirable for a
number of reasons. Are there any other options?
I will briefly mention two further possibilities. The first possibility is to
assign each positive integer an infinitesimal credence of having been selected.
To work with infinitesimals, we extend the standard real-number system to
include numbers that are greater than 0 but smaller than all the positive reals.
If we assign each integer an infinitesimal credence of having been picked,
we avoid the problems with assigning a positive real and also the problems
of assigning 0. (For instance, if you pile enough infinitesimals together they
can sum to 1.) Yet infinitesimal numbers have a great deal of mathematical
structure, and it’s not clear that the extra structure plausibly represents any
feature of agents’ attitudes.34 Moreover, the baroque mathematics of infinitesi
mals introduces troubles of its own (see Further Reading). So perhaps only one
viable option remains: Perhaps if you learn a positive integer was just selected,
its impossible to assign equal credence to each of the possibilities consistent

with what you know.35
5.5 Jeffrey Conditionalization
Section 4.1.1 showed that conditionalizing on new evidence creates and retains
certainties; evidence gained between two times becomes certain at the later
time and remains so ever after. Contraposing, if an agent updates by Condi
tionalization and gains no certainties between two times, it must be because
she gained no evidence between those times. In that section we also saw that if
an agent gains no evidence between two times, Conditionalization keeps her
credences fixed. Putting all this together, we see that under Conditionalization
an agents credences change just in case she gains new certainties.
As we noted in Section 4.2, mid-twentieth-century epistemologists like
C.I. Lewis defended this approach by citing sense data as the foundational
evidential certainties. Many contemporary epistemologists are uncomfortable
with this kind of foundationalism (and with appeals to sense data in gen
eral). Richard C. Jeffrey, however, had a slightly different concern, which he
expressed with the following example and analysis:
The agent inspects a piece of cloth by candlelight, and gets the impression
that it is green, although he concedes that it might be blue or even (but very
improbably) violet. If G, B, and V are the propositions that the cloth is green,
blue, and violet, respectively, then the outcome of the observation might be
that, whereas originally his degrees of belief in G, B, and V were .30, .30, and
.40, his degrees of belief in those same propositions after the observation are
.70, .25, and .05. If there were a proposition E in his preference ranking which
described the precise quality of his visual experience in looking at the cloth,
one would say that what the agent learned from the observation was that E is
true....
But there need be no such proposition E in his preference ranking; nor
need any such proposition be expressible in the English language. Thus, the
description “The cloth looked green or possibly blue or conceivably violet,”
would be too vague to convey the precise quality of the experience. Certainly,
it would be too vague to support such precise conditional probability ascrip
tions as those noted above. It seems that the best we can do is to describe, not
the quality of the visual experience itself, but rather its effects on the observer,
by saying, “After the observation, the agent’s degrees of belief in G, B, and V
were .70, .25, and .05.” (1965, p. 154)
5∙5 JEFFREY CONDITIONALIZATION 157
Jeffrey worried that even if we grant the existence of a sense datum for each
potential learning experience, the quality of that sense datum might not be
representable in a proposition to which the agent could assign certainty,
or at least might not be representable in a precise-enough proposition to
differentiate that sense datum from other nearby data with different effects
on the agents credences.
At the time Jeffrey was writing, the standard Bayesian updating norm
(updating by Conditionalization) relied on the availability of such proposi
tions. So Jeffrey proposed a new updating rule, capable of handling examples
like the cloth one above. While he called it probability kinematics, it is now
universally known as
Jeffrey Conditionalization: Given any ti and tj with i < j, any Ain C, and
a finite partition {B1,B2, ..., Bn} in £ whose members each have
nonzero cη∙,
cry(A) = cη(A ∣ B1) ∙ cr7∙(B1) + cη(A ∣ B2) ∙ cr7∙(B2) + ... + cη(A ∣ Bn) ∙ cr7(Bπ)
Let’s apply Jeffrey Conditionalization to the cloth example. Suppose Γm fishing

around in a stack of my family’s clean laundry hoping to pull out any shirt
that belongs to me, but the lighting is dim because I don’t want to turn on
the overheads and awaken my wife. The color of a shirt in the stack would be a
strong clue as to whether it was mine, as reflected by my conditional credences:
cr1(mine ∣ G) = 0.80
cr1(mine ∣ B) = 0.50 (5.18)
cr1(mine ∣ V) = 0
(For simplicity’s sake we imagine green, blue, and violet are the only color shirts
I might fish out of the stack.) At t1 I pull out a shirt. Between t1 and t2 I take
a glimpse of the shirt. According to Jeffrey’s story, my unconditional credence
distributions across the G∣B∣V partition are:
cr1(G) = 0.30 cr1(B) = 0.30 cr1(V) = 0.40

cr2(G) = 0.70 cr2(B) = 0.25 cr2(V) = 0.05
Applying Jeffrey Conditionalization, I find my credence in the target proposi

tion at the later time by combining my post-update unconditional credences
across the partition with my pre-update credences in the target proposition

conditional on members of the partition. This yields:
cr2(mine) =
cr1(mine ∣ G) ∙ cr2(G) + cr1(mine ∣ B) ∙ cr2(B) + cr1(mine ∣ V) ∙ cr2(V) =
0.80 ∙ 0.70 + 0.50 ∙ 0.25 + 0 ∙ 0.05 =
0.685
(5.20)
At t2 Γm fairly confident that the shirt I’ve selected is mine. How confident
was I at t1, before I caught my low-light glimpse? A quick calculation with the
Law of Total Probability reveals that cr1(mine) = 0.39. But it’s more interesting
to see what happens when we apply the Law of Total Probability to my
credences at t2∙.
cr2(mine) =
cr2(mine ∣ G) ∙ cr2(G) + cr2(mine ∣ B) ∙ cr2(B) + cr2(mine ∣ V) ∙ cr2(V)
(5.21)
Take a moment to compare Equation (5.21) with the first two lines of
Equation (5.20). Equation (5.21) expresses a feature that my t2 credence distri
bution must have if it is to satisfy the probability axioms and Ratio
Formula. Equation (5.20) tells me how to set my t2 credences by Jeffrey
Conditionalization. The only way to make these two equations match—the
only way to square the Jeffrey update with the probability calculus—is if
cr1(mine ∣ G) = cr2(mine ∣ G), cr1(mine ∣ B) = cr2(mine ∣ B), etc.
Why should these conditional credences stay constant over time? Well, at
any given time my credence that the shirt I’ve selected is mine is a function
of two kinds of credences: first, my unconditional credence that the shirt is a
particular color; and second, my conditional credence that the shirt is mine
given that it’s a particular color. When I catch a glimpse of the shirt between
t1 and t2, only the first kind of credence changes. I change my opinion about
what color the shirt is, but I don’t change my confidence that it’s my shirt given
that (say) it’s green. Throughout the example I have a fixed opinion about what
percentage of the green shirts in the house are mine; I simply gain information
about whether this shirt is green. So while my unconditional color credences
change, my credences conditional on the colors remain.
5-5 JEFFREY CONDITIONALIZATION 159
Ulis discussion reveals a general feature of Jeffrey Conditionalization. You’ll

prove in Exercise 5.8 that an agents credences between two times update by
Jeffrey Conditionalzation just in case the following condition obtains:
Rigidity: For any A in £ and any Bm in {B1, B2, ...,Bn},
crz∙(A ∣ Bm) = cη(A ∣ Bm)
So Jeffrey Conditionalization using a particular partition {Bl,B2, .. ∙ ,Bn} is

appropriate only when the agent’s credences conditional on the Bm remain
constant across two times. Jeffrey thought this was reasonable for updates that
“originate” in the Bm partition.36 In the cloth example, all my credence changes
between tl and t2 are driven by the changes in my color credences caused
by my experience. So if I tell you my credences at t1, and then tell you my
unconditional credences in the color propositions at t2, this should suffice for
you to work out the rest of my opinions at t2. Jeffrey Conditionalization makes
that possible.
Rigidity can help us perform Jeffrey Conditionalization updates on a proba
bility table. Given the partition {Bl,B2, ..., Bn} in which an update originates,
we divide the lines of the table into “blocks”: the Bl block contains all the lines
consistent with Bl∙, the B2 block contains all the lines consistent with B2; etc.
The agent’s experience between times ti and tj directly sets her unconditional
crz-values for the Bm; in other words, it tells us what each block must sum to
at tj. Once we know a block’s cr7∙ total, we set the values on individual lines
within that block by keeping them in the same proportions as at ti. (This
follows from Rigidity’s requirement that each line have the same cr2-value
conditional on a given Bm as it did at ti.) That is, we multiply all the cη-
values in a block by the same constant so that their cry-values achieve the
appropriate sum.
Figure 5.4 shows this process for the colored shirt example. I’ve built the
table around a simplified partition of doxastic possibilities in the problem,
but I could’ve made a probability table with the full list of state-descriptions
and everything would proceed the same way. I calculated the cr1-values in the
table from Equations (5.18) and (5.19). How do we then derive the credences
att2?
The credence change between tl and t2 originates in the G∣B∣Vpartition. So
the “blocks” on this table will be pairs of adjacent lines: the first pair of lines
(on which G is true), the second pair of lines (B lines), and the third pair of
partition member cri cr2

G & mine 0.24 0.56
G & ~mine 0.06 0.14
B & mine 0.15 0.125
B &. ~mine 0.15 0.125
V & mine 0 0
V & ~mine 0.40 ' 0.05
Figure 5.4 Jeffrey Conditionalization across a partition
Vlines. Let’s work with the B-block first. In Jeffreys story, glimpsing the shirt
sends me to cr2(B) = 0.25. So on the table, the third and fourth lines must
have cr2-values summing to 0.25. At t1 these lines were in a 1 : 1 ratio, so
they must maintain that ratio at t2. This leads to cr2-values of 0.125 on both
lines. Applying a similar process to the G- and V-blocks yields the remaining
cr2-values.
Once you understand this block-updating process, you can see that tra
ditional updating by Conditionalization is a special case of updating by Jef
frey Conditionalization. When you update by Conditionalization on some
evidential proposition E, your probability table divides into two blocks: lines
consistent with E versus ~E lines. After the update, the ~E lines go to zero,
while the E lines are multiplied by a constant so that they sum to 1.
This tells us how Jeffrey Conditionalization relates to traditional (or “strict”)
Conditionalization mathematically. But how should we understand their rela
tion philosophically? Suppose we class learning experiences into two kinds:
those that send some proposition to certainty and those that don’t. Jeffrey Con
ditionalization seems to be a universal updating rule, applying to both kinds
of experience. When experience does send a proposition to certainty, Jeffrey
Conditionalization provides the same advice as strict Conditionalization. But
Jeffrey Conditionalization also provides guidance for learning experiences of
the second kind.
Now the defender of Regularity (the principle forbidding extreme uncon
ditional credence in logically contingent propositions) will maintain that
only the second kind of learning experience ever occurs (at least to rational
agents), and therefore that strict Conditionalization should never be applied in
practice. All experience ever does is shuffle an agent’s unconditional credences
over some partition, without sending any partition members to extremity.
Jeffrey Conditionalization tells us how such changes over a partition affect the
rest of the agent’s credence distribution.
5.6 EXERCISES 161
But one can identify an important role for Jeffrey Conditionalization even
without endorsing Regularity. To establish the need for his new kinematics,
Jeffrey only had to argue that some experiences of the second kind exist—
sometimes we learn without gaining certainties. In that case we need a more
general updating rule than strict Conditionalization, and Jeffrey Conditional
ization provides one.
Yet despite being such a flexible tool, Jeffrey Conditionalization has its
drawbacks. For instance, while applications of strict Conditionalization are
always commutative, Jeffrey updates that do not send propositions to certainty
may not be. The simplest example of this phenomenon (which Jeffrey readily
acknowledged) occurs when one learning experience sends some Bm in the
partition to unconditional credence p, while the next experience sends that
same partition member to a different credence value q. Applying Jeffrey
Conditionalization to the experiences in that order will leave the agent with
a final unconditional credence in Bm of q, while applying Jeffreys rule to
the same experiences in the opposite order will result in a final Bm cre
dence of p. This commutativity failure is problematic if you think that the
effects of evidence on an agent should not depend on the order in which pieces
of evidence arrive.37
Finally, Jeffrey Conditionalization may not provide a recipe for every type
of learning experience. Traditional Conditionalization covers experiences that
set unconditional credences to certainty. Jeffrey Conditionalization general
izes to experiences that set unconditional credences to nonextreme values.
But what if an experience affects an agent by directly altering her conditional
credences? How can we calculate the effects of such an experience on her
other degrees of belief? Readers interested in that question might begin by
exploring van Fraassens “Judy Benjamin Problem” (1981), an example in
which direct alteration of conditional credences plausibly occurs, but which
cannot be analyzed using Jeffrey Conditionalization.38
5.6 Exercises
expression occurs, the needed proposition has nonzero unconditional
credence so that conditional credences are well defined.
Problem 5.1. At noon I rolled a six-sided die. It came from either the Fair
Factory (which produces exclusively fair dice), the Snake-Eyes Factory (which
produces dice with a 1/2 chance of coming up one and equal chance of each
other outcome), or the Boxcar Factory (which produces dice with a 1/4 chance
of coming up six and equal chance of each other outcome).
(a) Suppose you use the Principle of Indifference to assign equal credence
to each of the three factories from which the die might have come.
Applying the Principal Principle, what is your credence that my die roll
came up three?
(b) Maria tells you that the die I rolled didn’t come from the Boxcar
Factory. If you update on this new evidence by Conditionalization, how
confident are you that the roll came up three?
(c) Is Marias evidence admissible with respect to the outcome of the die
roll? Explain.
(d) After you’ve incorporated Maria’s information into your credence dis
tribution, Ron tells you the roll didn’t come up six. How confident are
you in a three after conditionalizing on Ron’s information?
(e) Is Ron’s evidence admissible with respect to the outcome of the die roll?
Explain.
Problem 5.2. 0 The expert deference principle in Equation (5.9) resembles

the Principal Principle in many ways. Yet the expert deference principle
makes no allowance for anything like inadmissible information. What kind
of information should play the role for expert deference that inadmissible
information plays for deference to chances? How should Equation (5.9) be
modified to take such information into account?
Problem 5.3. Suppose t1, t2, and t3 are three times, with the indices
reflecting their temporal order. At tl, you satisfy the probability axioms, Ratio
Formula, and Reflection Principle. You are also certain at tl that you will satisfy
these constraints at t2. However, for some proposition X your t1 credences are
equally divided between the following two (mutually exclusive and exhaustive)
hypotheses about what your t2 self will think of your t3 credences:
Y: (cr2[cr3(X) = 1/10] = 1/3) & (cr2[cr3(X) = 2/5] = 2/3)

Z: (cr2[cr3(Y) = 3/8] = 3/4) & (cr2[cr3(X) = 7/8] = 1/4)
Given all this information, what is cr1(Jζ^ (Be sure to explain your reasoning
clearly.)
5.6 EXERCISES 163
Problem 5.4. 0 Can you think of any kind of real-world situation in which
it would be rationally permissible to violate the Reflection Principle? Explain
the situation you’re thinking of, and why it would make a Reflection violation
okay.
Problem 5.5. Jingyi assigns the tl credences indicated by the probability

table below. Then between tl and t2, she learns P D Q.
P Q cri
τ T 0.4
τ F 0.2
F T 0.2
F F 0.2
(a) Determine Jingyi’s credence distribution at t2. Then use Equation (5.13)
to calculate the entropy of both cr1 and cr2 over the partition containing
the four P/Q state-descriptions.39
(b) Use the concept of information content to explain why the entropy of
Jingyi’s distribution changed in the direction it did between t1 and t2.
(c) Create a probabilistic credence distribution that assigns the same
unconditional value to P as cr1, but has a higher entropy over the
P/Q state-description partition.
(d) Use the partition containing just P and ~P to calculate the entropy for
cr1 and for your distribution from part (c). What does this tell you about
the partition-dependence of entropy comparisons?
Problem 5.6. Using Non-Negativity, Normality, Finite Additivity, the

Ratio Formula, and any results we’ve proven from those four, prove Finite
Conglomerability. (Hint: The Law of Total Probability may be useful here.)
Problem 5.7. Suppose that at tl you assign a “flat” credence distribution

over language 23 whose only two atomic propositions are B and C—that is,
you assign equal credence to each of the four state-descriptions of 23. Between
tl and t2 you perform a Jeffrey Conditionalization that originates in the
B∕~B partition and sets cr2(β) = 2/3. Between t2 and t3 you perform a Jeffrey
Conditionalization that originates in the C∕~Cpartition and sets cr3(C) = 3/4.
(a) Calculate your cr2 and cr3 distributions.
(b) Does your credence in B change between t2 and t3? Does your credence
in C change between t1 and t2?
(c) By talking about probabilistic independence at t1 and t2, explain the

changes or lack of changes you observed in parts (b) and (c).
(d) Now start again with the flat tl distribution, but apply the Jeffrey
Conditionalizations in the opposite order. (First an update that sets the
C credence to 3/4, then an update that sets B to 2/3.)
(e) Is the cr3 distribution you obtained in part (e) the same as the one from
part (a)? Does this always happen when you reverse the order of Jeffrey
Conditionalizations? If not, why do you think it happened in this case?
Problem 5.8. Prove that Jeffrey Conditionalization is equivalent to Rigid

ity. That is: Given any times ti and tj, and any finite partition {B1, B2, ..., Bn}
in £ whose members each have nonzero crz∙, the following two conditions are
equivalent:
1. For all A in £, crj∙(A) = cη(A ∣ B1) ■ crj(B1) + cri(A ∣ B2) ∙ cr7∙(B2) + ... +
crf(A ∣ Bn) ∙ cr7∙(Bπ).
2. For all A in £ and all Bm in the partition, cry(A ∣ Bm) = crz∙(A ∣ Bm).
(Hint: Complete two proofs—first condition 2 from condition 1, then vice
versa.)
Problem 5.9. Suppose we apply Jeffrey Conditionalization over a finite

partition {B1,B2, ..., Bn} in £ to generate cr2 from cr1. Show that we could
have obtained the same cr2 from cr1 in the following way: start with cr1j Jeffrey
Conditionalize it in a particular way over a partition containing only two
propositions; Jeffrey Conditionalize the result of that operation in a particular
way over a partition containing only two propositions (possibly different from
the ones used the first time); repeat this process a finite number of times until
cr2 is eventually obtained.40
5.7 Further reading
Subjective and Objective Bayesianism
Maria Carla Galavotti (2005). Philosophical Introduction to Probability. CSLI

Lecture Notes 167. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications
Excellent historical introduction to the many ways “probability” has been

understood by the philosophical and statistical community.
Alan Hajek (2019). Interpretations of Probability. In: The Stanford

Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. by Edward N. Zalta. Fall 2019. URL:
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/probability-interpret/
Survey of the various interpretations of probability, with extensive references.
Bruno de Finetti (1931/1989). Probabilism: A Critical Essay on the Theory

of Probability and the Value of Science. Erkenntnis 31, pp. 169-223.
(Translation of B. de Finetti, Probabilismo, Logos 14: 163-219)
Classic paper critiquing objective interpretations of probability and advocating

a Subjective Bayesian (in the semantic sense) approach.
Donald Gillies (2000). Varieties of Propensity. British Journal for the Philos
ophy of Science 51, pp. 807-35
Reviews different versions of the propensity theory and their motivations.

Focuses at the end on how propensity theories might respond to Humphreys’s
Paradox.
Deference Principles
David Lewis (1980). A Subjectivists Guide to Objective Chance. In: Studies

in Inductive Logic and Probability. Ed. by Richard C. Jeffrey. Vol. 2.
Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 263-94
Lewis’s classic article laying out the Principal Principle and its consequences
for theories of credence and chance.
Adam Elga (2007). Reflection and Disagreement. Nous 41, pp. 478-502
Offers principles for deferring to many different kinds of agents, including

experts, gurus (individuals with good judgment who lack some of your evi
dence), past and future selves, and peers (whose judgment is roughly as good
as your own).
Bas C. van Fraassen (1984). Belief and the Will. The Journal of Philosophy
81,pp. 235-56
Article in which van Fraassen proposes and defends the Reflection Principle.
Jonathan Weisberg (2007). Conditionalization, Reflection, and Self-

Knowledge. Philosophical Studies 135, pp. 179-97
Discusses conditions under which Reflection can be derived from Condition

alization, and vice versa.
Richard Pettigrew and Michael G. Titelbaum (2014). Deference Done Right.

Philosophers’Imprint 14, pp. 1-19
Attempts to get the formulation of deference principles precisely right, includ

ing expert deference principles, the Reflection Principle, and principles for
higher-order credences. Particularly concerned with making those principles
consistent with Conditionalization and with the possibility of ignorance about
what’s rationally required.
The Principle of Indifference
John Maynard Keynes (1921). Treatise on Probability. London: Macmillan

and Co., Limited
Chapter IV contains Keynes’s famous discussion of the Principle of

Indifference.
E. T. Jaynes (1957a). Information Theory and Statistical Mechanics I. Phys

ical Review 106, pp. 620-30
E. T. Jaynes (1957b). Information Theory and Statistical Mechanics II.
Physical Review 108, pp. 171-90
E.T. Jaynes introduces the Maximum Entropy approach.
Colin Howson and Peter Urbach (2006). Scientific Reasoning: The Bayesian
Approach. 3rd edition. Chicago: Open Court
Section 9.a covers the Indifference Principle, Harold Jeffreys’s attempts to make
it partition-invariant, and then Jaynes’s Maximum Entropy theory. Very clear
on the flaws of all of these approaches.
5-7 FURTHER READING 167
Teddy Seidenfeld (1986). Entropy and Uncertainty. Philosophy of Science 53,

pp. 467-91
A general discussion of the flaws with Jaynes’s Maximum Entropy approach;

especially good on its incompatibility with Bayesian conditionalization. Also
contains useful references to Jaynes’s many defenses of Maximum Entropy over
the years and to the critical discussion that has ensued.
Credences for Infinite Possibilities
David Papineau (2012). Philosophical Devices: Proofs, Probabilities, Possibil

ities, and Sets. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Chapter 2 offers a highly accessible introduction to the cardinalities of various

infinite sets. (Note that Papineau uses “denumerable” where we use the term
“countable”.)
Alan Hajek (2003). What Conditional Probability Could Not Be. Synthese
137, pp. 273-323
Assesses the viability of the Ratio Formula as a definition of conditional

probability in light of various infinite phenomena and plausible violations of
Regularity.
Colin Howson (2014). Finite Additivity, Another Lottery Paradox and

Conditionalisation. Synthese 191, pp. 989-1012
Neatly surveys arguments for and against Countable Additivity, then argues for
dropping Conditionalization as a universal update rule over accepting infinite
additivity principles.
Timothy Williamson (2007). How Probable Is an Infinite Sequence of

Heads? Analysis 67, pp. 173-80
Brief introduction to the use of infinitesimals in probability distributions,

followed by an argument against using infinitesimals to deal with infinite cases.
Kenny Easwaran (2014b). Regularity and Hyperreal Credences. Philosophi

cal Review 123, pp. 1-41
Excellent, comprehensive discussion of the motivations for Regularity, the

mathematics of infinitesimals, arguments against using infinitesimals to
secure Regularity (including Williamson’s argument), and an alternative
approach.
Jeffrey Conditionalization
Richard C. Jeffrey (1965). The Logic of Decision. 1st edition. McGraw-Hill

Series in Probability and Statistics. New York: McGraw-Hill
Chapter 11 contains Jeffrey’s classic presentation of his “probability kinemat

ics”, now universally known as “Jeffrey Conditionalization”.
Notes
1. The frequency theory is sometimes referred to as “frequentism” and its adherents as

“frequentists”. However “frequentism” more often refers to a school of statistical practice
at odds with Bayesianism (which we’ll discuss in Chapter 13). The ambiguity probably
comes from the fact that most people in that statistical school also adopt the frequency
theory as their interpretation of probability. But the positions are logically distinct and
should be denoted by different terms. So I will use “frequency theory” here, and reserve
“frequentism” for my later discussion of the statistical approach.
2. For many, many more see Hajek (1996) and its sequel Hajek (2009b).
3. The frequency theory will also need to work with counterfactuals if nonextreme prob
abilities can be meaningfully ascribed to a priori truths, or to metaphysical necessities.
(Might a chemist at some point have said, “It’s highly probable that water is H2O”?)
Assigning nonextreme frequencies to such propositions’ truth involves possible worlds
far away from the actual.
4. This difficulty for the propensity theory is often known as Humphreys’s Paradox, since
it was proposed in Humphreys (1985).
One might respond to Humphreys’s Paradox by suggesting that propensities don’t
follow the standard mathematical rules of probability. And honestly, it’s not obvious
why they should. The frequency theory clearly yields probabilistic values: in any
sequence of event repetitions a given outcome has a non-negative frequency, the tautol-
ogous outcome has a frequency of 1, and mutually exclusive outcomes have frequencies
summing to the frequency of their disjunction. In fact, Kolmogorov’s axioms can be
read as a generalization of the mathematics of event frequencies to cases involving
irrational and infinite quantities. But establishing that propensity values (or objective
chances) satisfy the probability axioms takes argumentation from one’s metaphysics of
propensity. Nevertheless, most authors who work with propensities assume that they
satisfy the axioms; if they didn’t, the propensity interpretation’s probabilities wouldn’t
count as probabilities in the mathematician’s sense (Section 2.2).
NOTES 169
5. One could focus here on a metaphysical distinction rather than a semantic one—
instead of asking what “probability” talk means, I could ask what probabilities are. But
some of the probability interpretations we will discuss don’t have clear metaphysical
commitments. The logical interpretation, for instance, takes probability to be a logical
relation, but need not go on to specify an ontology for such relations. So I will stick with
a semantic distinction, which in any case matches how these questions were discussed
in much of twentieth-century analytic philosophy.
6. In the twentieth century Subjective Bayesianism was also typically read as a form of
expressivism; an agents “probability” talk expressed her quantitative attitudes toward
propositions without having truth-conditions. Nowadays alternative semantics are
available that could interpret “probability” talk in a more cognitivist mode while still
reading such talk as reflecting subjective degrees of belief (Weatherson and Egan 2011).
7. See Hacking (1971) for discussion of Leibniz’s position.
8. Carnap himself did not believe all “probability” talk picked out the logical values just
described. Instead, he thought “probability” was ambiguous between two meanings,
one of which was logical probability and the other of which had more of a frequency
interpretation.
9. There is disagreement about whether the logical and evidential interpretations of
probability should be considered Objective Bayesian in the semantic sense. Popper
(1957) says that objective interpretations make probability values objectively testable.
Logical and evidential probabilities don’t satisfy that criterion, and Popper seems to
class them as subjective interpretations. Yet other authors (such as Galavotti 2005)
distinguish between logical and subjective interpretations. I have defined the semantic
Subjective/Objective Bayesian distinction so that logical and evidential interpretations
count as Objective; while they may be normative for the attitudes of agents, logical and
evidential probabilities do not vary with the attitudes particular agents or groups of
agents possess.
10. As I explained in Chapter 4, note 17, defining hypothetical priors as regular does not
commit us to the Regularity Principle as a rational constraint.
11. Those who believe that “probability” is used in many ways—or that there are many
different kinds of entities that count as probabilities—sometimes use the terms “sub
jective probability” and “objective probability”. On this usage, subjective probabilities
are agents’ credences, while objective probabilities include all the kinds of probabilities
we’ve mentioned that are independent of particular agents’ attitudes.
12. To assign H a credence exactly equal to the observed frequency of heads would be to
follow what Reichenbach (1938) called the straight rule. Interestingly, it’s impossible
to construct a hypothetical prior satisfying the probability axioms that allows an
agent to obey the straight rule in its full generality. However, Laplace (1814/1995)
proved that if an agent’s prior satisfies the Principle of Indifference (adopting a “flat”
distribution somewhat like the dashed line in Figure 5.3), her posteriors will obey the
rule of succession: after seeing h of n tosses come up heads, her credence in H will
be (h + 1)∕(h + 2). As the number of tosses increases, this credence approaches the
observed frequency of heads.
Given these difficulties aligning credences and observed frequencies, anyone who
thinks credences should match chances needs to describe a hypothetical prior making
such a match possible. In a moment we’ll see Lewis doing this with the Principal
Principle.
13. Since the ratio of B-outcomes to A-events must always fall between 0 and 1, this
principle sheds some light on why credence values are usually scaled from 0 to 1.
(Compare note 4 above.)
14. There’s also the problem that we sometimes have data from overlapping reference
classes applying to the same case, neither of which is a subclass of the other. The Book
of Odds (Shapiro, Campbell, and Wright 2014, p. 137) reports that 1 in 41.7 adults in
the United States aged 20 or older experiences heart failure in a given year. For non
Hispanic white men 20 or older, the number is 1 in 37. But only 1 in 500 men aged
20-39 experiences heart failure in a given year. In setting my credence that I will have a
heart attack this year, should I use the data for non-Hispanic white men over 20 or the
data for men aged 20-39?
15. Here Γm thinking especially of the following: “What makes it be so that a certain
reasonable initial credence function and a certain reasonable system of basic intrinsic
values are both yours is that you are disposed to act in more or less the ways that
are rationalized by the pair of them together, taking into account the modification of
credence by conditionalizing on total evidence” (Lewis 1980, p. 288).
16. My explanation at this point in the text of screening-off in the Principal Principle fits
very naturally with a propensity-style account of chance. Γm unsure whether it could
be made to work on Lewis’s own “best system” theory of chance (Lewis 1994). As far as
I know, Lewis himself never explains why the screening-off captured by the Principal
Principle should obtain, except to say that it matches our best intuitions about how
rational agents assign credences to chance events.
17. The notion of screening off in play here is the one I described in Chapter 3, note 9
for continuous random variables. The objective chance of H is a continuous variable,
so facts about Ch(H) screen off known flip frequencies from H in the sense that
conditional on setting Ch(H) to any particular value, known frequency information
becomes irrelevant to H.
18. Notice that the time ti to which the chance in the Principal Principle is indexed need
not be the time at which an agent assigns her credence concerning the experimental
outcome A. In our coin example, the agent forms her credence at 1 p.m. about the coin
flip outcome at noon using information about the chances at noon. This is significant
because on some metaphysical theories of chance, once the coin flip lands heads (or
tails) the chance of H goes to 1 (or 0) forevermore. Yet even if the chance of H has
become extreme by 1 p.m., the Principal Principle may still direct an agent to assign
a nonextreme 1 p.m. credence to H if all she knows are the chances from an earlier
time. (Getting this last point wrong is the most frequent mistake I see people make in
applying the Principal Principle. For more such mistakes, see Meacham 2010b.)
I should also note that because chances are time-indexed, the notion of admissibility
must be time-indexed as well. The information about the wad of chewing gum is
admissible relative to 11:30 a.m. chances—learning about the chewing gum affects your
credence about the flip outcome by way of your opinions about the 11:30 a.m. chances.
But the information that chewing gum was stuck to the coin after 11 a.m. is inadmissible
relative to the 11 a.m. chances. (Chewing gum information affects your credence in H,
NOTES 171
but not by influencing your opinions about the chances associated with the coin at 11
a.m.) So strictly speaking we should ask whether a piece of information is admissible
for a particular proposition relative to the chances at a given time. I have suppressed
this complication in the main text.
19. For a partition containing only two members (call them C1 and C2), the unconditional
credence form of the Law of Total Probability tells us that
cr(A) = cr(A ∣ C1) ∙ cr(C1) + cr(A ∣ C2) ■ cr(C2)
The conditional credence form (generated by the procedure described in Section 3.1.2)
tells us that for any E with cr(E) > 0,
cr(A ∣ E) = cr(A ∣ C1 & E) ∙ cr(C11E) + cr(A ∣ C2 & E) ∙ cr(C21E)
20. One caveat I won’t get into is that Lewis’s original (1980) formulation of the Principal
Principle becomes inconsistent if we allow propositions about chances to have chances
of their own, and those chances of chances maybe nonextreme. For why we might allow
this, and how Lewis (and others) reformulated the Principal Principle in response, see
Lewis (1994) and the literature that followed.
21. Equation (5.9) directs the assignment of your unconditional credences only when
information about the opinion of a particular expert is your total relevant evidence
concerning proposition A. If you have additional information about A (perhaps the
opinion of a second expert?), the relevant condition in the conditional credence on the
left-hand side of Equation (5.9) is no longer just crjs(A) = x. (See Exercise (5.2) for
more on this point.)
22. Supposing that your future credences result from your present credences by condition-
alization guarantees that your future self will possess at least as much evidence as your
present self. But it also has the advantage of guaranteeing that future and present selves
both work from the same hypothetical prior distribution (because of the Hypothetical
Priors Theorem, Section 4.3). It’s worth thinking about whether an agent should defer
to the opinions of a database expert who, while having evidence that’s a strict superset
of the agent’s, analyzes that evidence using different epistemic standards.
23. The justification I’ve just provided for Equation (5.11) explicitly uses every one of
the enumerated conditions except Condition 3. Condition 3 is necessary so that the
conditional credence in Equation (5.11) is well defined according to the Ratio Formula.
24. One complication here is that van Fraassen sometimes describes Reflection as relating
attitudes, but at other times portrays it as being about various acts of commitment, and
therefore more directly concerned with assertions and avowals than with particular
mental states.
25. The Reflection Principle applies to times ti and tj with; strictly greater than i. What
would happen if we applied it when j = i? In that case we’d have a principle for how
an agent’s current credences should line up with her credences about her current cre
dences. This principle would engage the results of an agent’s introspection to determine
what her current credences are. An agent’s credences about her own current credences
are her higher-order credences, and they have been the subject of much Bayesian
scrutiny (e.g., Skyrms 1980b). The core issue is how much access a rational agent is
required to have to the contents of her own mind.
26. Joyce (2005) reports that this sort of problem was first identified by John Venn in the
1800s.
27. This example is adapted from one in Salmon (1966, pp. 66-7). A related example is
van Fraassen’s (1989) Cube Factory, which describes a factory making cubes of various
sizes and asks how confident I should be that a given manufactured cube has a size
falling within a particular range. The Principle of Indifference yields conflicting answers
depending on whether cube size is characterized using side length, face area, or volume.
28. In Chapter 14 we will discuss other potential responses to this kind of ignorance.
29. What about cases in which an agent has ruled out the proposition Q? Should rational
agents assign credences conditional on conditions that they’ve ruled out? For discussion
and references on this question, see Titelbaum (2013a, Ch. 5).
30. I was careful to define the Ratio Formula so that it simply goes silent when cr(Q) = 0,
and is therefore in need of supplementation if we want to constrain values like cr(2 12).
Other authors define the Ratio Formula so that it contains the same equation as ours
but leaves off the restriction to cr(Q) > 0 cases. This forces an impossible calculation
when cr(Q) = 0. Alternatively, one can leave the Ratio Formula unrestricted but make
its equation cr(P ∣ Q) ∙ cr(Q) = cr(P & Q). This has the advantage of being true even
when cr(Q) = 0 (because cr(P& Q) will presumably equal 0 as well), but does no better
than our Ratio Formula in constraining the value of cr(2 ∣ 2). (Any value we fill in for
that conditional credence will make the relevant product-equation true.)
31. For a historical overview of the approach and detailed comparison of the disparate
formal systems, see Makinson (2011).
32. Seidenfeld, Schervish, and Kadane (2017) shows that this pattern generalizes: At
each infinite cardinality, we cannot secure the relevant Conglomerability principle
with Additivity principles of lower cardinalities; Conglomerability at a particular level
requires Additivity at that same level.
33. I got the example that follows from Brian Weatherson.
34. Contrast our move from comparative to quantitative representations of doxastic atti
tudes in Chapter 1. There the additional structure of a numerical representation allowed
us to model features like confidence-gap sizes, which plausibly make a difference to
agents’ real-world decisions.
35. Let me quickly tie up one loose end: This section discussed cases in which it might be
rational for an agent to assign unconditional credence 0 to a proposition without ruling
it out. All the cases in which this might be rational involve credence assignments over
infinite partitions. For the rest of this book we will be working with finite partitions,
and will revert to the assumption we were making prior to this section that credence 0
always represents ruling something out.
36. Actually, Jeffrey’s original proposal was a bit more complicated than that. In Jeffrey
(1965) he began withasetofpropositions{B1,¾> ∙ ■ ∙ ,Bn} in which the credence change
originated, but did not require the Bm to form a partition. Instead, he constructed a
set of “atoms”, which we can think of as state-descriptions constructed from the Bm.
(Each atom was a consistent conjunction in which each Bm appeared exactly once,
either affirmed or negated.) The Rigidity condition (which Jeffrey sometimes called
“invariance”) and Jeffrey Conditionalization were then applied to these atoms rather
than directly to the Bm in which the credence change originated.
NOTES 173
Notice that in this construction the atoms form a partition. Further, Jeffrey
recognized that if the Bm themselves formed a partition, the atoms wound up in a
one-to-one correspondence with the Bm to which they were logically equivalent. I
think it’s for this reason that Jeffrey later (2004, Ch. 3) dropped the business with
“atoms” and applied his probability kinematics directly to any finite partition.
37. Though see Lange (2000) for an argument that this order-dependence is not a problem
because the character of the experiences changes when they’re temporally rearranged.
38. Interestingly, the main thrust of van Fraassen’s article is that while Maximum Entropy
is capable of providing a solution to the Judy Benjamin Problem, that solution is
intuitively unappealing.
39. Because we’re going to be using the entropy values only for comparative purposes, in
the end it won’t make a difference what base we use for the logarithms in Equation
(5.13). But just to make your answers easily checkable with others’, please follow Jaynes
(1957a) in using the natural log In.
40. I owe this problem to Sarah Moss.
Glossary for Volume 1
actual world The possible world in which we live. Events that actually happen happen
in the actual world. 26
admissible evidence Evidence that, if it has any effect on an agent’s credence in an

outcome of an event, does so by way of affecting the agent’s credences about the
outcome’s objective chance. 135
analyst expert Expert to whom one defers because of her skill at forming attitudes on
the basis of evidence. 142
antecedent In a conditional of the form “If P, then Q,” P is the antecedent. 26
atomic proposition A proposition in language £ that does not contain any con
nectives or quantifiers. An atomic proposition is usually represented either as a
single capital letter (P, Q, R, etc.) or as a predicate applied to some constants
(Fa, Lab, etc.). 26
Base Rate Fallacy Assigning a posterior credence to a hypothesis that overemphasizes

the likelihoods associated with one’s evidence and underemphasizes one’s prior in the
hypothesis. 97
Bayes factor For a given piece of evidence, the ratio of the likelihood of the hypothesis
to the likelihood of the catchall. An update by Conditionalization multiplies your
odds for the hypothesis by the Bayes factor of your evidence. 98
Bayes Net A diagram of causal relations among variables developed from information
about probabilistic dependencies among them. 75
Bayes’s Theorem For any H and E in £, cr(JT ∣ E) = cr(E ∣ H) ■ cr(H)∕cr(E). 61
Belief Closure If some subset of the propositions an agent believes entails a fur
ther proposition, rationality requires the agent to believe that further proposition
as well. 6
Belief Consistency Rationality requires the set of propositions an agent believes to be

logically consistent. 6
Bertrand’s Paradox When asked how probable it is that a chord of a circle is longer
than the side of an inscribed equilateral triangle, the Principle of Indifference
produces different answers depending on how the chord is specified. 147
catchall The proposition that the hypothesis H under consideration is false (in other
words, the proposition ~Ef). 64
176 GLOSSARY FOR VOLUME 1
classical probability The number of favorable event outcomes divided by the total
number of outcomes possible. 124
classificatory concept Places an entity in one of a small number of kinds. 4
common cause A single event that causally influences at least two other events. 73
commutative Updating by Conditionalization is commutative in the sense that updat

ing first on E then on E, has the same effect as updating in the opposite order. 94
comparative concept Places one entity in order with respect to another. 4
Comparative Entailment For propositions P and Q, if P 1= Q then rationality requires

an agent to be at least as confident of Q as P. 11
condition In a conditional credence, the proposition the agent supposes. 56
conditional credence A degree of belief assigned to an ordered pair of propositions,

indicating how confident the agent is that the first proposition is true on the
supposition that the second is. 56
conditional independence When cr(Q & R) > 0, P is probabilistically independent of

Q conditional on R just in case cr(P ∣ Q & R) = cr(P ∣ R). 68
Conditionalization For any time ti and later time tj, if proposition E in Z represents
everything the agent learns between t; and tj, and crl∙(E) > 0, then for any H in Z,
ctj(EΓ) = cri(H ∣ E) (Bayesians’ traditional updating rule). 91
Conglomerability For each proposition P and partition {Q1, Q2, Q3, ...} in Z, cr(P)
is no greater than the largest cr(P ∣ Qj∙) and no less than the least cr(P ∣ Qi). 153
conjunction P & Q is a conjunction; P and Q are its conjuncts. 26
Conjunction Fallacy Being more confident in a conjunction than you are in one of its
conjuncts. 39
consequent In a conditional of the form “If P, then Q,” Q is the consequent. 26
consistent The propositions in a set are consistent when at least one possible world
makes all the propositions true. 28
constant A lower-case letter in language Z representing an object in the universe of

discourse. 30
contingent A proposition that is neither a tautology nor a contradiction. 28
contradiction A proposition that is false in every possible world. 28
Contradiction For any contradiction F in Z, cr(F) = 0. 34
Countable Additivity For any countable set {Q1, Q2, Q3, ...} of mutually exclusive
propositions in Z, cr(Q1 V Q2 V Q3 V ...) = cr(Q1) + cr(Q2) + cr(Q3) + .... 152
credence Degree of belief. 3

GLOSSARY FOR VOLUME 1 177
cumulative Updating by Conditionalization is cumulative in the sense that updating

first on evidence E and then on evidence E' has the same net effect as updating once,
on the conjunction E&E'. 94
database expert Expert to whom one defers because her evidence includes one’s own,
and more. 142
Decomposition For any propositions P and Q in £, cr(P) = cr(P & Q) +

cr(P&~Q). 34
deference principle Any principle directing an agent to align her current credences
with some other distribution (such as objective chances, credences of an expert, or
credences of her future self). 141
direct inference Determining how likely one is to obtain a particular experimental

result from probabilistic hypotheses about the setup. 61
disjunction P V Q is a disjunction; P and Q are its disjuncts. 26
disjunctive normal form The disjunctive normal form of a non-contradictory

proposition is the disjunction of state-descriptions that is equivalent to that
proposition. 30
distribution An assignment of real numbers to each proposition in language £.31
doxastic attitude A belief-like representational propositional attitude. 3
doxastically possible worlds The subset of possible worlds that a given agent enter
tains. 37
entailment P entails Q (P 1= Q) just in case there is no possible world in which P

is true and Q is false. On a Venn diagram, the P-region is wholly contained in the
Q-region. 28
Entailment For any propositions P and Q in £, if P 1= Q then cr(P) ≤ cr(Q). 34
epistemic standards Applying an agent’s ultimate epistemic standards to her total

evidence at a given time yields her doxastic attitudes at that time. Bayesians represent
ultimate epistemic standards as hypothetical priors. 107
Equivalence For any propositions P and Q in £, if P =11= Q then cr(P) =

cr(Q). 34
equivalent Equivalent propositions are associated with the same set of possible
worlds. 28
evidential probability The degree to which a body of evidence probabilities a hypoth

esis, understood as independent of any particular agent’s attitudes. 131
evidentialism The position that what attitudes are rationally permissible for an agent
supervenes on her evidence. 130
exhaustive The propositions in a set are jointly exhaustive if each possible world makes
at least one of the propositions in the set true. 28
falsification A piece of evidence falsifies a hypothesis if it refutes that hypothesis

relative to one’s background assumptions. 67
Finite Additivity For any mutually exclusive propositions P and Q in 23, cr(P V Q) =
cr(P) + cr(Q) (one of the three probability axioms). 32
Finite Additivity (Extended) For any finite set of mutually exclusive propositions
{P1, P2, ..., Pn}, cr(P1 V P2 V ... V Pn) = cr(P1) + cr(P2) + ... + cr(Pn). 34
frequency theory An interpretation of probability according to which the probability

is x that event A will have outcome B just in case fraction x of events like A have
outcomes like B. 125
Gambler’s Fallacy Expecting later outcomes of an experiment to “compensate” for

unexpected previous results despite the probabilistic independence of future results
from those in the past. 68
General Additivity For any propositions P and Q in 23, cr(P V Q) = cr(P) + cr(Q) —
cr(P&Q). 34
higher-order credences An agent’s credences about her own current credences.

Includes both her credences about what her current credence-values are and her
credences about what those values should be. 171
Humphreys’s Paradox Difficulty for the propensity interpretation of probability that

when the probability of E given H can be understood in terms of propensities it is
often difficult to interpret the probability of H given £ as a propensity as well. 168
hypothetical frequency theory Interpretation of probability that looks not at the pro
portion of actual events producing a particular outcome but instead at the proportion
of such events that would produce that outcome in the limit. 127
hypothetical prior distribution A regular, probabilistic distribution used to represent

an agent’s ultimate epistemic standards. The agent’s credence distribution at a given
time can be recovered by conditionalizing her hypothetical prior on her total evi
dence at that time. 110
Hypothetical Priors Theorem Given any finite series of credence distributions

{cr1, cr2, ..., crn} each of which satisfies the probability axioms and Ratio Formula,
let Ei be a conjunction of the agent’s total evidence at ti. If each cri is related to cη+1
as specified by Conditionalization, then there exists at least one regular probability
distribution PrH such that for all 1 <i <n, cri(∙) = P⅛(∙ ∣ Et∙). 110
IID trials Independent, identically distributed probabilistic events. Trials are IID if the
probabilities associated with a given trial are unaffected by the outcomes of other
trials (independence), and if each trial has the same probability of producing a given
outcome (identically distributed). 87
inconsistent The propositions in a set are inconsistent when there is no possible world
in which all of them are true. 28
independence When cr(Q) > 0, proposition P is probabilistically independent of

proposition Q relative to cr just in case cr(P ∣ Q) = cr(P). 65
infinitesimal A number that is greater than zero but less than any positive real
number. 155
initial prior distribution Credence distribution assigned by an agent before she pos
sessed any contingent evidence. 106
interpretations of probability Philosophical theories about the nature of probability

and the meanings of linguistic probability expressions. 124
inverse inference Determining how likely a probabilistic hypothesis is on the basis of

a particular run of experimental data. 62
irrelevant Probabilistically independent. 65
Jeffrey Conditionalization Proposed by Richard C. Jeffrey as an alternative updating

rule to Conditionalization, holds that for any ti and tj∙ with i < j, any A in £, and a
finite partition {B1, B2, ..., Bn} in £ whose members each have nonzero cri, crj∙(A) =
cri(A ∣ B1) ∙ cr∕B1) + cr,∙(A ∣ B2) ∙ cr∕B2) + ... + cri∙(A ∣ Bn) ∙ crj∙(Bn). 157
Judy Benjamin Problem An example proposed by Bas van Fraassen in which an

agent’s experience directly alters some of her conditional credence values, van
Fraassen argued that this example could not be addressed by traditional Condition
alization or by Jeffrey Conditionalization. 161
just in case If and only if. 26
Kolmogorov’s axioms The three axioms (Non-Negativity, Normality, and Finite

Additivity) that provide necessary and sufficient conditions for a probability
distribution. 32
Law of Total Probability For any proposition? and finite partition {Q1, Q2,..., Qn}in
£, cr(P) = cr(P ∣ Q1) ∙ cr(Q1) + cr(P ∣ Q2) ∙ cr(Q2) + ... + cr(P ∣ Q„) ∙ cr(Qn). 59
likelihood The probability of some particular piece of evidence on the supposition of

a particular hypothesis—cr(P ∣ H). 62
linear combination When applied to three numerical variables, z is a linear combi

nation of x and y just in case there exist constants a and b such that z = ax + by.
For instance, Finite Additivity requires cr(X V Y) = cr(X) + cr(Y), making the
credence in a disjunction a linear combination of the credences in its mutually
exclusive disjuncts (with the two constants a and b each set to 1). When applied to
probability distributions, distribution Prz over language £ is a linear combination of
distributions Prx and Pry over £ just in case there exists some 0 ≤ a ≤ 1 such that
for every proposition P E £, Prz(P) = α ∙ Prx(P) + (1 — α) ∙ Prj,(P). 54
Lockean thesis Connects believing a proposition with having a degree of confidence

in that proposition above a numerical threshold. 15
logical probability The degree to which a body of evidence probabilities a hypothesis,

understood as a logical relation similar to deductive entailment. 131
logically possible A world is logically possible when it violates no laws of logic. So, for
instance, a world with no gravity is physically impossible because it violates the laws
of physics, but it is logically possible. 37
Lottery Paradox Paradox for requirements of logical belief consistency and closure
involving a lottery with a large number of tickets. 8
material biconditional A material biconditional P ≡ Q is true just in case P and Q are

both true or P and Q are both false. 26
material conditional A material conditional P D Q is false just in case its antecedent

P is true and its consequent Q is false. 26
Maximally For any proposition Pin £, cr(P) ≤ 1. 34
Maximum Entropy Principle Given any partition of the space of possibilities, and
any set of constraints on allowable credence distributions over that partition, the
Maximum Entropy Principle selects the allowable distribution with the highest
entropy. 147
monotonicity If a property is monotonic, then whenever proposition E bears the

property, every conjunction containing E as a conjunct bears the property as well.
101
Monty Hall Problem A famous probabilistic puzzle case, demonstrating the impor
tance of taking an agent’s total evidence into account. 102
Multiplication When P and Q have nonextreme cr-values, P and Q are probabilistically

independent relative to cr if and only if cr(P & Q) = cr(P) ∙ cr(Q). 65
mutually exclusive The propositions in a set are mutually exclusive when there is no
possible world in which more than one of the propositions is true. 28
negation ~P is the negation of P. 26
Negation For any proposition Pin E, cr(~P) = 1 — cr(P). 33
negative relevance When cr(Q) > 0, Q is negatively relevant to P relative to cr just in

case cr(P ∣ Q) < cr(P). 66
Non-Negativity For any proposition P in £, cr(P) ≥ 0 (one of the three probability

axioms). 32
nonmonotonicity Probabilistic relations are nonmonotonic in the sense that even if H

is highly probable given E, H might be improbable given the conjunction of E with
some E'. 102
Normality For any tautology T in cr(T) = 1 (one of the three probability

axioms). 32
normalization factor In an update by Conditionalization, state-descriptions inconsis

tent with E (the evidence learned) have their unconditional credences sent to zero.
The remaining state-descriptions all have their unconditional credences multiplied
by the same normalization factor, equal to the reciprocal of E’s prior. 119
normative distinction The normative distinction between Subjective and Objective

Bayesians concerns the strength of rationality’s requirements. Distinguished this
way, Objective Bayesians hold that there is exactly one rationally permissible set
of epistemic standards (/hypothetical priors), so that any body of total evidence
gives rise to a unique rational attitude toward any particular proposition. Subjective
Bayesians deny that rational requirements are strong enough to mandate a unique
attitude in every case. 129
objective chance A type of physical probability that can be applied to the single
case. 128
observation selection effect Effect on the appropriate conclusions to draw from a

piece of evidence introduced by the manner in which that evidence was obtained
(for example, the method by which a sample was drawn). 102
odds If an agent’s unconditional credence in P is cr(P), her odds for P are cr(P) :
cr(~P), and her odds against P are cr(~P) : cr(P). 45
partition A mutually exclusive, jointly exhaustive set of propositions. On a Venn

diagram, the regions representing propositions in a partition combine to fill the entire
rectangle without overlapping at any point. 29
Partition For any finite partition of propositions in £, the sum of their unconditional
cr-values is 1. 34
permissive case An example in which two agents with identical total evidence
assign different credences without either agent’s thereby being irrational. Objective
Bayesians in the normative sense deny the existence of permissive cases. 131
positive relevance When cr(Q) > 0, Q is positively relevant to P relative to cr just in

case cr(P ∣ Q) > cr(P). 66
possible worlds Different ways the world might have come out. Possible worlds are
maximally specified—for any event and any possible world that event either does or
does not occur in that world—and the possible worlds are plentiful enough such that
for any combination of events that could happen, there is a possible world in which
that combination of events does happen. 26
posterior The probability of some hypothesis on the supposition of a particular piece

of evidence—P(H ∣ E). 63
practical rationality Concerns the connections between attitudes and actions. 7

predicate A capital letter representing a property or relation in language £. 30

Preface Paradox Paradox for requirements of logical belief consistency and closure in
which the preface to a nonfiction book asserts that at least one of the claims in the
book is false. 8
Principal Principle David Lewis’s proposal for how rational credences concerning an
event incorporate suppositions about the objective chances of that event’s possible
outcomes. 136
Principle of Indifference If an agent has no evidence favoring any proposition in a
partition over any other, she should spread her credence equally over the members
of the partition. 146
Principle of the Common Cause When event outcomes are probabilistically corre
lated, either one causes the other or they have a common cause. 73
Principle of Total Evidence A rational agent’s credence distribution takes into account
all of the evidence she possesses. 102
prior An unconditional probability; the probability of a proposition before anything
has been supposed. For example, an agent’s prior credence in a particular hypothesis
His cr(H). 63
probabilism The thesis that rationality requires an agent’s credences to satisfy the
probability axioms. 33
probabilistically independent When cr(Q) > 0, P is probabilistically independent of
Q relative to cr just in case cr(P ∣ Q) = cr(P). 65
probability axioms Kolmogorov’s axioms. 32

probability distribution Any distribution satisfying Kolmogorov’s probability
axioms. 32
probability kinematics What Richard C. Jeffrey, its inventor, called the updating rule
now generally known as “Jeffrey Conditionalization”. 157
probability table A table that assigns unconditional credences to each member in a
partition. To satisfy the probability axioms, the values in each row must be non
negative and all the values must sum to 1. When the partition members are state
descriptions of a language £, the values in the probability table suffice to specify all
of the agent’s credences over £.41
problem of the single case The challenge of interpreting probability such that single
(and perhaps non-repeatable) events may receive nonextreme probabilities. 127
propensity theory Interpretation of probability identifying probability with a physical
arrangement’s quantifiable tendency to produce outcomes of a particular kind. 127
proposition An abstract entity expressible by a declarative sentence and capable of
having a truth-value. 3
propositional attitude An attitude adopted by an agent toward a proposition or set of
propositions. 3
propositional connective One of five truth-functional symbols (~, &, V, D, ≡) used

to construct larger propositions from atomic propositions. 26
quantitative concept Characterizes an entity by ascribing it a numerical value. 4
Ratio Formula For any P and Q in £, if cr(Q) > 0 then cr(P ∣ Q) = cr(P & Q)∕cr(Q).
The Bayesian rational constraint relating an agents conditional credences to her
unconditional credences. 57
reference class problem When considering a particular event and one of its possible
outcomes, the frequency with which this type of event produces that type of outcome
depends on which reference class (event-type) we choose out of the many to which
the event belongs. 126
Reflection Principle For any proposition A in £>, real number x, and times ti and tj
with; > i, rationality requires cr1∙(A ∣ cq∙(A) = x) = x. 143
refutation P refutes Q just in case P entails ~Q. When P refutes Q, every world that
makes P true makes Q false. 28
regular A distribution that does not assign the value 0 to any logically contingent
propositions. 99
Regularity Principle In a rational credence distribution, no logically contingent
proposition receives unconditional credence 0. 99
relevant Not probabilistically independent. 66
Rigidity condition For any A in £ and any Bm in the finite partition {B1, B2, ..., Bn},
cry(A ∣ Bm) = cη(A ∣ Bm). This condition obtains between ti and tj just in case the
agent Jeffrey Conditionalizes across {B1,B2, ..., Bn}. 159
rule of succession Laplace’s rule directing an agent who has witnessed h heads on n
independent flips of a coin to set credence (h +1)∕(n + 2) that the next flip will come
up heads. 169
screening off R screens off P from Q when P is unconditionally relevant to Q but not
relevant to Q conditional on either R or ~R. 68
semantic distinction When classified according to the semantic distinction, Sub
jective Bayesians take “probability” talk to reveal the credences of agents, while
Objective Bayesians assign “probability” assertions truth-conditions independent of
the attitudes of particular agents or groups of agents. 129
sigma algebra A set of sets closed under union, intersection, and complementation.
A probability distribution can be assigned over a sigma algebra containing sets of
possible worlds instead of over a language containing propositions. 52
Simple Binarist A made-up character who describes agents’ doxastic propositional
attitudes exclusively in terms of belief, disbelief, and suspension of judgment. 5
Simpson’s Paradox Two propositions may be correlated conditional on each member
of a partition yet anti-correlated unconditionally. 70
state-description A conjunction of language T in which (1) each conjunct is either an

atomic proposition of £ or its negation; and (2) each atomic proposition of £ appears
exactly once. 29
straight rule Reichenbach’s name for the norm setting an agent’s credence that the
next event of type A will produce an outcome of type B exactly equal to the observed
frequency of B-outcomes in past A-events. 169
strict Conditionalization Another name for the Conditionalization updating rule.

The “strict” is usually used to emphasize a contrast with Jeffrey Conditionalization.
160
subadditive In a subadditive distribution, there exist mutually exclusive P and Q in £

such that cr(P V Q) < cr(P) + cr(Q). 51
substitution instance A substitution instance of a quantified sentence is produced by

removing the quantifier and replacing its variable throughout what remains with the
same constant. 31
superadditive In a superadditive distribution, there exist mutually exclusive P and Q

in Z} such that cr(P V Q) > cr(P) + cr(Q). 47
supervenience A-properties supervene on B-properties just in case any two objects

that differ in their A-properties also differ in their B-properties. For example, one’s
score on a test supervenes on the answers one provides; if two students got different
scores on the same test, their answers must have differed. 58
tautology A proposition that is true in every possible world. 28
theoretical rationality Evaluates representational attitudes in their capacity as repre

sentations, without considering how they influence action. 7
truth-value True and false are truth-values. We assume propositions are capable of
having truth-values. 3
unconditional credence An agent’s degree of belief in a proposition, without making

any suppositions beyond her current background information. 32
Uniqueness Thesis Given any proposition and body of total evidence, there is exactly
one attitude it is rationally permissible for agents with that body of total evidence to
adopt toward that proposition. 129
universe of discourse The set of objects under discussion. 30
ur-prior Alternate name for a hypothetical prior distribution. 106
Venn Diagram Diagram in which an agent’s doxastically possible worlds are repre
sented as points in a rectangle. Propositions are represented by regions containing
those points, with the area of a region often representing the agent’s credence in an
associated proposition. 26
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Index of Names in Volume 1
Adams, Ernest 79 Feldman, Richard 129

Alchourron, Carlos E. 22 Fisher, R.A. 87
Arntzenius, Frank 86 Fitelson, Branden 22, 52, 87, 89
Foley, Richard 15, 20,121
Barshad, Amos 21 Folz, William 21
Bartha, Paul 122
Bayes, Reverend Thomas 61 Gardenfors, Peter 22
Bell, Elizabeth 22 Galavotti, Maria Carla xxi, 53, 87, 111,
Bengson, John 20 164, 169
Bergmann, Merrie 51 Gillies, Donald 165
Bernoulli, Jacob 125 Good, I.J. 22,121
Bertrand, Joseph 147
Bickel, P. J. 71 Hajek, Alan 85, 86, 87,121,165, 167,168
Bolzano, Bernard 131 Hacking, Ian xxi, 51,118,169
Bradley, Darren xxi, 120 Hall, Monty 102
Bramley-Moore, L. 88 Hall, Ned 142
Hammel, E.A. 71
Callahan, Laura 121 Hart, Casey 122
Campbell, Louise Firth 170 Hempel, Carl G. xxiii
Campbell-Moore, Catrin 89,121 Hitchcock, Christopher R. 85,122
Cariani, Fabrizio 89 Holton, Richard 22
Carnap, Rudolf xxiii, 4, 22, 54,102,118, Hosiasson-Lindenbaum, Janina 152
121,131 Howson, Colin xxi, 120,166,167
Cartwright, Nancy 88 Hume, David 20
Christensen, David 16,20 Humphreys, Paul 168
Clatterbuck, Hayley 87
Cromwell, Oliver 120 Jackson, Elizabeth G. 19
Cronin, Patrick 120 Jaynes, E.T. 147, 166,173
Jeffrey, Richard C, xxiii, 99,132,
Davidson, Donald 21 156-161,168
de Bona, Glauber 89 Jeffreys, Harold 166
de Finetti, Bruno 111, 132,165 Joyce, James M. 88,172
Debowsky, Maria xxiii
Kadane, J. B. 172
Earman, John xxi Kahneman, Daniel 38, 50, 97
Easwaran, Kenny 167 Keynes, John Maynard 131,146,166
Eddington, A. 102 Kim, Jaegwon 21
Egan, Andy 169 Kolmogorov, Andrey 32,51
Elga, Adam 165 Kornblith, Hilary 21
Ellenberg, Jordan 120 Kuhn, Thomas S. 108
Ellis, Robert Leslie 125 Kyburg Jr., Henry E. 8, 20
192 INDEX OF NAMES IN VOLUME 1
Lance, Mark Norris 22 Salmon, Wesley 172

Lange, Alexandra 22 Schervish, M. J. 172
Lange, Marc 173 Schwarz, Wolfgang 88
Laplace, Pierre-Simon xiii, 87, Seidenfeld, Teddy 167,172
124.169 Selvin, Steve 102
Leblanc, H. 53,152 Shapiro, Amram 170
Lee, A. 88 Simpson, E. H. 88
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm Skyrms, Brian xxi, 51,171
von 131 Spohn, Wolfgang 22
Levi, Isaac 101,118,121 Staffel, Julia 54,122
Lewis, C.I. 100,156 Stephenson, Todd A. 85
Lewis, David 78, 86,107,119,128, Stern, Reuben 88
133-141,165 Strevens, Michael xxi
Lindley, Dennis V. 120
Locke, John 15 Talbott, William J. xxi
Lubliner, Irving 89 Teller, Paul 118
Lynch, Kevin 22 Thomason, Richard 120
Titelbaum, Michael G. xxiii, 88,121, 122,
Makinson, David C. 8, 20, 22,172 166,172
Mazurkiewicz, Stefan 53 Tversky, Amos 38, 50, 97
Meacham, Christopher J.G. 119,170
Moon, Andrew 22 Urbach, Peter xxi, 166
Moor, James 51
Moss, Sarah 20,22,88,122,173 vanFraassen, Bas 86,142-145,148,161,
165, 172
Nelson, Jack 51 Velasco, Joel xxiii, 22,119
Venn, John 26,125,172
O’Connell, J. W. 71 Vineberg, Susan 121
von Mises, Richard 125
Papineau, David 167
Pascal, Blaise 7 Wainer, Howard 120
Pearson, K. 88 Wald, Abraham 120
Peirce, Charles Sanders 128 Weatherson, Brian xxi, 169,172
Pettigrew, Richard 166 Weintraub, Ruth 20
Pollock, John L. 22 Weisberg, Jonathan xxi, 166
Popper, Karl R. 53,128, White, Roger 129
152.169 Williams, J. Robert G. 52
Price, Richard 87 Williams, Jerome 88
Williamson, Timothy 167
Ramsey, E P. 76, 89,132 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 53
Reichenbach, Hans 62, 72, 84, Wright, Rosalind 170
85.169
Renyi, Alfred 152 Yalcin, Seth 89
Roeper, P. 53,152 Yule,G.U. 88
PART III
APPLICATIONS
Volume 1 of this book explained why we might want to theorize about degrees
of belief, then laid out the five core normative rules of Bayesian epistemology:
Kolmogorov’s three probability axioms, the Ratio Formula for conditional
credences, and updating by Conditionalization. We also (in Chapter 5) inves
tigated some further norms that might be adopted in addition to—or in place
of—the core rules.
Γm sure as you worked through that material, a number of objections to
and problems for those norms occurred to you. Hopefully many of those
will be addressed when we get to Part V of the book. First, though, we will
ask why Bayesian epistemologists believe in the norms to begin with. Part
IV considers explicit, premise-conclusion style philosophical arguments for
the Bayesian rules. But as I see it, what actually convinced most practioners
to adopt Bayesian epistemology—to accept that agents can be usefully repre
sented as assigning numerical degrees of belief, and that rationality requires
those degrees of belief to satisfy certain mathematical constraints—were the
applications in which this approach found success.
Our discussion has already covered some minor successes of Bayesian
epistemology. For example, while a purely binary doxastic view has trouble
furnishing agents with a rational, plausible set of attitudes to adopt in the Lot
tery Paradox (Section 1.1.2), Bayesian epistemology has no trouble sketching a
set of lottery credences that are intuitively appropriate and entirely consistent
with Bay⅛ian norms (Section 2.2.2).
Now we are after bigger targets. At one time or another, Bayesianism has
been applied to offer positive theories of such central philosophical concepts as
explanation, coherence, causation, and information. Yet the two applications
most central to the historical development of Bayesian epistemology were
confirmation theory and decision theory. As these two subjects grew over the
course of the twentieth century and cemented their significance in philosophy
(as well as economics and other nearby disciplines), Bayesian epistemology
came to be viewed more and more as an indispensible philosophical tool.
194 APPLICATIONS
Each chapter in this part of the book takes up one of those two applications.
Confirmation is tied to a number of central notions in theoretical rationality,
such as induction, justification, evidential support, and epistemic reasons.
Bayesian epistemology provides the most detailed, substantive, and plausible
account of confirmation philosophers have available, not only accounting
for the broad contours of the concept but also yielding particular results
concerning specific evidential situations. Decision theory, meanwhile, con
cerns rational action under uncertainty, and so is a central plank of practical
rationality and the theory of rational choice. Degrees of belief have been
indispensible to decision theory since its inception.
Volumes have been written on each of these subjects, so these two chapters
aim merely to introduce you to their historical development, identify some
successes achieved, and point to some lingering controversies. More informa
tion can be found through the Further Reading sections in each chapter. As for
the applications of Bayesian epistemology not covered here, you might start
with the book cited below.
Further Reading
Luc Bovens and Stephan Hartmann (2003). Bayesian Epistemology. Oxford:

Oxford University Press
Discusses applications of Bayesian epistemology to information, coherence,

reliability, confirmation, and testimony.
Confirmation
When evidence supports a hypothesis, philosophers of science say that the

evidence “confirms” that hypothesis. Bayesians place this confirmation rela
tion at the center of their theory of induction. But confirmation is also closely
tied to such epistemological notions as justification and reasons. Bayesian
epistemology offers a systematic theory of confirmation (and its opposite,
disconfirmation) that not only deepens our understanding of this relation but
also provides specific answers about which hypotheses are supported (and to
what degree) in particular evidential situations.
Since its early days, the analysis of confirmation has been driven by a
perceived analogy to deductive entailment. In Chapter 4 we discussed epis-
temic standards that relate a body of evidence (represented as a proposition)
to the doxastic attitudes it supports. But confirmation—though intimately
linked with epistemic standards in ways we’ll presently see—is a different
kind of relation: instead of relating a proposition and an attitude, it relates
two propositions (evidence and hypothesis). Confirmation shares this feature
with deductive entailment. In fact, Rudolf Carnap thought of confirmation as
a generalization of traditional logical relations, with deductive entailment and
refutation as two extremes of a continuous confirmational scale.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, logicians produced
ever-more-powerful syntactical theories capable of answering specific ques
tions about which propositions deductively entailed which. Impressed by this
progress, theorists such as Carl Hempel and Carnap envisioned a syntactical
theory that would do the same for confirmation. As Hempel put it:
The theoretical problem remains the same: to characterize, in precise and

general terms, the conditions under which a body of evidence can be said to
confirm, or to disconfirm, a hypothesis of empirical character. (1945a, p. 7)
Hempel identified various formal properties that the confirmation relation

might or might not possess. Carnap then argued that we get a confir
mation relation with exactly the right formal properties by identifying
confirmation with positive probabilistic relevance.
Fundamentals of Bayesian Epistemology 2: Arguments, Challenges, Alternatives. Michael G. Titelbaum,

Oxford University Press. © Michael G. Titelbaum 2022. DOI: 10.1093∕oso∕9780192863140.003.0006
196 CONFIRMATION
This chapter begins with Hempel’s formal conditions on the confirmation

relation. Identifying the right formal conditions for confirmation will not only
help us assess various theories of confirmation; it will also help us understand
exactly what relation philosophers of science have in mind when they talk
about “confirmation”.1 We then move on to Carnaps Objective Bayesian the
ory of confirmation, which grounds confirmation in probability theory. While
Carnaps theory has a number of attractive features, we will also identify two
drawbacks: its failure to capture particular patterns of inductive inference that
Carnap found appealing, and the language-dependence suggested by Good
mans “grue” problem. We’ll respond to these problems with a confirmation
theory based on Subjective Bayesianism (in the normative sense).
Confirmation is fairly undemanding, in one sense: we say that evidence con
firms a hypothesis when it provides any amount of support for that hypothesis,
no matter how small. But we might want to distinguish bodies of evidence
that strongly support hypotheses from those that provide only weak support.
Probabilistic theories of confirmation offer a number of different ways to
measure the strength of confirmation in any particular case. In Section 6.4.1
we’ll survey these different measures of confirmational strength, assessing the
pros and cons of each. Finally, we’ll apply probabilistic confirmation theory to
provide a Bayesian solution to Hempel’s Paradox of the Ravens.
6.1 Formal features of the confirmation relation
6.1.1 Confirmation is weird! The Paradox of the Ravens
One way to begin thinking about confirmation is to consider the simplest

possible cases in which a piece of evidence confirms a general hypothesis. For
example, the proposition that a particular frog is green seems to confirm the
hypothesis that all frogs are green. On the other hand, the proposition that a
particular frog is not green disconfirms the hypothesis that all frogs are green.
(In fact, it refutes that hypothesis!) If we think this pattern always holds, we
will maintain that confirmation satisfies the following constraint:
Nicod’s Criterion: For any predicates F and G and constant a of £, (Vx)

(Fx D Gx) is confirmed by Fa & Ga and disconfirmed by Fa & ~Gα.
Hempel (1945a,b) named this condition after Jean Nicod (1930), who built
his theory of induction around the criterion. We sometimes summarize the
6.1 FORMAL FEATURES OF CONFIRMATION 197
Nicod Criterion by saying that a universal generalization is confirmed by its

positive instances and disconfirmed by its negative instances. Notice that
one can endorse the Nicod Criterion as a sufficient condition for confirmation
without taking it to be necessary; we need not think all cases of confirmation
follow this pattern.
Yet Hempel worries about the Nicod Criterion even as a sufficient condi
tion for confirmation, because of how it interacts with another principle he
endorses:
Equivalence Condition (for hypotheses): Suppose H and H' in £ are logi

cally equivalent (H =11= Jf'). Then any E in JE that confirms H also
confirms H,.
Hempel endorses the Equivalence Condition because he doesn’t want confir

mation to depend on the particular way a hypothesis is formulated; logically
equivalent hypotheses say the same thing, so they should enter equally into
confirmation relations. Hempel is also concerned with how working scientists
use confirmed hypotheses; for instance, practitioners will often deduce pre
dictions and explanations from confirmed hypotheses. Equivalent hypotheses
have identical deductive consequences, and scientists don’t hesitate to substi
tute logical equivalents for each other.
But combining Nicod’s Criterion with the Equivalence Condition yields
counterintuitive consequences, which Hempel calls the “paradoxes of confir
mation”. The most famous of these is the Paradox of the Ravens. Consider the
hypothesis that all ravens are black, representable as (Vx)(Rx D Bx). By Nicod’s
Criterion this hypothesis is confirmed by the evidence that a particular raven
is black, Ra &. Ba. But now consider the evidence that a particular non-raven is
non-black, ~Ba&.~Ra. This is a positive instance of the hypothesis (Vx)(~Bx Ξ>
~Rx), so by Nicod’s Criterion it confirms that hypothesis. By contraposition,
that hypothesis is equivalent to the hypothesis that all ravens are black. So by
the Equivalence Condition, ~Ba & ~Ra confirms (Vx)(Rx D Bx) as well. The
hypothesis that all ravens are black is confirmed by the observation of a red
herring, or a white shoe. This result seems counterintuitive, to say the least.
Nevertheless, Hempel writes that “the impression of a paradoxical situa
tion. .. is a psychological illusion” (1945a, p. 18); on his view, we reject the
confirmational result because we misunderstand what it says. Hempel notes
that in everyday life people make confirmation judgments relative to an exten
sive corpus of background knowledge. For example, a candidate’s performance
in an interview may confirm that she’d be good for the job, but only relative to a
198 CONFIRMATION
great deal of background information about how the questions asked relate to
the job requirements, how interview performance predicts job performance,
etc. In assessing confirmation, then, we should always be explicit about the
background we’re assuming. This is especially important because background
knowledge can dramatically alter confirmation relations. For example, in
Section 4.3 we discussed a poker game in which you receive the cards that
will make up your hand one at a time. At the beginning of the game, your
background knowledge contains facts about how a deck is constructed and
about which poker hands are winners. At that point the proposition that your
last card will be the two of clubs does not confirm the proposition that you will
win the hand. But as the game goes along and you’re dealt some other twos,
your total background knowledge changes such that the proposition that you’ll
receive the two of clubs now strongly confirms that you’ll win.
Nicod’s Criterion does not mention background corpora, so it’s tempting
to apply the criterion with full generality—that is, regardless of which corpus
which use. Yet there are clearly some evidential situations in which a positive
instance does not confirm a universal generalization. For example, suppose
I know Γm in the Hall of Atypically Colored Birds. A bird is placed in the
Hall only if the majority of his species-mates are one color but he happens
to be another color. If my background corpus includes that Γm in the Hall
of Atypically Colored Birds, then observing a black raven disconfirms the
hypothesis that all ravens are black.2 Because of such examples, Hempel thinks
the Nicod Criterion should be applied only against a tautological background.
A tautological background corpus contains no contingent propositions; it is
logically equivalent to a tautology T.
When we intuitively reject the Nicod Criterion’s consequence that a red her
ring confirms the ravens hypothesis, we are sneaking non-tautological infor
mation into the background of our judgment. Hempel thinks we’re imagining
a situation in which we already know in advance (as part of the background)
that we will be observing a herring and checking its color. Relative to that
background—which includes the information ~Ra—we know that whatever
we’re about to observe will have no evidential import for the hypothesis that
ravens are black. So when we then get the evidence that ~Ba, that evidence is
confirmationally inert with respect to the hypothesis (V%)(Rx D Bx).
But the original question was whether ~Ba &. ~Ra (taken all together, at
once) confirmed (Vx)(Rx D Bx). On Hempel’s view, this is a fair test of the
Nicod Criterion only against an empty background corpus (since that’s the
background against which he thinks the Criterion applies). And against that
corpus, Hempel thinks the confirmational result is correct. Here’s a way of
understanding why: Imagine you’ve decided to test the hypothesis that all
ravens are black. You will do this by selecting objects from the universe one
at a time and checking them for ravenhood and blackness. It’s the beginning
of the experiment, you haven’t checked any objects yet, and you have no
background information about the tendency of objects to be ravens and/or
black. Moreover, you’ve found a way to select objects from the entire universe
at random, so you have no background information about what kind of object
you’ll be getting. Nevertheless, you start thinking about what sorts of objects
might be selected, and whether they would be good or bad news for the
hypothesis. Particularly important would be any ravens that weren’t black,
since any such negative instance would immediately refute the hypothesis.
(Here it helps to realize that the ravens hypothesis is logically equivalent to
~(3x)(,Rx & ~Bx).^) So when the first object arrives and you see it’s a red
herring— ~Ba&~Ra—this is good news for the hypothesis (at least, some good
news). After all, the first object could’ve been a non-black raven, in which case
the hypothesis would’ve been sunk.
This kind of reasoning defuses the seeming paradoxicality of a red herring’s
confirming that all ravens are black, and the objection to the Nicod Criterion
that results. As long as we’re careful not to smuggle in illicit background
information, observing a red herring confirms the ravens hypothesis to at least
a small degree. Hempel concludes that on his reading of the Nicod Criterion,
it is consistent with the Equivalence Condition.
Nevertheless, I.J. Good worries about the Nicod Criterion, even against a
tautological background:
[T]he closest I can get to giving [confirmation relative to a tautological

background] a practical significance is to imagine an infinitely intelligent
newborn baby having built-in neural circuits enabling him to deal with
formal logic, English syntax, and subjective probability. He might now argue,
after defining a crow in detail, that it is initially extremely unlikely that there
are any crows, and therefore that it is extremely likely that all crows are black.
“On the other hand,” he goes on to argue, “if there are crows, then there is a
reasonable chance that they are of a variety of colors. Therefore, if I were to
discover that even a black crow exists I would consider [the hypothesis that
all crows are black] to be less probable than it was initially.” (1968, p. 157)3
Here Good takes advantage of the fact that (yx)(Rx D Bx) is true if there are
no ravens (or crows, in his example).4 Before taking any samples from the
universe, the intelligent newborn might consider four possibilities: there are
200 CONFIRMATION
no ravens; there are ravens but they come in many colors; there are ravens and
they’re all black; there are ravens and they all share some other color. The first
and third of these possibilities would make (Vx)(Rx D Bx) true. When the
baby sees a black raven, the first possibility is eliminated; this might be a large
enough blow to the ravens hypothesis that the simultaneous elimination of the
fourth possibility would fail to compensate. In other words, the observation of
a black raven might not confirm that all ravens are black, violating the Nicod
Criterion even against a tautological background.
6.1.2 Further adequacy conditions
We have already seen two general conditions (Nicod s Criterion and the Equiv
alence Condition) that one might take the confirmation relation to satisfy We
will now consider a number of other such conditions, most of them discussed
(and given the names we will use) by Hempel. Sorting out which of these are
genuine properties of confirmation has a number of purposes. First, Hempel
thought the correct list provided a set of adequacy conditions for any positive
theory of confirmation. Second, sorting through these conditions will help
us understand the abstract features of evidential support. These are features
about which epistemologists, philosophers of science, and others (including
working scientists and ordinary folk!) often make strong assumptions—many
of them incorrect. Finally, we are going to use the word “confirmation” in
subsequent sections as a somewhat technical term, distinct from some of the
ways “confirm” is used in everyday speech. Working through the properties of
the confirmation relation will help illustrate how were using the term.
The controversy between Hempel and Good leaves it unclear whether the
Nicod Criterion should be endorsed as a constraint on confirmation, even
when it’s restricted to the tautological background. On the other hand, the
Equivalence Condition can be embraced in a highly general form:
Equivalence Condition (full version): For any H, H',E,E',K and K' in £,

suppose HMI=H', E=H=-E', and K=ft=K,. Then E confirms (/dis
confirms) H relative to background K just in case E' confirms
(∕disconfirms) H, relative to background K'.
Here we can think of K as a conjunction of all the propositions in an agent’s

background corpus, just as E is often a conjunction of multiple pieces of
evidence. This full version of the Equivalence Condition captures the idea that
logically equivalent propositions should enter into all the same confirmation
relations.
Our next candidate constraint is the
Entailment Condition: For any consistent E, H, and 1C in 23, if E & E 1= H

but K ≠ H, then E confirms H relative to K.
This condition captures the idea that entailing a hypothesis is one way to
support, or provide evidence for, that hypothesis. If E entails H in light of
background corpus K (in other words, if E and K together entail H), then E
confirms H relative to K. The only exception to this rule is when K already
entails H, in which case the fact that E and Ktogether entail H does not indicate
any particular relation between E and H.5 Notice that a tautological H will be
entailed by every K, so the restriction on the Entailment Condition prevents
the condition from saying anything about the confirmation of tautologies.
Hempel thinks of his adequacy conditions as applying only to empirical
hypotheses and bodies of evidence, so he generally restricts them to logically
contingent Es and Hs.
Hempel considers a number of adequacy conditions motivated by the
following intuition:
Confirmation Transitivity: For any A, B, C, and K in 23, if A confirms B

relative to K and B confirms C relative to K, then A confirms C
relative to K.
It’s tempting to believe confirmation is transitive, as well as other nearby

notions such as justification or evidential support. This temptation is but
tressed by the fact that logical entailment is transitive. Confirmation, however,
is not in general transitive. Here’s an example of Confirmation Transitivity
failure: Suppose our background is the fact that a card has just been selected
at random from a standard fifty-two-card deck. Consider these three proposi
tions:
A∙. The card is a jack.

B: The card is the jack of spades.
C: The card is a spade.
Relative to our background, A would confirm B, at least to some extent. And

relative to our background, B would clearly confirm C (in accordance with the
202 CONFIRMATION
Entailment Condition). But relative to the background that a card was picked
from a fair deck, A does nothing to support conclusion C.
The failure of Confirmation Transitivity has a number of important conse
quences. First, it explains why in the study of confirmation we take evidence
to be propositional rather than objectual. In everyday language we often use
“evidence” to refer to objects rather than propositions; police don’t store
propositions in their Evidence Room. But as possible entrants into confirma
tion relations, objects have an ambiguity akin to the reference class problem
(Section 5.1.1). Should I consider this bird evidence that all ravens are black
(against tautological background)? If we describe the bird as a black raven,
the answer might be yes. But if we describe it as a black raven found in the
Hall of Atypically Colored Birds, the answer seems to be no. Yet a black raven
in the Hall of Atypically Colored birds is still a black raven. If confirmation
were transitive, knowing that a particular description of an object confirmed
a hypothesis would guarantee that more precise descriptions confirmed the
hypothesis as well. Logically stronger descriptions (it’s a black raven in the
Hall of Atypically Colored Birds) entail logically weaker descriptions (it’s a
black raven) of the same object; by the Entailment Condition, the logically
stronger description confirms the logically weaker; so if confirmation were
transitive anything confirmed by the weaker description would be confirmed
by the stronger as well.
But confirmation isn’t transitive, so putting more or less information in our
description of the very same object can alter what’s confirmed. (Black raven?
Might confirm ravens hypothesis. Black raven in Hall of Atypically Colored
Birds? Disconfirms. Black raven mistakenly placed in the Hall of Atypically
Colored Birds when it shouldn’t have been? Perhaps confirms again.) We
solve this problem by letting propositions rather than objects enter into the
confirmation relation. If we state our evidence as a proposition—such as the
proposition that a black raven is in the Hall ofAtypically Colored Birds—there’s
no question how the objects involved are being described.6
Confirmation’s lack of transitivity also impacts epistemology more broadly.
For instance, it may cause trouble for Richard Feldman’s (2007) principle
that “evidence of evidence is evidence”. Suppose I read in a magazine that
anthropologists have reported evidence that Neanderthals cohabitated with
homo sapiens. I don’t actually have the anthropologists’ evidence for that
hypothesis—the body of information that they think supports it. But the maga
zine article constitutes evidence that they have such evidence; one might think
that the magazine article therefore also constitutes evidence that Neanderthals
and homo sapiens cohabitated. (After all, reading the article seems to provide
me with some justification for that hypothesis.) Yet we cannot adopt this
“evidence of evidence is evidence” principle with full generality. Suppose Γve
randomly picked a card from a standard deck and examined it carefully. If
I tell you my card is a jack, you have evidence for the proposition that I know
my card is the jack of spades. If I know my card is the jack of spades, I have (very
strong) evidence for the proposition that my card is a spade. So your evidence
(jack) is evidence that I have evidence (jack of spades) for the conclusion spade.
Yet your evidence is no evidence at all that my card is a spade.7
Finally, the failure of Confirmation Transitivity shows what’s wrong with
two confirmation constraints Hempel embraces:
Consequence Condition: If B in £ confirms every member of a set of

propositions relative to K and that set jointly entails H' relative to
K, then E confirms H' relative to K.
Special Consequence Condition: For any E, H, H,, and K in £, if E confirms
H relative to K and HfcKt=H', then E confirms H' relative to K.
The Consequence Condition states if a set of propositions together entails a

hypothesis (relative to some background), then any evidence that confirms
every member of the set also confirms that hypothesis (relative to that back
ground). The Special Consequence Condition says that if a single proposition
entails some hypothesis, then anything that confirms the proposition also
confirms the hypothesis (again, all relative to some background corpus).
The Special Consequence Condition is so-named because it can be derived
from the Consequence Condition (by considering singleton sets). Yet each of
these conditions is a bad idea, as can be demonstrated by our earlier jack of
spades example. Proposition A that the card is a jack confirms proposition B
that it’s the jack of spades; B entails proposition C that the card is a spade;
yet A does not confirm C. We can even create examples in which H entails
H' relative to K, but evidence E that confirms H cfeconfirms Hf relative to K.
Relative to the background corpus K most of us have concerning the kinds of
animals people keep as pets, the evidence E that Bob’s pet is hairless confirms
(at least slightly) the hypothesis H that Bob’s pet is a Peruvian Hairless Dog.
Yet relative to K that same evidence E disconfirms the hypothesis H, that Bob’s
pet is a dog.8
Why might the Special Consequence Condition seem plausible? It certainly
looks tempting if one reads “confirmation” in a particular way. In everyday
language it’s a fairly strong claim that a hypothesis has been “confirmed”; this
suggests our evidence is sufficient for us to accept the hypothesis. (Consider
204 CONFIRMATION
the sentences “That confirmed my suspicion” and “Your reservation has been
confirmed”) If we combine that reading of “confirmed” with Glymour’s posi
tion that “when we accept a hypothesis we commit ourselves to accepting all
of its logical consequences” (1980, p. 31), we get that evidence confirming a
hypothesis also confirms its logical consequences, as the Special Consequence
Condition requires. But hopefully the discussion to this point has indicated
that we are not using “confirms” in this fashion. On our use, evidence confirms
a hypothesis if it provides any amount of support for that hypothesis; the
support need not be decisive. For us, evidence can confirm a hypothesis
without requiring or even permitting acceptance of the hypothesis. If your only
evidence about a card is that it’s a jack, this evidence confirms in our sense that
the card is the jack of spades. But this evidence doesn’t authorize you to accept
or believe that the card is the jack of spades.
Another motivation for the Special Consequence Condition—perhaps this
was Hempel’s motivation—comes from the way we often treat hypotheses in
science. Suppose we make a set of atmospheric observations confirming a
particular global warming hypothesis. Suppose further that in combination
with our background knowledge, the hypothesis entails that average global
temperatures will increase by five degrees in the next fifty years. It’s very
tempting to report that the atmospheric observations support the conclusion
that temperatures will rise five degrees in fifty years. Yet that’s to unthinkingly
apply the Special Consequence Condition.
I hope you’re getting the impression that denying Confirmation Transitivity
can have serious consequences for the ways we think about everyday and
scientific reasoning. Yet it’s important to realize that denying the Special Con
sequence Condition as a general principle does not mean that the transitivity it
posits never holds. It simply means that we need to be careful about assuming
confirmation will transmit across an entailment, and perhaps also that we need
a precise, positive theory of confirmation to help us understand when it will
and when it won’t.
Rejecting the Special Consequence Condition does open up some intriguing
possibilities in epistemology. Consider these three propositions:
E: I am having a perceptual experience as of a hand before me.

H: I have a hand.
Hf∙. There is a material world.
This kind of evidence figures prominently in G.E. Moore’s (1939) proof of the
existence of an external world. Yet for some time it was argued that E could
not possibly be evidence for H. The reasoning was, first, that E could not
discriminate between H' and various skeptical hypotheses (such as Descartes’s
evil demon), and therefore could not provide evidence for Hf. Next, H entails
Hf, so if E were evidence for H it would be evidence for H' as well. But
this step assumes the Special Consequence Condition. Epistemologists have
recently explored positions that allow E to support H without supporting Hr,
by denying Special Consequence.9
Hempel’s unfortunate endorsement of the Consequence Condition also
pushes him toward the
Consistency Condition: For any E and K in Z}, the set of all hypotheses
confirmed by E relative to K is logically consistent with E&K.
In order for the set of all hypotheses confirmed by E to be consistent with E&K,
it first has to be a logically consistent set in its own right. So among other things,
the Consistency Condition bans a single piece of evidence from confirming
two hypotheses that are mutually exclusive with each other.
It seems easy to generate confirmational examples that violate this require
ment: evidence that a randomly drawn card is red confirms both the hypothesis
that it’s a heart and the hypothesis that it’s a diamond, but these two con
firmed hypotheses are mutually exclusive. Hempel also notes that scientists
often find themselves entertaining theoretical alternatives that are mutually
exclusive with each other; experimental data eliminates some of those theories
while confirming all of the ones that remain. Yet Hempel is trapped into the
Consistency Condition by his allegiance to the Consequence Condition. Taken
together, the propositions in an inconsistent set entail a contradiction; so any
piece of evidence that confirmed all the members of an inconsistent set would
also (by the Consequence Condition) confirm a contradiction. Hempel refuses
to grant that anything could confirm a contradiction! So he tries to make the
Consistency Condition work.10
Hempel rightly rejects the
Converse Consequence Condition: For any E, H, H,, and K in £ (with H'

consistent with K), if E confirms H relative to K and H' & K 1= H,
then E confirms H, relative to K.
The Converse Consequence Condition says that relative to a given background,

evidence that confirms a hypothesis also confirms anything that entails that
hypothesis.
206 CONFIRMATION
Here’s a counterexample. Suppose our background knowledge is that a fair

six-sided die has been rolled, and our propositions are:
E: The roll outcome is prime.

H: The roll outcome is odd.
H,∙. The roll outcome is 1.
In this case E confirms H relative to our background, H' entails H, yet E refutes
H,. (Recall that 1 is not a prime number!)
Still, there’s a good idea in the vicinity of Converse Consequence. Suppose
our background consists of the fact that we are going to run a certain exper
iment. A particular scientific theory, in combination with that background,
entails that the experiment will produce a particular result. If this result does
in fact occur when the experiment is run, we take that to support the theory.
This is an example of the
Converse Entailment Condition: For any consistent E, H, and 7< in T, if

H & K1= E but K ≠ E, then E confirms H relative to K.
Converse Entailment says that if, relative to a given background, a hypothesis

entails some evidence, then that evidence confirms that hypothesis relative to
that background. (Again, this condition omits cases in which the background
K entails the experimental result E all on its own, because such cases need not
reveal any connection between H and K)
Converse Entailment doesn’t give rise to examples like the die roll case
above (because in that case E is not entailed by either H or H' in combination
with K). But because deductive entailment is transitive, Converse Entailment
does generate the problem of irrelevant conjunction. Consider the following
propositions:
E: My pet is a flightless bird.

H: My pet is an ostrich.
H,∙. My pet is an ostrich and beryllium is a good conductor.
Here H entails E, so by the Converse Entailment Condition E confirms H,

which seems reasonable.11 Yet despite the fact that Hf also entails E (because
H' entails EΓ), it seems worrisome that E would confirm H'. What does my
choice in pets indicate about the conductivity of beryllium?
Nothing—and that’s completely consistent with the Converse Entailment

Condition. Just because E confirms a conjunction one of whose conjuncts
concerns beryllium doesn’t mean E confirms that beryllium-conjunct all on
its own. To assume that it does would be to assume the Special Consequence
Condition, which we’ve rejected. So facts about my pet don’t confirm any
conclusions that are about beryllium but not about birds. On the other hand,
it’s reasonable that E would confirm H' to at least some extent, by virtue of
eliminating such rival hypotheses as “beryllium is a good conductor and my
pet is an iguana.”
Rejecting the Special Consequence Condition therefore allows us to accept
Converse Entailment. But again, this should make us very careful about how
we reason in our everyday lives. A scientific theory, for instance, will often
have wide-ranging consequences, and might be thought of as a massive con
junction. When the theory makes a prediction that is borne out by experiment,
that experimental result confirms the theory. But it need not confirm the
rest of the theory’s conjuncts, taken in isolation. In other words, experimen
tal evidence that confirms a theory may not confirm that theory’s further
predictions.12
Finally, we should say something about disconfirmation. Hempel takes the
following position:
Disconfirmation Duality: For any E, H, and K in £, E confirms H relative to

K just in case E disconfirms ~H relative to K.
Disconfirmation Duality pairs confirmation of a hypothesis with discon

firmation of its negation. It allows us to immediately convert many of
our constraints on confirmation into constraints on disconfirmation. For
example, the Entailment Condition now tells us that if E 8c K deductively
refutes H (yet K doesn’t refute H all by itself), then E disconfirms H
relative to K. (See Exercise 6.2.) We should be careful, though, not to
think of confirmation and disconfirmation as exhaustive categories: for
many propositions E, H, and K, E will neither confirm nor disconfirm
H relative to K.
Figure 6.1 summarizes the formal conditions on confirmation we have
accepted and rejected. The task now is to find a positive theory of which
bodies of evidence confirm which hypotheses relative to which backgrounds
that satisfies the right conditions and avoids the wrong ones.
208 CONFIRMATION
Name Brief, somewhat imprecise description Verdict

Equivalence Condition equivalent hypotheses, evidence, back accepted
grounds behave same confirmationally
Entailment Condition evidence confirms what it entails accepted
Converse Entailment a hypothesis is confirmed by what it accepted
Condition entails
Disconfirmation a hypothesis is confirmed just when accepted
Duality its negation is disconfirmed
Confirmation anything confirmed by a confirmed rejected
Transitivity hypothesis is also confirmed
Consequence anything entailed by a set of confirmed rejected
Condition hypotheses is also confirmed
Special Consequence anything entailed by a confirmed rejected
Condition hypothesis is also confirmed
Consistency Condition all confirmed hypotheses are consistent rejected
Converse Consequence anything that entails a confirmed rejected
Condition hypothesis is also confirmed
Nicods Criterion Fa &. Ga confirms (Vx)(Fx D Gx) ???
Figure 6.1 Accepted and rejected conditions on confirmation
6.2 Carnap’s theory of confirmation
6.2.1 Confirmation as relevance
Carnap saw that we could get a confirmation theory with exactly the prop
erties we want by basing it on probability. Begin by taking any probabilistic
distribution Pr over £. (I’ve named it “Pr” because we aren’t committed at this
stage to its being any kind of probability in particular—much less a credence
distribution. All we know is that it’s a distribution over the propositions in
23 satisfying the Kolmogorov axioms.) Define Pr’s background corpus K as
the conjunction of all propositions X in 23 such that Pr(X) = I.13 Given an
E and H in 23, we apply the Ratio Formula to calculate Pr(H ∣ E). Two distinct
theories of confirmation now suggest themselves: (1) E confirms H relative
to K just in case Pr(H ∣ E) is high; (2) E confirms H relative to K just in
case Pr(H ∣ E~) > Pr(H). In the preface to the second edition of his Logical
Foundations of Probability, Carnap calls the first of these options a “firmness”
concept of confirmation and the second an “increase in firmness” concept
(1962a, p. xvff).14
The firmness concept of confirmation has a number of problems. First, there
are questions about where exactly the threshold for a “high” value of Pr(H ∣ E)
falls, what determines that threshold, how we discover it, etc. Second, there
6.2 carnap’s theory of confirmation 209
will be cases in which E is irrelevant to H—or even negatively relevant to

H∖—yet Pr(EΓ∣ E) is high because Pr(H) was already high. For example, take
the background K that a fair lottery with a million tickets has been held, the
hypothesis H that ticket 942 did not win, and the evidence E that elephants
have trunks. In this example Pr(Jf ∣ E) may very well be high, but that need not
be due to any confirmation of lottery results by the endowments of elephants.
Finally, the firmness concept doesn’t match the confirmation conditions we
approved in the previous section. Wherever the threshold for “high” is set,
whenever E confirms H relative to K it will also confirm any H' entailed by
H. As a probability distribution, Pr must satisfy the Entailment rule and its
extension to conditional probabilities (see Section 3.1.2), so if H 1= H, then
Pr(H' ∣ E) ≥ Pr(7F ∣ E). If Pr(H ∣ E^) surpasses the threshold, Pr(H' ∣ E) will as
well. But that means the firmness concept of confirmation satisfies the Special
Consequence Condition, to which we’ve already seen counterexamples.
Warning
Conflating firmness and increase in firmness, or just blithely assuming the

firmness concept is correct, is one of the most frequent mistakes made in
the confirmation literature and more generally in discussions of evidential
support.15 For example, it is often claimed that an agent’s evidence supports
or justifies a conclusion just in case the conclusion is probable on that
evidence. But for conclusions with a high prior, the conclusion may be
probable on the evidence not because of anything the evidence is doing,
but instead because the conclusion was probable all along. Then it’s not the
evidence that’s justifying anything!
Increase in firmness has none of these disadvantages; it is the concept of

confirmation we’ll work with going forward. Given a probability distribution
Pr with background K (as defined above), E confirms Hrelative to Kjust in case
Pr(H ∣ E) > Pr(H). In other words, given Pr, evidence E confirms H relative
to K just in case E is positively relevant to H. We identify disconfirmation
with negative relevance-. Given Pr, E disconfirms H relative to K just in case
Pr(H ∣ E) < Pr(H). If Pr(H ∣ E) = Pr(H), then E is irrelevant to H and neither
confirms nor disconfirms it relative to K.
This account of confirmation meets exactly those conditions we endorsed
in the previous section: Disconfirmation Duality and the Equivalence,
210 CONFIRMATION
Entailment, and Converse Entailment Conditions. Disconfirmation Duality

follows immediately from our definitions of positive and negative relevance.
The Equivalence Condition follows from the Equivalence rule for probability
distributions; logically equivalent propositions will always receive identical Pr-
values. We get the Entailment Condition because if E, H, and K are consistent,
E & K 1= H, but K ≠ H, then Pr(H ∣ E) = 1 while Pr(H) < 1. (You’ll prove
this in Exercise 6.4.) The key result for Converse Entailment was established
in Exercise 4.4. Identifying confirmation with positive relevance yields an
account of confirmation with the general contours we want, prior to our
committing to anything about the specific numerical values of Pr.
6.2.2 Finding the right function
Yet Carnap wants more than the general contours of confirmation—he wants
a substantive theory that says in every case which bodies of evidence support
which hypotheses relative to which backgrounds. A theory like that seems
obtainable to Carnap because he sees confirmation as a logical relation. As with
other logical relations, whether E confirms H relative to K is independent of the
truth-values of those propositions and of particular attitudes individuals adopt
toward them. Like Hempel, Carnap thinks confirmation relations emerge from
the logical form of propositions, and therefore can be captured by a syntactical
theory working with strings of symbols representing logical forms. (Nicod’s
Criterion is a good example of a confirmation principle that works with logical
form.) Enormous progress in formal deductive logic in the decades just before
Logical Foundations makes Carnap confident that a formalism for inductive
logic is within reach.
To construct the formalism Carnap wants, we begin with a formal language
XL16 We then take each consistent corpus in that language (represented as a
non-contradictory, conjunctive proposition K) and associate it with a particu
lar Pr distribution over £. That done, we can test whether evidence E confirms
hypothesis H relative to a particular Kby seeing whether E is positively relevant
to H on the Pr associated with that K.
The crucial step for Carnap is the association of each K with a unique
distribution Pr. A full Pr distribution must be specified for each K so that for
any E, H, and K we might select in £, there will be a definite answer to the
question of whether E confirms, disconfirms, or is irrelevant to H on K. (Just
as there’s always a definite answer as to whether a given P deductively entails
a given Q, refutes it, or neither.) The Pr associated with a given K must assign
1 to each conjunct of that K, but this leaves a lot of latitude with respect to the
Pr-values of other propositions. And it’s important to get the right Pr for each
K; the wrong Pr distribution could make evidential support counterinductive,
or could have everyday evidence confirming skeptical hypotheses.
Even in a language £ with finitely many atomic propositions, there will
typically be many, many possible non-contradictory background corpora K.
Specifying a Pr-distribution for each such K could be a great deal of trouble.
Carnap simplifies the process by constructing every such Pr from a single,
regular probability distribution over £ that he calls m. As a regular proba
bility distribution, m reflects no contingent truths. (In other words, m has
a tautological background corpus.) To obtain the Pr(∙) distribution relative to
some substantive, non-contradictory K, we calculate τπ(∙ ∣ Kf (This guarantees
that Pr(K) =1.) Evidence E confirms hypothesis H relative to K just in case
Pr(H ∣ E) > Pr(EΓ), which is equivalent to m(H ∣ E&K) > m(H ∣ K). So instead
of working with particular Pr-distributions, we can focus our attention on tπ.17
m also fulfills a number of other roles for Carnap. Carnap thinks of an
agent’s background corpus at a given time as her total evidence at that time.
If an agent’s total evidence is K, Carnap thinks m(H ∣ K) provides the logical
probability of H on her total evidence. Moreover, Carnap thinks that logical
probabilities dictate rational credences. A rational agent with total evidence K
will assign credence cr(H) = m(H ∣ K) for any H in E. Since m is a particular,
unique distribution, this means there is a unique credence any agent is required
to assign each proposition H given body of total evidence K. So Carnap
endorses the Uniqueness Thesis (Section 5.1.2), with m playing the role of
the uniquely rational hypothetical prior distribution. On Carnap’s view, logic
provides the unique correct epistemic standards that all rational agents should
apply, represented numerically by the distribution m. Carnap is thus an
Objective Bayesian in both senses of the term: in the normative sense, because
he thinks there’s a unique rational hypothetical prior; and in the semantic
sense, because he defines “probability” as an objective concept independent
of agents’ particular attitudes.18
m allows us to separate out two questions that are sometimes run together
in the confirmation literature. Up until now we have been asking whether
evidence E confirms hypothesis H relative to background corpus K. For Carnap
this question can be read: For a rational agent with total evidence K, would
some further piece of evidence E be positively relevant to H? Carnap answers
this question by checking whether m(H ∣ E & K) > m(H ∣ K). But we might
also ask about confirmational relations involving Kitself. Bayesians sometimes
ask how an agent’s total evidence bears on a hypothesis—does the sum total
212 CONFIRMATION
of information in the agents possession tell in favor of or against H? From a

Carnapian perspective this question is usually read as comparing the proba
bility of H on K to H’s probability relative to a tautological background. So we
say that the agents total evidence K confirms H just in case tn(H ∣ K) > m(H).
Carnap doesn’t just assert that this rational prior tn must exist; he provides
a recipe for calculating its numerical values. To understand Carnap’s calcula
tions, let’s begin with a very simple language, containing only one predicate F
and two constants a and b. This language has only two atomic propositions (Fa
and Fb), so we can specify distribution m over the language using a probability
table with four state-descriptions. Carnap runs through a few candidates for
distribution tn; he calls the first one nV:
Fa Fb nV
T T 1/4
T F 1/4
F T 1/4
F F 1/4
In trying out various candidates for tn, Carnap is attempting to determine

the logical probabilities of particular propositions relative to a tautological
background, nV captures the natural thought that a tautological back
ground should treat each of the available possibilities symmetrically, m ,
applies a principle of indifference and assigns each state-description the
same value.19
Yet m' has a serious drawback:
mt(Ffe ∣ Fa) = mt(Fb) = 1/2 (6.1)
On πt' , Fa is irrelevant to Fb; so according to m', Fa does not confirm Fb

relative to the empty background. Carnap thinks the fact that one object has
property F should confirm that the next object will have F, even against a
tautological background. Yet tn' does not yield this result. Even worse, this
flaw remains as m+ is extended to larger languages. nV makes each proposition
Fa, Fb, Fc, etc. independent not only of each of the others but also of logical
combinations of the others; even the observation that ninety-nine objects all
have property F will not confirm that the 100th object is an F. (See Exercise
6.5.) This is especially bad because m' is supposed to represent the unique
hypothetical prior for all rational agents. According to m', if a rational agent’s
total evidence consists of the fact that ninety-nine objects all have property F,
this total evidence does not confirm in the slightest that the next object will
have F. does not allow “learning from experience”; as Carnap puts it:
The choice of [m^] as the degree of confirmation would be tantamount to

the principle never to let our past experiences influence our expectations
for the future. This would obviously be in striking contradiction to the basic
principle of all inductive reasoning. (1950, p. 565)
Carnap wants a theory of confirmation that squares with commonsense

notions of rational inductive reasoning; clearly fails in that role.
To address this problem, Carnap offers distribution m*. According to m*,
logical probability is indifferent not among the state-descriptions in a lan
guage, but instead among its structure-descriptions. To understand structure
descriptions, start by thinking about property profiles. A property profile
specifies exactly which of the languages predicates an object does or does not
satisfy. In a language with the single predicate F, the two available property
profiles would be “this object has property F” and “this object lacks property
F.” In a language with two predicates F and G, the property profiles would be
“this object has both F and G,” “this object lacks property F but has property
G”; etc. Given language £, a structure-description describes how many objects
in the universe of discourse possess each of the available property profiles, but
doesn’t say which particular objects possess which profiles.20 For example, the
language containing one property F and two constants a and b has the two
property profiles just mentioned. Since there are two objects, this language
allows three structure-descriptions: “both objects have F”, “one object has F
and one object lacks F”, and “both objects lackF”. Written in disjunctive normal
form, the three structure-descriptions are:
i. Fa &. Fb
ii. (Fa 8c ~Fb) V (~Fa & Fb) (6∙2)
iii. ~Fα & ~Fb
Note that one of these structure-descriptions is a disjunction of multiple state

descriptions.21
m* assigns equal value to each structure-description in a language. If
a structure-description contains multiple state-description disjuncts, m*
divides the value of that structure-description equally among its state
descriptions. For our simple language, the result is:
214 CONFIRMATION
Fa Fb m*
T T 1/3
T F 1/6
F T 1/6
F F 1/3
Each structure-description from (6.2) above receives an m*-value of 1/3; the

structure-description containing the middle two lines of the table divides its
m*-value between them.
m* allows learning from experience. From the table above, we can calculate
vx∖Fb ∣ Fa) = 2/3 > 1/2 = m*(Fb) (6.3)
On m*, the fact that a possesses property F confirms that b will have F relative
to the tautological background.
Nevertheless, tn* falls short in a different way. Suppose our language
contains two predicates F and G and two constants a and b. Carnap thinks
that on the correct, logical tn distribution we should have
m(Fb ∣ Fa&Ga&Gb) > m(Fb ∣ Fa) > m(Fb ∣ Fa&Ga&~Gb) > m(Fb) (6A)
While evidence that a has F should increase a rational agent’s confidence that
b has F, that rational confidence should increase even higher if we throw in
the evidence that a and b share property G. If a and b both have G, in some
sense they’re the same kind of object, so one should expect them to be alike
with respect to F as well. When I tell you that one object in my possession
has a beak, this might make you more confident that the other object in my
possession is beaked as well. But if you already know that both objects are
animals of the same species, beak information about one is much more relevant
to your beak beliefs about the other. On the other hand, information that a and
b are unalike with respect to G should make F-facts about a less relevant to
F-beliefs about b. Telling you that my two objects are not animals of the same
species reduces the relevance of beak information about one object to beak
conclusions about the other. Carnap thinks a successful m-distribution would
capture these analogical effects, expressed in Equation (6.4).
To see if Equation (6.4) holds for m*, one would need to identify the
structure-descriptions in this language. The available property profiles are:
object has both F and G, object has F but not G, object has G but not F, object
has neither. Some examples of structure-descriptions are: both objects have
6.3 grue 215
F and G, one object has both F and G while the other has neither, one object
has F but not G while the other object has G but not F, etc. I’ll leave the details
to the reader (see Exercise 6.6), but suffice it to say that tn* is unable to capture
the analogical effects of Equation (6.4).
Carnap responded to this problem (and others) by introducing a continuum
of m-distributions with properties set by two adjustable parameters.22 (1971,
1980) The parameter λ was an “index of caution”, controlling how reluctant
tπ made an agent to learn from experience. Given the details of how Carnap
defined A, tnt was the τn-distribution with 2-value ∞ (because it made the
agent infinitely cautious and forbade learning from experience), while m* had
λ-value 2. Adjusting the other parameter, γ, made analogical effects possible.
Carnap suggested we set the values of these parameters using pragmatic con
siderations, which threatened the Objective Bayesian aspects of his project. But
even then, Mary Hesse (1963, p. 121) and Peter Achinstein (1963) uncovered
more subtle learning effects that Carnaps parameterized m-distributions were
unable to capture. In the end, Carnap never constructed an m-distribution (or
set of m-distributions) with which he was entirely satisfied.
6.3 Grue
Nelson Goodman (1946, 1955) offered another kind of challenge to Hempel

and Carnaps theories of confirmation. Here is the famous passage:
Suppose that all emeralds examined before a certain time t are green. At
time t, then, our observations support the hypothesis that all emeralds are
green; and this is in accord with our definition of confirmation. Our evidence
statements assert that emerald a is green, that emerald b is green, and so on;
and each confirms the general hypothesis that all emeralds are green. So far,
so good.
Now let me introduce another predicate less familiar than “green”. It is the
predicate “grue” and it applies to all things examined before t just in case
they are green but to other things just in case they are blue. Then at time t we
have, for each evidence statement asserting that a given emerald is green,
a parallel evidence statement asserting that that emerald is grue. And the
statements that emerald a is grue, that emerald b is grue, and so on, will each
confirm the general hypothesis that all emeralds are grue. Thus according to
our definition, the prediction that all emeralds subsequently examined will be
green and the prediction that all will be grue are alike confirmed by evidence
216 CONFIRMATION
statements describing the same observations. But if an emerald subsequently

examined is grue, it is blue and hence not green. Thus although we are well
aware which of the two incompatible predictions is genuinely confirmed,
they are equally well confirmed according to our definition. Moreover, it is
clear that if we simply choose an appropriate predicate, then on the basis of
these same observations we shall have equal confirmation, by our definition,
for any prediction whatever about other emeralds. (1955, pp. 73-4)
The target here is any theory of confirmation on which the observation that
multiple objects all have property F confirms that the next object will have F
as well. As we saw, Carnap built this “learning from experience” feature into
his theory of confirmation. It was also a feature of Hempel’s positive theory
of confirmation, so Goodman is objecting to both Carnaps and Hempel’s
theories. We will focus on the consequences for Carnap, since I did not present
the details of Hempel’s positive approach.
Goodman’s concern is as follows: Suppose we have observed ninety-nine
emeralds before time t, and they have all been green. On Carnap’s theory, this
total evidence confirms the hypothesis that the next emerald observed will be
green. So far, so good. But Goodman says this evidence can be re-expressed
as the proposition that the first ninety-nine emeralds are grue. On Carnap’s
theory, this evidence confirms the hypothesis that the next emerald observed
will be grue. But for the next emerald to be grue it must be blue. Thus it seems
that on Carnap’s theory our evidence confirms both the prediction that the
next emerald will be green and the prediction that the next emerald will be
blue. Goodman thinks it’s intuitively obvious that the former prediction is
confirmed by our evidence while the latter is not, so Carnap’s theory is getting
things wrong.
Let’s look more carefully at the details. Begin with a language £ containing
constants α1 through α100 representing objects, and predicates G and O repre
senting the following properties:
Gx: x is green
Ox: x is observed by time t
We then define “grue” as follows in language £:
Gx ≡ Ox: x is grue; it is either green and observed by time t or non-green and

not observed by t
6.3 grue 217
The grue predicate says that the facts about whether an emerald is green match
the facts about whether it was observed by t.23 Goodman claims that according
to Carnaps theory, our total evidence in the example confirms (Vx)G% and
Gα100 (which is good), but also (Vx)(Gx ≡ Ox) and Gα100 ≡ Oα100 (which are
supposed to be bad).
But what exactly is our evidence in the example? Goodman agrees with
Hempel that in assessing confirmation relations we must explicitly and pre
cisely state the contents of our total evidence. Evidence that the first ninety-
nine emeralds are green would be:
E'. Ga1 & G$2 Gλ99
But E neither entails nor is equivalent to the statement that the first ninety-
nine emeralds are grue (because it doesn’t say anything about whether those
emeralds’ G-ness matches their O-ness), nor does E confirm (Vx)(Gx ≡ Ox)
on Carnap’s theory.
A better statement of the evidence would be:
Er: (Gα1 & Oa1) &, (Ga2 & Oa2) (Ga99 & Oa99)
Here we’ve added an important fact included in the example: that emeralds
al through a99 are observed by t. This evidence statement entails both that all
those emeralds were green and that they all were grue. A bit of technical work
with Carnap’s theory24 will also show that according to that theory, Ef confirms
(V%)Gx, Gα100, (Vx)(Gx = Ox), and Gα100 ≡ Oa100.
It looks like Carnap is in trouble. As long as his theory is willing to “project”
past observations of any property onto future predictions that that property
will appear, it will confirm grue predictions alongside green predictions.
The theory seems to need a way of preferring greenness over grueness for
projection purposes; it seems to need a way to play favorites among properties.
Might this need be met by a technical fix? One obvious difference between
green and grue is the more complex logical form of the grue predicate in 23.
There’s also the fact that the definition of “grue” involves a predicate 0
that mentions time; perhaps induction on predicates referring to times is
suspicious. So maybe we could build a new version of Carnap’s theory that only
projects logically simple predicates, or predicates that don’t mention times.
Yet Goodman turns these proposals against themselves by re-expressing the
problem in an alternate language , built on the following two predicates:
218 CONFIRMATION
GRx: x is grue
Ox: x is observed by time t
Defined in language the predicate “green” looks like this:
GRx ≡ Ox: x is green; it is either grue and observed by time t or non-grue and
not observed by t
Expressed in Z7, the evidence E' is:
E': (GRα1 & Oa1) & (GRa2 & Oa2) & ... & (GRa99 & Oa99)
This expression of E, in £/ is true in exactly the same possible worlds as the

expression of E' we gave in 23. And once more, when applied to E, Carnaps
theory has E' confirming both that all emeralds are grue and that they are
green, and that α100 will be grue and that it will be green.
But in £>' all the features that discriminated against grue now work against
green—it’s the definition of greenness that is logically complex and involves
the predicate O referring to time. If you believe that logical complexity or
reference to times makes the difference between green and grue, you now
need a reason to prefer the expression of the problem in language E over its
expression in . This is why Goodman’s grue problem is sometimes described
as a problem of language dependence: We could build a formal confirmation
theory that projected logically simple predicates but not logically complex, yet
such a theory would yield different projections when the very same situation
was expressed in different languages (such as 23 and Z3').
Why is language dependence such a concern? Recall that Hempel endorsed
the Equivalence Condition in part because he didn’t want confirmation to
depend on the particular way hypotheses and evidence were presented. For
theorists like Hempel and Carnap who take confirmational relations to be
objective, it shouldn’t make a difference how particular subjects choose to
represent certain propositions linguistically. Two scientists shouldn’t draw
different conclusions from the same data just because one speaks English and
the other speaks Japanese!25
Hempel and Carnap sought a theory of confirmation that worked exclu
sively with the syntactical forms of propositions represented in language.
Goodman charges that such theories can yield consistent verdicts only when
applied within a carefully selected subset of languages. And since a syntactical
theory may operate only once a language is provided, such a theory cannot
6.3 grue 219
select appropriate languages for us. Goodman concludes, “Confirmation of

a hypothesis by an instance depends rather heavily upon features of the
hypothesis other than its syntactical form” (1955, pp. 72-3).
Warning
It is sometimes suggested that—although this is certainly not a syntactical

distinction—the grue hypothesis may be dismissed on the grounds that it
is “metaphysically weird”. This usually involves reading “All emeralds are
grue” as saying that all the emeralds in the universe are green before time
t then switch to being blue after t. But that reading is neither required to
get the problem going nor demanded by anything in Goodman (1946) or
Goodman (1955). Suppose, for instance, that each emerald in the universe is
either green or blue, and no emerald ever changes color. By an unfortunate
coincidence, it just so happens that the emeralds you observe before t are
all and only the green emeralds. In that case it will be true that all emeralds
are grue, with no metaphysical sleight-of-hand required.
As the previous warning suggests, the metaphysical details of Goodmans grue

example have sometimes obscured its philosophical point. “Grue” indicates a
correlation between two properties: being green and being observed by time t.
It happens to be a perfect correlation, expressed by a biconditional. Some
such correlations are legitimately projectible in science: If you observe that
certain types of fish are born with a fin on the left side just when they are
born with a fin on the right, this bilateral symmetry is a useful, projectible
biconditional correlation. The trouble is that any sizable body of data will
contain many correlations, and we need to figure out which ones to project
as regularities that will extend into the future. (The women in this meeting
room all have non-red hair, all belong to a particular organization, and all
are under 6 feet tall. Which of those properties will also be exhibited by
the next woman to enter the room?) Grue is a particularly odd, particularly
striking example of a spurious correlation, but is emblematic of the problem
of sorting projectible from unprojectible hypotheses.26 It is not essential to
the example that one of the properties involved refers to times, or that one
of the properties is a relatively simple physical property (color). Sorting
spurious from significant correlations is a general problem, for all kinds
of variables.27
220 CONFIRMATION
Goodman offers his own proposal for detecting projectible hypotheses, and
many authors have made further proposals since then. Instead of investigating
those, Γd like to examine exactly what the grue problem establishes about
Carnap’s theory (and others). The first thing to note is that although evidence
E, confirms on Carnap’s theory that emerald α100 is grue, it does not confirm
that emerald α100 is blue. Recall that Carnap offers a hypothetical prior distri
bution tn* that is supposed to capture the unique, logically-mandated ultimate
epistemic standards. A hypothesis H is confirmed by total evidence Ef (the
evidence we settled on for the grue example) just in case tn*(H ∣ E,) > tn*(H).
For example, it turns out that
tn*(Gα1001 Er) > m*(Gα100) (6.5)
So on Carnap’s theory, E’ confirms Gα100. But if that’s true, then E' must be
negatively relevant to ~Gawo, the proposition that emerald α100 is blue. So
while E' confirms that α100 is green and confirms that α100 is grue, it does not
confirm that α100 is blue.
This seems impossible—given that α100 is not observed by t (that is, given
that ~Oα100), α100 is grue just in case α100 is blue! But ~Ofl100 is not given in
the total evidence E,. E' says that every emerald a1 through a99 was observed
by t and is green. If that’s all we put into the evidence, that evidence is going to
confirm that α100 both is green and was observed by t. After all, if every object
described in the evidence has the property Gx&Ox, Carnapian “learning from
experience” will confirm that other objects have this property as well. Once we
understand that Carnap’s theory is predicting from E, that α100 bears both Ox
and Gx, the prediction that α100 will have Gx ≡ Ox is no longer so startling.
In fact, the assessment of Ef one gets from Carnap’s theory is intuitively
plausible. If all you knew about the world was that there existed ninety-nine
objects and all of them were green and observed before t, you would expect
that if there were a 100th object it would be green and observed before t as
well. In other words, you’d expect the 100th object to be grue—by virtue of
being green (and observed), not blue!28 We can read the prediction that the
100th object is grue as a prediction that it’s not green only if we smuggle extra
background knowledge into the case—namely, the assumption that α100 is an
unobserved emerald. (This is similar to what happened in Hempel’s analysis
of the Paradox of the Ravens.) So what happens if we explicitly state this extra
fact, by adding to the evidence that α100 is not observed by t?
E": (Ga1 & Oa1) & (Ga2 & Oa2) (Ga99 & Oa99) & ~Oα100
6.4 SUBJECTIVE BAYESIAN CONFIRMATION 221
Skipping the calculations (see Exercise 6.7), it turns out that
mψ(Gα100 ≡ OalQ0 ∣ E'') = m*(~Gα100 ∣ E")

= m*(G⅛ ∣ E,,) = m*(Gα100) (6.6)
= 1/2
On Carnaps probabilistic distribution tn*, E" confirms neither that α100 will
be grue, nor that α100 will be green, nor—for that matter—that all emeralds are
grue or that all emeralds are green.
Perhaps it’s a problem for Carnap’s theory that none of these hypotheses is
confirmed by E", when intuitively some of them should be. Or perhaps it’s
a problem that on m*, E' confirms that all emeralds are grue—even if that
doesn’t have the consequence of confirming that the next emerald will be blue.
Suffice it to say that while language-dependence problems can be found for
Carnap’s theory as well as various other positive theories of confirmation,29
it’s very subtle to determine exactly where those problems lie and what their
significance is.
6.4 Subjective Bayesian confirmation
I began my discussion of Carnap’s confirmation theory by pointing out its

central insight: We can get a confirmation relation with exactly the right formal
features by equating confirmation with probabilistic relevance. In 1980, Clark
Glymour reported the influence of this insight on philosophical theories of
confirmation:
Almost everyone interested in confirmation theory today believes that con

firmation relations ought to be analysed in terms of probability relations.
Confirmation theory is the theory of probability plus introductions and
appendices. Moreover, almost everyone believes that confirmation proceeds
through the formation of conditional probabilities of hypotheses on evi
dence. The basic tasks facing confirmation theory are thus just those of
explicating and showing how to determine the probabilities that confir
mation involves, developing explications of such metascientific notions as
“confirmation,” “explanatory power,” “simplicity,” and so on in terms of
functions of probabilities and conditional probabilities, and showing that
the canons and patterns of scientific inference result. It was not always so.
Probabilistic accounts of confirmation really became dominant only after
222 CONFIRMATION
the publication of Carnap’s Logical Foundations of Probability, although of

course many probabilistic accounts had preceded Carnap’s. An eminent
contemporary philosopher has compared Carnap’s achievement in inductive
logic with Frege’s in deductive logic: just as before Frege there was only a
small and theoretically uninteresting collection of principles of deductive
inference, but after him the foundation of a systematic and profound theory
of demonstrative reasoning, so with Carnap and inductive reasoning.
(1980, pp. 64-5)
Carnap holds that if a rational agent’s credence distribution is cr, evidence

E confirms hypothesis H relative to that agent’s background corpus just in
case cr(H ∣ E) > cr(H). The distinctive feature of Carnap’s positive theory is
that he thinks only one credence distribution is rationally permissible for each
agent given her total evidence: the distribution obtained by conditionalizing
the “logical probability” distribution tn on her background corpus. So if
we wanted, we could give Carnap’s entire account of confirmation without
mentioning agents at all: E confirms H relative to K just in case m(H ∖E8cK) >
tπ(H ∣ K). In the end, confirmation facts are logical and objective, existing “out
there” among the propositions.
Carnap’s commitment to Uniqueness makes him an Objective Bayesian in
the normative sense. Subjective Bayesians appreciate Carnap’s central insight
about probabilistic relevance, and agree with him that a piece of evidence E
confirms hypothesis H relative to an agent’s credence distribution cr just in case
cr(H ∣ E) > cr(H). But these points of agreement are separable from the com
mitment to a unique distribution τn determining the correct cr-distribution
relative to total evidence for all rational agents. Subjective Bayesians think
that specifying an agent’s background corpus/total evidence Kis insufficient to
fully determine her rational credences. They are willing to let different rational
agents construct their credences using different hypothetical priors, encoding
those agents’ differing epistemic standards. So two rational agents with the
same total evidence may assign different credences to the same propositions.
This makes agents’ particular credence distributions much more significant
to the Subjective Bayesian account of confirmation than they are to Carnap’s
approach. For Subjective Bayesians, whether E confirms H cannot be relative
simply to a background corpus, because such a corpus is insufficient to
determine an entire probability distribution. Without a unique function tn
to rely on, Subjective Bayesians need something else to fill out the details
around K and generate a full distribution. For this, they usually rely on the
opinions of a particular agent. A Subjective Bayesian will say that E confirms
H for a specific agent just in case cr(Jf ∣ E) > cr(H) on that agent’s current
credence distribution cr. A piece of evidence confirms a hypothesis for an
agent when the evidence is positively relevant to the hypothesis relative to that
agent’s current credences. Put another way, evidence confirms a hypothesis
for an agent just in case conditionalizing on that evidence would increase her
confidence in the hypothesis.
Since Subjective Bayesians permit rational agents to assign different cre
dence distributions (even against the same background corpus!), this means
that the same evidence will sometimes confirm different hypotheses for differ
ent rational agents. Two agents with, say, different levels of trust in authority
might draw differing conclusions about whether a particular report confirms
that Oswald acted alone or is further evidence of a government conspiracy.
For a Subjective Bayesian, it may turn out that due to differences in the agents’
credence distributions, the fact in question confirms one hypothesis for one
agent and a different hypothesis for the other. There need be no independent,
absolute truth about what’s really confirmed. And this confirmatory difference
need not be traceable to any difference in the agents’ background corpora;
the agents may possess different credence distributions because of differences
in their epistemic standards, even when their bodies of total evidence are
the same.
The Subjective Bayesian approach to confirmation is still a probabilistic
relevance account, so it still satisfies all the adequacy conditions we endorsed
in Section 6.1.2. Take any credence distribution cr a rational agent might
assign that satisfies the Kolmogorov axioms and Ratio Formula. Let K be
the conjunction of all propositions X in £ such that cr(X) = 1. Now specify
that E confirms H relative to K and that credence distribution just in case
cr(H ∣ £) > cr(H). Confirmation relative to cr will now display exactly the fea
tures we accepted in Figure 6.1: Disconfirmation Duality and the Equivalence,
Entailment, and Converse Entailment Conditions. So, for instance, one will
get the desirable result that relative to any rational credence distribution, a
hypothesis is confirmed by evidence it entails.30
While Subjective Bayesians usually talk about confirmation relative to a
particular agents credence distribution, they are not committed to doing
so. The central claim of the Subjective Bayesian account of confirmation is
that confirmation is always relative to some probability distribution, which
is underdetermined by a corpus of background evidence. The distribution
that does the work is often—but need not always be—an agent’s credence
distribution.31 For example, a scientist may assess her experimental data rel
ative to a commonly accepted probabilistic model of the phenomenon under
224 CONFIRMATION
investigation (such as a statistical model of gases), even if that model doesn’t

match her personal credences about the events in question. Similarly, a group
may agree to assess evidence relative to a probability distribution distinct
from the credence distributions of each of its members. Whatever probability
distribution we consider, the Kolmogorov axioms and Ratio Formula ensure
that the confirmation relation relative to that distribution will display the
formal features we desire.
The most common objection to the Subjective Bayesian view of confirma
tion is that for confirmation to play the objective role we require in areas
like scientific inquiry, it should never be relative to something so subjective
as an agents opinions about the world. (A Congressional panel’s findings
about the evidence bearing on the Kennedy assassination shouldn’t depend
on the committee members’ levels of trust in authority!) We will return to
this objection—and to some theories of confirmation that try to avoid it—in
Chapter 13. For now I want to consider another objection to the Subjective
Bayesian view, namely that it is so empty as to be near-useless. There are
so many probability distributions available that for any E and H we will be
able to find some distribution on which they are positively correlated (except
in extreme cases when lιl=~H). It looks, then, like the Subjective Bayesian
view tells us almost nothing substantive about which particular hypotheses
are confirmed by which bodies of evidence.
While the Subjective Bayesian denies the existence of a unique probability
distribution to which all confirmation relations are relative, the view need not
be anything-goes.32 Chapter 5 proposed a number of plausible constraints
beyond the Kolmogorov axioms and Ratio Formula on the credences of a
rational agent. If these constraints are accepted, they will impose some shape
upon any confirmation relation defined relative to a rational agent’s credences.
For example, David Lewis argues at his (1980, p. 285ff.) that if a credence
distribution satisfies the Principal Principle, then relative to that distribution
the evidence that a coin has come up heads on x percent of its tosses will
confirm that the objective chance of heads on a single toss is close to x. By
confirming such hypotheses about the chances, this evidence will also confirm
predictions about the outcomes of future flips, achieving some of the learning
from experience that Carnap sought in a theory of confirmation.
So one way to get substantive results from a Subjective Bayesian the
ory of confirmation is to impose more substantive requirements on rational
credences than just the probability axioms. But there’s another way to get
substance out of the theory, without adding additional constraints. Notice
that Lewis’s Principal Principle result has the form: if your credences have
features such-and-such, then confirmation relative to those credences will

have features so-and-so. We can derive results like this even when the credal
features such-and-such are not mandated by rationality. For example, if you
assign equal credence to each possible outcome of a six-sided-die roll, then
relative to your credence distribution the evidence that the roll came up odd
will confirm that it came up prime. This will be true regardless of whether
your total evidence rationally required equanimity over the possible out
comes. Subjective Bayesianism can yield interesting, informative results about
which bodies of evidence confirm which hypotheses relative to a particular
probability distribution, regardless of whether that distribution was rationally
required.
The theory can also work in the opposite direction: given a target confir-
mational relation, it can tell us features of a probability distribution that will
yield that relation. But before I describe some of Subjective Bayesianism’s more
interesting results on that front, I need to explain how Bayesians measure the
strength of evidential support.
6.4.1 Confirmation measures
We have been considering a classificatory question: Under what conditions

does a body of evidence E confirm a hypothesis H? Related to that classificatory
question are various comparative confirmational questions: Which of E or
E, confirms H more strongly? Is E better evidence for Hor H'? etc. These
comparative questions could obviously be answered if we had the answer
to an underlying quantitative question: To what degree does E confirm H?
(If we knew the degree to which E confirms H and the degree to which E,
confirms the same H, we could say whether E or E, confirms H more strongly.)
Popper (1935/1959) introduced the notion of degrees of confirmation. Since
then various Bayesian confirmation measures have been proposed to quantify
degree of confirmation: they take propositions E and H and some probability
distribution Pr (perhaps an agents credence distribution) and try to measure
how much E confirms H relative to Pr.
Warning
When we set out to understand degree of confirmation in terms of Pr, it’s

important not to conflate firmness with increase in firmness (Section 6.2.1).
226 CONFIRMATION
It’s also important to get clear on how degree of confirmation relates to

various notions involving justification.
Compare the following:
• the degree to which E confirms H relative to Pr

. Pr(H∣E)
• the degree to which an agent with total evidence E would be justified in
believing (or accepting) H
The degree to which E confirms H relative to Pr cannot be measured by

Pr(H∣ E~). Pr(H∣ E) tells us how probable H is given E (relative to Pr). If
Pr represents an agent’s hypothetical prior distribution, Pr(H ∣ E) tells us
the degree of confidence rationality requires that agent to assign H when
her total evidence is E. The confirmation of H by E is a relation between E
and H, while the value of Pr(H ∣ E) may be affected as much by the value of
Pr(H) as it is by E. So Pr(H ∣ E) is not solely reflective of the confirmational
relationship between H and E (relative to Pr).
Some authors discuss the degree to which E “justifies” H. This may or
may not be meant as synonymous with the degree to which E confirms H.
Even so, it cannot be identical to Pr(Jf ∣ E), for the reasons just explained.
But other authors think it’s a category mistake to speak of one proposition’s
justifying another; evidence may only justify particular attitudes toward H.
When Pr is an agent’s hypothetical prior, we might speak of Pr(H ∣ E) as the
credence in H an agent is justified in possessing when her total evidence
isE.
Yet even this is distinct from the degree to which such an agent is justified
in believing H. Belief is a binary doxastic attitude. We might propose a
theory that quantifies how much an agent is justified in possessing this
binary attitude. But there’s no particular reason to think that the resulting
measure should satisfy the Kolmogorov axioms, much less be precisely
equal to Pr(EΓ ∣ E) for any Pr with independent significance. (See Shogenji
2012.)
Finally, there is the view that an agent is justified in believing or accepting
H only if Pr(H ∣ E) is high (where E represents total evidence and Pr her
hypothetical prior). Here Pr(H ∣ E) is not supposed to measure how justified
such an acceptance would be; it’s simply part of a necessary condition for
such acceptance to be justified. Whether one accepts this proposal depends
on one’s views about the rational relations between credences and binary
acceptances/beliefs.
So if the degree to which E confirms H relative to Pr cannot be measured

by Pr(H ∣ E~), how should it be measured? There is a now a sizable literature
that attempts to answer this question. Almost all of the measures that have
been seriously defended are relevance measures: They agree with our earlier
analysis that E confirms H relative to Pr just in case Pr(H ∣ E) > Pr(H). In
other words, the relevance measures all concur that confirmation goes along
with positive probabilistic relevance (and disconfirmation goes with negative
probabilistic relevance). Yet there turn out to be a wide variety of confirmation
measures satisfying this basic constraint. The following measures have all been
extensively discussed in the historical literature:33
d(H,E~) = Pr(H∣E)-Pr(H)
s(H, E~) = Pr(H ∣ E^) - Pr(H ∣ ~E)
^Pr(H∣E)
r(H,E~) = log
. Pr(H)
' Pr(E∣H) '
KH,E~) = log
.Pr(E∣~H).
These measures are to be read such that, for instance, d(H, E) is the degree
to which E confirms H relative to Pr on the d-measure. For the measures
containing fractions, we stipulate that the value of the fraction is infinite when
the denominator but not the numerator is 0. (Just think of it as taking the limit
of the fraction as the denominator goes to 0.)
Each of the measures has been defined such that if H and E are positively
relevant on Pr, then the value of the measure is positive; if H and E are
negatively relevant, the value is negative; and if H is independent of E then
the value is 0. In other words: positive values represent confirmation, negative
values represent disconfirmation, and 0 represents irrelevance.34 For example,
if Pr assigns each of the six faces on a die equal probability of coming up on a
given roll, then
d(2, prime) = Pr(2 ∣ prime) — Pr(2)

= 1/3 - 1/6 (6.7)
= 1/6
This value is positive because evidence that the die roll came up prime would
confirm the hypothesis that it came up two. Beyond the fact that its positive,
the particular number returned by the d-measure has no intrinsic significance.
228 CONFIRMATION
(It’s not as if a d-value of, say, 10 has a particular meaning.) But we can make
meaningful comparisons among values assigned by the same confirmation
measure. For example, d(3 V 5, prime) = 1/3, which is greater than the 1/6
calculated above. So according to the d-measure (sometimes called the “differ
ence measure”), on this Pr-distribution evidence that the die came up prime
more strongly supports the disjunctive conclusion that it came up three or five
than the conclusion that it came up two.
Since they are all relevance measures, the confirmation measures I listed
will agree on classificatory facts about whether a particular E supports a
particular H relative to a particular Pr. Nevertheless, they are distinct measures
because they disagree about various comparative facts. A bit of calculation will
reveal that r(2, prime) = log(2). Again, that particular number has no special
significance, nor is there really much to say about how an r-score of log(2)
compares to a d-score of 1/6. (r and d measure confirmation on different scales,
so to speak.) But it is significant that r(3 V5, prime) = log(2) as well. According
to the r-measure (sometimes called the “log ratio measure”), evidence that the
roll came up prime confirms the hypothesis that it came up two to the exact
same degree as the hypothesis that it came up either three or five. That is a
substantive difference with the d-measure about a comparative confirmation
claim.
Since the various confirmation measures can disagree about comparative
confirmation claims, to the extent that we are interested in making such
comparisons we will need to select among the measures available. Arguing
for some measures over others occupies much of the literature in this field.
What kinds of arguments can be made? Well, we might test our intuitions
on individual cases. For instance, it might just seem intuitively obvious to
you that the primeness evidence favors the 3 V 5 hypothesis more strongly
than the 2 hypothesis, in which case you may prefer the d-measure over the
r-measure. Another approach parallels Hempel’s approach to the qualitative
confirmation relation: We first identify formal features we want a confirma
tion measure to display, then we test positive proposals for each of those
features.
For example, suppose E confirms H strongly while E' confirms H only
weakly. If we let c represent the “true” confirmation measure (whichever
measure that turns out to be), c(H,E) and c(H,E,') will both be positive
numbers (because E and E' both confirm EΓ), but c(H, E) will be the larger of
the two. Intuitively, since E is such good news for H it should also be very bad
news for ~H; since E, is only weakly good news for H it should be only weakly
bad news for ~H. This means that while c(~H,E) and c(~H,E') are both
negative, c(~H, E) is the lower (farther from zero) of the two. That relationship
is guaranteed by the following formal condition:
Hypothesis Symmetry: For all H and E in £ and every probabilistic Pr,

c(H,E) = -c(~H,E).
Hypothesis Symmetry says that evidence which favors a hypothesis will dis
favor the negation of that hypothesis just as strongly. It guarantees that if
c(H,E) > c(HsE') then c(~H,E) < c(~H, E').35
Hypothesis Symmetry won’t do all that much work in narrowing our field;
of the confirmation measures under consideration, only r is ruled out by this
condition. A considerably stronger condition can be obtained by following
Carnap’s thought that entailment and refutation are the two extremes of
confirmation.36 If that’s right, then confirmation measures must satisfy the
following adequacy condition:
Logicality: All entailments receive the same degree of confirmation, and

have a higher degree of confirmation than any non-entailing con
firmations.37
If we combine Logicality with Hypothesis Symmetry, we get the further result

that refutations are the strongest form of disconfirmation, and all refutations
are equally strong.
Logicality is violated by, for instance, confirmation measure d. It’s easy to
see why. d subtracts the prior of H from its posterior. Since the posterior can
never be more than 1, the prior will therefore put a cap on how high d can
get. For example, if Pr(H) = 9/10, then no E will be able to generate a d-value
greater than 1/10, which is the value one will get when E 1= H. On the other
hand, we saw in Equation (6.7) that d-values greater than 1/10 are possible
even for evidence that doesn’t entail the hypothesis (e.g., d(2, prime) = 1/6),
simply because the prior of the hypothesis in question is so much lower. As
with the firmness concept of confirmation, the prior of H interferes with the
d-score’s assessment of the relation between E and H. This interference makes
the d-measure violate Logicality.
Out of all the confirmation measures prominently defended in the historical
literature (including all the measures described above), only measure I satifies
Logicality. This constitutes a strong argument in favor of measure I (sometimes
called the “log likelihood-ratio measure” of confirmation). If I looks familiar
to you, that may be because it simply applies a logarithm to the Bayes factor,
230 CONFIRMATION
which we studied in Section 4.1.2. There we saw that the Bayes factor equals the
ratio of posterior odds to prior odds, and is a good way of measuring the impact
a piece of evidence has on an agents opinion about a hypothesis. Moreover,
the log-likelihood ratio has a convenient mathematical feature often cited
approvingly by statisticians: When pieces of evidence E1 and E2 are screened off
by H on Pr, l(H, E1 8lE2) = l(H, E1)+l(H, E2). (See Exercise 6.9.) We often have
cases in which independent pieces of evidence stack up in favor of a hypothesis.
Measure I makes confirmation by independent evidence additive; the strength
of a stack of independent pieces of evidence equals the sum of the individual
pieces’ strengths.
However, a newer confirmation measure38 has been proposed by Crupi,
Tentori, and Gonzalez (2007) that also satisfies both Hypothesis Symmetry and
Logicality:
Pr(⅞∣B) Pr(H) .f p^H ∣

l-Pr(H) v∣∕
z(H,E) =
if pr(H ∣ £) < pr(H)
This measure is particulary interesting because it measures confirmation

differently from disconfirmation (hence the piecewise definition). That means
confirmation and disconfirmation may satisfy different general conditions
under the z-measure. For example, the following condition is satisfied for cases
of disconfirmation but not for cases of confirmation:
z(H,E) = z(E,H) (6.8)
Interestingly, Crupi, Tentori, and Gonzalez have conducted empirical studies

in which subjects’ comparative judgments seem to match z-scores more than
they match other confirmation measures. In particular, subjects seem to
intuitively treat disconfirmation cases differently from confirmation cases.
(See Exercise 6.10.)
6.4.2 Subjective Bayesian solutions to

the Paradox of the Ravens
Earlier (Section 6.1.1) we saw Hempel endorsing conditions on confirmation

according to which the hypothesis that all ravens are black would be confirmed
not only by the observation of a black raven but also by the observation
of a red herring. Hempel explained this result—the so-called Paradox of

the Ravens—by arguing that its seeming paradoxicality results from back
ground assumptions we illicitly smuggle into the question. Our confirmation
intuitions are driven by contingent facts we typically know about the world, but
for Hempel the only fair test of ravens confirmation was against an empirically
empty background. Hempel would ultimately defend a positive theory of
confirmation on which black raven and red herring observations stand in
exactly the same relations to the ravens hypothesis, as we long as we stick to a
tautological background corpus.
Subjective Bayesians take the paradox in exactly the opposite direction. They
examine our contingent background assumptions about what the world is like,
and try to explain the intuitive confirmation judgments that result. As Charles
Chihara puts it (in a slightly different context), the problem is “that of trying
to see why we, who always come to our experiences with an encompassing
complex web of beliefs,” assess the paradox the way we do. (1981, p. 437)
Take the current knowledge you actually have of what the world is like. Now
suppose that against the background of that knowledge, you are told that you
will soon be given an object a to observe. You will record whether it is a raven
and whether it is black; you are not told in advance whether a will have either of
these properties. Recall that on the Subjective Bayesian view of confirmation,
evidence E confirms hypothesis H relative to probability distribution Pr just in
case E is positively relevant to H on Pr. In this situation it’s plausible that, when
you gain evidence E about whether a is a raven and whether it is black, you will
judge the confirmation of various hypotheses by this evidence relative to your
personal credence distribution. So we will let your cr play the role of Pr.
The key judgment we hope to explain is that the ravens hypothesis (all ravens
are black) is more strongly confirmed by the observation of a black raven than
by the observation of a non-black non-raven (a red herring, say). One might go
further and suggest that observing a red herring shouldn’t confirm the ravens
hypothesis at all. But if we look to our considered judgments (rather than
just our first reactions) here, we should probably grant that insofar as a non
black raven would be absolutely disastrous news for the ravens hypothesis, any
observation of an object that doesn’t turn out to be a non-black raven should
be at least some good news for the hypothesis.39
Expressing our key judgment formally requires us to measure degrees of
confirmation, a topic we discussed in the previous section. If c(H, E) measures
the degree to which E confirms H relative to cr, the Bayesian claims that
c(H, Ba & Ra) > c(H, ~Ba & ~Ra) (6.9)

232 CONFIRMATION
where H is the ravens hypothesis (Vx)(Rx D Bx). Again, the idea is that relative
to the credence distribution cr you assign before observing a, observing a to
be a black raven would confirm H more strongly than observing a to be a non
black non-raven.
Fitelson and Hawthorne (2010b) show that Equation (6.9) will hold relative
to cr if both the following conditions are met:
cr(~Bd) > cr(Rd) (6.10)

cr(~Bα ∣ H) cr(~Ba)
cr(Ra ∣ H) ''' cr(Rd)
These conditions are jointly sufficient for the confirmational result in Equation
.
(6.9) They are not necessary; in fact, Bayesians have proposed a number of
different sufficient sets over the years.40 But these have the advantage of being
simple and compact; they also work for every construal of c canvassed in the
previous section except for confirmation measure s.
What do these conditions say7. You satisfy Equation (6.10) if you are more
confident prior to observing the object a that it will be non-black than you
are that a will be a raven. This would make sense if, for example, you thought
a was going to be randomly selected for you from a universe that contained
more non-black things than ravens.41 Equation (6.11) then considers the ratio
of your confidence that a will be non-black to your confidence that it will be a
raven. Meeting condition (6.10) makes this ratio greater than 1; now we want
to know how the ratio would change were you to suppose all ravens are black.
Equation (6.11) says that when you make this supposition the ratio doesn’t go
up—supposing all ravens are black wouldn’t, say, dramatically increase how
many non-black things you thought were in the pool or dramatically decrease
your count of ravens. (It turns out from the math that for the confirmational
judgment in Equation (6.9) to go false, the left-hand ratio in (6.11) would
have to be much larger than the right-hand ratio; hence my talk of dramatic
changes.) This constraint seems sensible. Under normal circumstances, for
instance, supposing that all ravens are black should if anything increase the
number of black things you think there are, not increase your count of non-
black items.
Subjective Bayesians suggest that relative to our real-life knowledge of the
world, were we to confront a selection situation like the one proposed in the
ravens scenario, our credence distribution would satisfy Equations (6.10) and
(6.11). Relative to such a credence distribution, the observation of a black
raven confirms the ravens hypothesis more strongly than the observation of
a red herring. This is how a Subjective Bayesian explains the key intuitive
judgment that the ravens hypothesis is better confirmed by a black raven
observation than a red herring observation: by showing how that judgment
follows from more general assumptions we make about the composition of the
world. Given that peoples outlook on the world typically satisfies Equations
(6.10) and (6.11), it follows from the Subjective Bayesian’s quantitative theory
of confirmation that if they are rational, most people will take the black raven
observation to confirm more strongly.42
Now one might object that people who endorse the key ravens judgment
have credence distributions that don’t actually satisfy the conditions specified
(or other sets of sufficient conditions Bayesians have proposed). Or an Objec
tive Bayesian might argue that a confirmation judgment can be vindicated
only by grounding it in something firmer than personal credences. I am not
going to take up those arguments here. But I hope to have at least fought
back the charge that Subjective Bayesianism about confirmation is empty. The
Subjective Bayesian account of confirmation tells us when evidence E confirms
hypothesis H relative to credence distribution cr. You might think that because
it does very little to constrain the values of cr, this account can tell us nothing
interesting about when evidence confirms a hypothesis. But we have just seen
a substantive, unexpected result. It was not at all obvious at the start of our
inquiry that any rational credence distribution satisfying Equations (6.10) and
(6.11) would endorse the key ravens judgment. Subjective Bayesian results
about confirmation often take the form, “If your credences are such-and-such,
then these confirmation relations follow,” but such conditionals can be highly
informative.
For instance, the result we’ve just seen not only reveals what confirmational
judgments agents will make in typical circumstances but also what kinds of
atypical circumstances may legitimately undermine those judgments. Return
to the Hall of Atypically Colored Birds, where a bird is displayed only if the
majority of his species-mates are one color but his color is different. Suppose it
is part of an agent’s background knowledge (before she observes object a) that
a is to be selected from the Hall of Atypically Colored Birds. If at that point—
before observing a—the agent were to suppose that all ravens are black, that
would dramatically decrease her confidence that a will be a raven. If all ravens
are black, there are no atypically colored ravens, so there should be no ravens
in the Hall43 Thus given the agent’s background knowledge about the Hall
of Atypically Colored Birds, supposing the ravens hypothesis H decreases her
confidence that a will be a raven (that is, Ra). This makes the left-hand side of
Equation (6.11) greater than the right-hand side, and renders Equation (6.11)
234 CONFIRMATION
false. So one of the sufficient conditions in our ravens result fails, and its route
to Equation (6.9) is blocked. This provides a tidy explanation of why, if you
know you’re in the Hall of Atypically Colored Birds, observing a black raven
should not be better news for the ravens hypothesis than observing a non-black
non-raven.
Besides this account of the Paradox of the Ravens, Subjective Bayesians
have offered solutions to various other confirmational puzzles. For example,
Hawthorne and Fitelson (2004) approach the problem of irrelevant conjunc
tion (Section 6.1.2) by specifying conditions under which adding an irrelevant
conjunct to a confirmed hypothesis yields a new hypothesis that—while still
confirmed—is less strongly confirmed than the original. Similarly, Chihara
(1981) and Eells (1982, Ch. 2) respond to Goodmans grue example (Section
6.3) by specifying credal conditions under which a run of observed green
emeralds more strongly confirms the hypothesis that all emeralds are green
than the hypothesis that all emeralds are grue.44
Even more intriguingly, the Subjective Bayesian account of confirmation has
recently been used to provide rationalizing explanations for what otherwise
look like irrational judgments on the part of agents. The idea is that some
times when subjects are asked questions about probability, they respond with
answers about confirmation instead. In Tversky and Kahneman’s Conjunction
Fallacy experiment (Section 2.2.4), the hypothesis that Linda is a bank teller is
entailed by the hypothesis that Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist
movement. This entailment means that an agent satisfying the probability
axioms must be at least as confident in the former hypothesis as the latter. But it
does not mean that evidence must confirm the former as strongly as the latter.
Crupi, Fitelson, and Tentori (2008) outline credal conditions under which the
evidence presented to subjects in Tversky and Kahneman’s experiment would
confirm the feminist-bank-teller hypothesis more strongly than the bank
teller hypothesis. It may be that subjects who rank the feminist-bank-teller
hypothesis more highly in light of that evidence are reporting confirmational
judgments rather than credences.
Similarly, in analyzing the Base Rate Fallacy (Section 4.1.2) we noted the
strong Bayes factor of the evidence one gets from a highly reliable disease test.
Since the Bayes factor tracks the log likelihood-ratio measure of confirmation,
this tells us that a positive result from a reliable test strongly confirms that
the patient has the disease (as it should!). When doctors are asked for their
confidence that the patient has the disease in light of such a positive test result,
the high values they report may reflect their confirmational judgments.
6-5 EXERCISES 235
The Subjective Bayesian account of confirmation may therefore provide an

explanation of what subjects are doing when they seem to make irrational
credence reports. Nevertheless, having an explanation for subjects’ behavior
does not change the fact that these subjects may be making serious mistakes.
It’s one thing when a doctor is asked in a study to report a credence value
and reports a confirmation value instead. But if that doctor goes on to make
treatment decisions based on the confirmation value rather than the posterior
probability, this can have significant consequences. Confusing how probable a
hypothesis is on some evidence with how strongly that hypothesis is confirmed
by that evidence is a version of the firmness/increase-in-firmness conflation. If
the doctor recommends a drastic treatment for a patient on the basis that the
test applied was highly reliable (even though, with the base rates taken into
account, the posterior probability that a disease is present remains quite low),
her confusion about probability and confirmation may prove highly dangerous
for her patient.
6.5 Exercises
that the distributions under discussion satisfy the probability axioms and Ratio
Formula. You may also assume that whenever a conditional probability expres
sion occurs, the needed proposition has nonzero unconditional probability so
that conditional probabilities are well defined.
Problem 6.1. Salmon (1975) notes that each of the following confirma-
tional situations can arise:
(a) Two pieces of evidence each confirm some hypothesis, but their con
junction disconfirms it.
(b) Two pieces of evidence each confirm some hypothesis, but their dis
junction disconfirms it.
(c) A piece of evidence confirms each of two hypotheses, but it disconfirms
their conjunction.
(d) A piece of evidence confirms each of two hypotheses, but it disconfirms
their disjunction.
Provide a real-world example of each of these four situations. (And don’t
make it easy on yourself—none of propositions (dis)confirming or being
(dis)confirmed should be a tautology or a contradiction!)
236 CONFIRMATION
Problem 6.2. For purposes of this problem, assume that the Equivalence
Condition, the Entailment Condition, and Disconfirmation Duality are all true
of the confirmation relation.
(a) Show that if E & K deductively refutes H but K does not refute H on its
own, then E disconfirms H relative to K.
(b) Show that if H&K deductively refutes E but K does not refute H on its
own, then E disconfirms H relative to K.
Problem 6.3. Suppose the Special Consequence Condition and Converse

Consequence Condition were both true. Show that under those assumptions,
if evidence E confirms some proposition H relative to K, then relative to K
evidence E will also confirm any other proposition X we might choose.45 (Hint:
Start with the problem of irrelevant conjunction.)
Problem 6.4. Suppose we have propositions E, H, and K in £ meeting the

following conditions: (1) the set containing E, H, and K is logically consistent;
(2) E & K1= H∙, and (3) K ≠ H. Suppose also probabilistic distribution Pr over
£ is such that for any proposition X, Pr(X) = 1 just in case K⅛= X.
(a) Prove that Pr(E) > 0.
(b) Prove that Pr(H ∣ E) = 1.
(c) Prove that Pr(H) < 1.
Problem 6.5. Suppose we have a language whose only atomic proposi

tions are Fa1,Fa2, .. .,Fan for some integer n > 1. In that case, m∖Fan) =
1/2.
(a) Show that for any non-contradictory proposition K expressible solely in
terms of Fa1 through Eαπ-1, tn^(Eαπ ∣ K) = 1/2.
(b) What does the result you demonstrated in part (a) have to do
with Carnap’s point that m' does not allow “learning from
experience”?
Problem 6.6.
(a) Make a probability table over state-descriptions for the four atomic
propositions Fa, Fb, Ga, Gb. In the right-hand column, enter the values
Carnap’s τn* assigns to each state-description. (Hint: Keep in mind that
Fa 8l ~Fb &.Ga& ~Gb belongs to a different structure-description than
Fa &. ~Fb & ~Ga & Gb.)
(b) Use your table to show that tn*(Efe ∣ Fa & Ga & Gb) > m*(Fb ∣ Fa).
(c) Use your table to show that xn*(Fb \Fa&Ga& ~Gb) = m*(Ffe).
6.5 EXERCISES 237
(d) For each of problem (b) and (c) above, explain how your answer relates
to m*’s handling of “analogical effects”.46
Problem 6.7. Suppose E" is the proposition
(Gα1 & Oα1) & (Gα2 & Oa2) & ... & (Gα99 & Oα99) & ~Ocz100
Without actually making a probability table, prove that on Carnap’s confirma

tion theory:
(a) m*(Gα100 ≡ Oawo ∣ E") = m*(~Gα∣00 ∣ B,,)
(b) m*(Gα100 ≡ Oawo ∣ E") = m*(Gawo ∣ B")
(c) m*(Gα1001 B") = 1/2
(d) m*(Gα100) = 1/2
(e) m*(Ga100 ≡ Oawo ∣B") = m*(Gα100 ∣ E”) = m*(Gα100)
Problem 6.8. Provide examples showing that the r-measure of confirma

tion violates each of the following constraints:
(a) Hypothesis Symmetry
(b) Logicality
Problem 6.9. Prove that on the /-measure of degree of confirmation, if El

is screened off from E2 by H on Pr, then the degree to which El & E2 confirms
H can be found by summing the degrees to which E1 and E2 each confirm H
individually. (Hint: Remember that log(x ∙y) = logx + logy.)
Problem 6.10. Crupi, Tentori, and Gonzalez think it’s intuitive that on
whatever measure c correctly gauges confirmation, the following constraint
will be satisfied for cases of disconfirmation but not confirmation:
c(H,E) = c(E,H')
(a) Provide a real-world example of two propositions A and B such that,

intuitively, A confirms B but B does not confirm A to the same degree.
(Don’t forget to specify the Pr distribution to which your confirmation
judgments are relative!)
(b) Provide a real-world example of two propositions C and D such that,
intuitively, C disconfirms D and D disconfirms C to the same degree.
(Don’t make it too easy on yourself—pick a C and D that aren’t mutually
exclusive!)
238 CONFIRMATION
(c) Does it seem to you intuitively that for any propositions C and D and
probability distribution Pr, if C disconfirms D then D will disconfirm C
to the same degree? Explain why or why not.
Problem 6.11.
(a) Provide an example in which the I- and ^-measures disagree on
a comparative confirmational claim. That is, provide an example in
which the /-measure says that E1 confirms Hl more strongly than E2
confirms H2, but the z-measure says E2 confirms H2 more strongly than
E1 confirms H1.
(b) Prove that the I- and z-measures never disagree on how strongly
two pieces of evidence confirm the same hypothesis. That is, prove that
there do not exist H, E1, E2, and Pr such that l(H,E1)>l(H,E2) but
z(H,E1)<z(H,⅞).
Problem 6.12. The solution to the Paradox of the Ravens presented

in Section 6.4.2 is not the only Subjective Bayesian solution that has been
defended. An earlier solution47 invoked the following four conditions (where
H abbreviates (Vx)(Rx D Bx)):
(i) Pr(Rcι & ~Ba) > 0
(ii) Pr(~Bα) > Pr(Rα)
(iii) Pr(Rα ∣ H) = Pr(Rα)
(iv) Pr(~Bα ∣ H) = Pr(~Bα)
Assuming Pr satisfies these conditions, complete each of the following. (Hint:
Feel free to write H instead of the full, quantified proposition it represents, but
don’t forget what H entails about Ra and Ba.)
(a) Prove that Pr(~Rα & ~Ba) > Pr(Ra & Ba).
(b) Prove that Pr(Rα &Ba&H) = Pr(H) ∙ Pr(Ra).
(c) Prove that Pr(~Rα & ~Ba &H) = Pr(H) ∙ Pr(~Ba).
(d) Show that on confirmation measure d, if Pr satisfies conditions (i)
through (iv) then Ra & Ba confirms H more strongly than ~Ra & ~Ba
does.
(e) Where in your proofs did you use condition (i)?
(f) Suppose Pr is your credence distribution when you know you are about
to observe an object a drawn from the Hall of Atypically Colored Birds.
Which of the conditions (i) through (iv) will Pr probably not satisfy?
Explain.
6.6 Further reading
Ellery Eells (1982). Rational Decision and Causality. Cambridge Studies in

Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
The latter part of Chapter 2 (pp. 52-64) offers an excellent discussion of

Hempel’s adequacy conditions for confirmation, how the correct conditions
are satisfied by a probabilistic relevance approach, and Subjective Bayesian
solutions to the Paradox of the Ravens and Goodmans grue puzzle.
Rudolf Carnap (1955/1989). Statistical and Inductive Probability. In: Read

ings in the Philosophy of Science. Ed. by Baruch A. Brody and Richard E.
Grandy. 2nd edition. Hoboken: Prentice-Hall
A brief, accessible overview by Carnap of his position on the meaning of “prob

ability” and the development of his various confirmation functions. (Here
he uses “individual distribution” to refer to state-descriptions and “statistical
distribution” to refer to structure-descriptions.) Includes a probability table
with diagrams!
Alan Hajek and James M. Joyce (2008). Confirmation. In: The Routledge
Companion to Philosophy of Science. Ed. by Stathis Psillos and Martin
Curd. New York: Routledge, pp. 115-28
Besides providing an overview of much of the material in this chapter, suggests

that there may not be one single correct function for measuring degree of
confirmation.
Classic Texts
Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum (1940). On Confirmation. Journal of Sym

bolic Logic 5, pp. 133-48
Early suggestion that the Paradox of the Ravens might be resolved by first
admitting that both a black raven and a red herring confirm that all ravens
are black, but then second arguing that the former confirms more strongly
240 CONFIRMATION
than the latter. (Though she uses a different example than the color of ravens.)
Also anticipates some of Carnap’s later conclusions about which adequacy
conditions could be met by a confirmation theory based on probability.
Carl G. Hempel (1945a). Studies in the Logic of Confirmation (I). Mind 54,
pp. 1-26
Carl G. Hempel (1945b). Studies in the Logic of Confirmation (II). Mind 54,
pp. 97-121
Hempel’s classic papers discussing his adequacy conditions on the confirma

tion relation and offering his own positive, syntactical account of confirmation.
Rudolf Carnap (1950). Logical Foundations of Probability. Chicago: Univer

sity of Chicago Press
While much of the material earlier in this book is crucial for motivating
Carnap’s probabilistic theory of confirmation, his discussion of distributions
mJ and m* occurs in the Appendix. (Note that the preface distinguishing
“firmness” from “increase in firmness” concepts of confirmation does not
appear until the second edition of this text, in 1962.)
Nelson Goodman (1955). Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press
Chapter III contains Goodman’s “grue” discussion.
Extended Discussion
Michael G. Titelbaum (2010). Not Enough There There: Evidence, Reasons,

and Language Independence. Philosophical Perspectives 24, pp. 477-528
Proves a general language-dependence result for all objective accounts of

confirmation (including accounts that are Objective Bayesian in the normative
sense), then evaluates the result’s philosophical significance.
Katya Tentori, Vincenzo Crupi, and Selena Russo (2013). On the Determi
nants of the Conjunction Fallacy: Probability versus Inductive Confirma
tion. Journal ofExperimental Psychology: General 142, pp. 235-55
NOTES 241
Assessment of various explanations of the Conjunction Fallacy in the psychol

ogy literature, including the explanation that subjects are reporting confirma
tion judgments rather than posterior credences.
Notes
1. Scientists—and philosophers of science—are interested in a number of other properties

and relations of evidence and hypotheses in addition to confirmation. These include
predictive power, informativeness, simplicity, unification of disparate phenomena, etc.
An interesting ongoing Bayesian line of research asks whether and how these various
other notions relate to confirmation.
2. Good (1967) offers a more detailed example in the same vein. Good describes the
population distributions of two worlds constructed so that observing a black raven
confirms that we are in the world in which not all ravens are black.
3. As I pointed out in Chapter 4’s note 13, this passage may have been the inspiration for
David Lewis’s referring to hypothetical priors (numerical distributions satisfying the
probability axioms yet containing no contingent evidence) as “superbaby” credences.
4. In discussing the Paradox of the Ravens, one might worry whether (Vx)(Rx D Bx)-with
its material conditional, and lack of existential import—is a faithful translation of “All
ravens are black.” Strictly speaking, Hempel is examining what confirms the proposition
expressed by the sentence in logical notation, rather than the proposition expressed by
the sentence in English. But if the two come apart, intuitions about “All ravens are black”
may become less relevant to Hempel’s discussion.
5. Despite his attention to background corpora, Hempel isn’t careful about backgrounds
in the adequacy conditions he proposes. So I have added the relevant background
restrictions to Hempel’s official definitions of his conditions, and will explain the
motivations for those restrictions as we go along.
Also, in case you’re wondering why E, H, and K are required to be consistent in the
Entailment Condition, consider a case in which K refutes E and E is entirely irrelevant to
H. E&Kwill be a contradiction, and so will entail H, but we don’t want to say E confirms
H relative to K. I will include similar consistency requirements as needed going forward.
6. Similar considerations tell against citing events as evidence. Was it the discovery of Troy
that supported the historicity of Homer, the discovery of Troy in northwestern Turkey,
or the discovery of Troy in northwestern Turkey by Heinrich Schliemann?
7. An interesting literature has sprung up among Bayesian epistemologists about the pre
cise conditions under which evidence of evidence constitutes evidence for a hypothesis.
See, for example, Tai and Comesana (2017), Roche (2014), and Fitelson (2012), building
off foundational work in Shogenji (2003).
8. I learned of this example from Bradley (2015, §1.3); as far as I know it first appeared at
Pryor (2004, pp. 350-1).
Note, by the way, that while one might want a restriction to keep the Special
Consequence Condition from applying when K i= H', in the stated counterexamples
H' is not entailed by K. Out of desperation we could try to save Special Consequence by
242 CONFIRMATION
claiming it holds only relative to tautological backgrounds (as Hempel did with Nicod’s
Criterion). But we can recreate our cards counterexample to Special Consequence by
emptying out the background and adding facts about how the card was drawn as
conjuncts to each of A, B, and C. Similar remarks apply to the counterexamples we’ll
soon produce for other putative confirmation constraints.
9. For one of many articles on confirmational intransitivity and skepticism, see White
(2006). The broader epistemology community’s recent acknolwedgment that reasons
for a conclusion need not transmit to propositions entailed by that conclusion often
feels to me like a rediscovery of Bayesian epistemology’s rejection of Hempel’s Special
Consequence Condition decades earlier.
10. We could provide another argument for the Consistency Condition from the premises
that (1) if a hypothesis is confirmed by evidence we possess then we should accept
that hypothesis; and (2) one should never accept inconsistent propositions. But we’ve
already rejected (1) for our notion of confirmation.
11. Γm assuming the definition of an ostrich includes its being a flightless bird, and
whatever X is involved doesn’t entail E, H, or H, on its own.
12. Hypothetico-deductivism is a positive view of confirmation that takes the condition
in Converse Entailment to be not only sufficient but also necessary for confirmation: E
confirms H relative to Kjust in case H &.X 1= E and X J≠ E. This is implausible for a
number of reasons (see Hempel 1945b). Here’s one: Evidence that a coin of unknown
bias has come up heads on exactly half of a huge batch of flips supports the hypothesis
that the coin is fair; yet that evidence isn’t entailed by that hypothesis.
13. Strictly speaking there will be infinitely many X in £ such that Pr(X) = 1, so we will
take K to be a proposition in £ logically equivalent to the conjunction of all such
X. (I’ll ignore this detail in what follows.) Notice that if Pr represents the credence
distribution of an agent at a given time ti, this definition makes the agent’s background
corpus equivalent to her total evidence Ei at that time, as that notion was discussed in
Section 4.3.
14. Carnap’s preface to the second edition distinguishes the firmness and increase in
firmness concepts because he had equivocated between them in the first edition. Carnap
was roundly criticized for this by Popper (1954).
15. I even made this mistake once in an article, despite my intense awareness of the issue!
Luckily the error was caught before the offending piece was published.
16. Here we assume that, as pointed out in Chapter 2’s note 5, the atomic propositions of
A are logically independent.
17. A word about Carnap’s notation in his (1950). Carnap actually introduces two con
firmation functions, tn(∙) and c(∙, ∙). For any non-contradictory proposition K in £,
c(∙,K) is just the function I’ve been describing as Pr(∙) relative to X; in other words,
c(∙, X) = ∏t(∙ ∣ X) = m(∙ 8cX)∕τπ(K). As I’ve just mentioned in the main text, this makes
c somewhat redundant in the theory of confirmation, so I won’t bring it up again.
18. As I mentioned in Chapter 5, note 8, Carnap actually thinks “probability” is ambiguous
between two meanings. What he calls κprobability1,' is the logical notion of probability
we’ve been discussing. Carnap’s “probability2” is based on frequencies, and is therefore
objective as well.
notes 243
19. Among other things, m't' represents the technique for determining probabilities that
Ludwig Wittgenstein proposed in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921/1961,
Proposition 5.15ff.)
20. Jonathan Kvanvig suggested to me the following helpful illustration: Suppose I roll two
dice, a red one and a blue one. A structure-description would say “One die came up six,
the other came up three”, while a state-description would say “The red die came up six,
the blue die came up three”. The structure-description tells us how many objects display
particular combinations of features, but—unlike the state-description—it doesn’t tell us
which specific objects display which combinations.
21. Formally, two state-descriptions are disjuncts of the same structure-description just in
case one state-description can be obtained from the other by permuting its constants.
22. Interestingly, Carnap’s continuum proposal shared a number of features with a much
earlier proposal by Johnson (1932).
23. To simplify matters, Γm going to assume going forward that (1) each object under
discussion in the grue example is observed exactly once (so that “not observed by t”
is equivalent to “observed after t”); (2) each object is either green or blue (so “not
green” is equivalent to “blue”); and (3) each object is an emerald. Strictly speaking these
assumptions should be made explicit as part of the agent’s total evidence, but since
doing so would make no difference to the forthcoming calculations, I won’t bother.
This approach is backed up by Goodman’s position in his (1955, p. 73, n. 9) that the
grue problem is “substantially the same” as the problem he offered in Goodman (1946).
The earlier version of the problem was both more clearly laid-out and cleaner from a
logical point of view. For instance, instead of green and blue, he used red and not-
red. The earlier paper also made clearer exactly whose positive theories of confirmation
Goodman took the problem to target.
24. Γm going to assume Goodman is criticizing the version of Carnap’s theory committed
to mi:; Carnap’s subsequent changes to handle analogical effects make little difference
here.
25. Compare the difficulties with partition selection we encountered for indifference
principles in Section 5.3.
26. To emphasize that not every pattern observed in the past should be expected to hold
in the future, John Venn once provided the following example: “I have given a false
alarm of fire on three different occasions and found the people came to help me each
time” (1866, p. 180). One wonders if his false alarms were intentional experiments in
induction (quoted in Galavotti 2005, pp. 77—8.)
27. Hume’s (1739-40/1978) problem of induction asked what justifies us in projecting any
past correlations into the future. Goodmans “new riddle of induction” asks, given that
we are justified in projecting some correlations, which ones we ought to project.
28. Hempel’s theory of confirmation displays a similar effect. And really, any close reader
of Hempel should’ve known that some of Goodman’s claims against Hempel were
overstated. I mentioned that Hempel endorses the Consistency Condition (Section
6.1.2); he goes on to prove that it is satisfied by his positive theory of confirmation. On
Hempel’s theory, the hypotheses confirmed by any piece of evidence must be consistent
with both that evidence and each other. So a single body of evidence cannot confirm
244 CONFIRMATION
both Gcz100 and ~Gα100. Contra Goodman, it just cant be that on Hempel’s theory we
get the “devastating result that any statement will confirm any statement” (1955, p. 81).
29. For more on this topic, see Hooker (1968), Fine (1973, Ch. VII), Maher (2010), and
Titelbaum (2010).
30. Also, the Subjective Bayesian account of confirmation does not suffer from language
dependence problems. Suppose credence distribution cr, defined over language £,
makes it the case that cr(H ∣ E~) > cr(H). We might define a different language £' that
expresses all the same propositions as 23, and a distribution ex' over 23'. Intuitively, ex'
expresses the same credences as cr just in case cr'(X,) = cr(X) whenever X' ∈ 23'
expresses the same proposition as X ∈ 23. If that condition is met, then ex' will satisfy
the Kolmogorov axioms just in case cr does. And if cx(H ∣ E) > cx(H), we will have
cx'(H' ∣ E') > cr(H') for the H' and E' in 23' that express the same propositions
as H and E (respectively). So confirmation relations are unaffected by translations
across languages. (The same will be true of the confirmation measures we discuss in
Section 6.4.1.)
31. Keep in mind that we’re discussing Subjective Bayesians in the normative sense (Section
5.1.2). Their Subjective Bayesianism is an epistemological position, about the variety of
rational hypothetical priors available. Subjective Bayesians in the normative sense need
not be Subjective Bayesians in the semantic sense; they need not read every assertion
containing the word “probability” as attributing a credence to an individual.
32. As we put it in Chapter 5, the Subjective Bayesian need not be an extreme Subjective
Bayesian, who denies any constraints on rational hypothetical priors beyond the
probability axioms.
33. For citations to various historical authors who defended each measure, see Eells and
Fitelson (2002).
34. The logarithms have been added to the r- and /-measures to achieve this centering
on 0. Removing the logarithms would yield measures ordinally equivalent to their
logged versions, but whose values ran from 0 to infinity (with a value of 1 indicating
probabilistic independence). Notice also that the base of the logarithms is irrelevant for
our purposes.
35. Hypothesis Symmetry was defended as a constraint on degree of confirmation by
Kemeny and Oppenheim (1952); see also Eells and Fitelson (2002), who gave it that
particular name.
36. Carnap thought of confirmation as a “generalization of entailment” in a number of
senses. Many Subjective Bayesians are happy to accept Carnap’s idea that deductive
cases are limiting cases of confirmation, but aren’t willing to follow Carnap in taking
those limiting cases as a model for the whole domain. Whether E entails H relative to K
depends just on the content of those propositions, and Carnap thought matters should
be the same for all confirmatory relations. To a Subjective Bayesian, though, whether E
confirms H relative to K depends on something more—a full probability distribution Pr.
37. See Fitelson (2006) for Logicality. Note that in assessing whether confirmation measures
satisfy Logicality, we restrict our attention to “contingent” cases, in which neither E nor
H is entailed or refuted by the K associated with Pr.
notes 245
38. Glass and McCartney (2015) notes that Crupi, Tentori, and Gonzalez’s z-measure
adapts to the problem of confirmation the so-called “certainty factor” that has been
used in the field of expert systems since Shortliffe and Buchanan (1975).
39. Another thought one might have is that while a red herring confirms that all ravens
are black, its degree of confirmation of that hypothesis is exceedingly weak in absolute
terms. While some Bayesian analyses of the paradox also try to establish this result, we
won’t consider it here. (See Vranas 2004 for discussion and citations on the proposal that
a red herring confirms the ravens hypothesis to a degree that is “positive but minute.”)
40. For citations to many historical proposals, see Fitelson and Hawthorne (2010a,
esp. n. 10). Fitelson and Hawthorne (2010b) goes beyond these historical sources
by also proposing necessary conditions for Equation (6.9), which unfortunately are too
complex to detail here.
41. The result assumes you assign non-extreme unconditional credences to the proposition
that a is black and to the proposition that it’s a raven. This keeps various denominators
in the Ratio Formula positive. We also assume you have a non-extreme prior in H.
42. Why “if they are rational”? The mathematical result assumes not only that the credence
distribution in question satisfies Equations (6.10) and (6.11) but also that it satisfies the
probability axioms and Ratio Formula. (This allows us to draw out conclusions about
values in the credence distribution beyond those directly specified by Equations (6.10)
and (6.11).) Subjective Bayesians assume a rational credence distribution satisfies the
probability axioms and Ratio Formula.
43. Perhaps even with the supposition that all ravens are black, the agent’s confidence that
a will be a raven is slightly above zero because once in a long while the Hall’s curators
make a mistake.
44. At the 2020 Central Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Assocation, Sven
Moritz Silvester Neth presented a paper arguing that a sufficient condition for favoring
the green hypothesis over the grue hypothesis after observing a run of green emeralds
is to have a prior on which an emerald’s being green is probabilistically independent
of whether it has been observed by time t. This fits my diagnosis that what’s at stake in
the grue problem is which correlations we should take seriously and which we should
treat as spurious. If one antecedently assumes that emerald color is independent of
time of observation, then any correlations between those two variables one notices in a
sample will be discarded as unimportant, rather than projected forward through a grue
hypothesis.
45. For purposes of this problem you may assume that E, H, X, and K stand in no special
logical relationships. (Being inconsistent counts as a “special logical relationship”; being
consistent does not.)
46. I owe this entire problem to Branden Fitelson.
47. See Fitelson and Hawthorne (2010a, Sect. 7) for discussion.
7
Decision Theory
Up to this point most of our discussion has been about epistemology. But
probability theory originated in attempts to understand games of chance,
and historically its most extensive application has been to practical decision
making. The Bayesian theory of probabilistic credence is a central element
of decision theory, which developed throughout the twentieth century in
philosophy, psychology, and economics. Decision theory searches for rational
principles to evaluate the acts available to an agent at any given moment. Given
what she values (her utilities) and how she sees the world (her credences),
decision theory recommends the act that is most efficacious for achieving those
values from her point of view.
Decision theory has always been a crucial application of Bayesian theory. In
his The Foundations of Statistics, Leonard J. Savage wrote:
Much as I hope that the notion of probability defined here is consistent with
ordinary usage, it should be judged by the contribution it makes to the theory
of decision. (1954, p. 27)
Decision theory has also been extensively studied, and a number of excellent
book-length introductions are now available. (I recommend one in the Fur
ther Reading section of this chapter.) As a result, I haven’t packed as much
information into this chapter as into the preceding chapter on confirmation.
I hope only to equip the reader with the terminology and ideas we will need
later in this book, and that she would need to delve further into the philosophy
of decision theory.
We will begin with the general mathematical notion of an expectation,
followed by the philosophical notion of utility. We will then see how Savage
calculates expected utilities to determine rational preferences among acts, and
the formal properties of rational preference that result. Next comes Richard
Jeffreys Evidential Decision Theory, which improves on Savage’s by applying
to probabilistically dependent states and acts. We will then discuss Jeffrey’s
troubles with certain kinds of risk-aversion (especially the Allais Paradox),
and with Newcomb’s Problem. Causal Decision Theory will be proposed as

7.1 CALCULATING EXPECTATIONS 247
a better response to Newcomb. I will close by briefly tracing some of the

historical back-and-forth about which decision theory handles Newcombs
problem best.
7.1 Calculating expectations
Suppose there’s a numerical quantity—say, the number of hits a particular

batter will have in tonights baseball game—and you have opinions about what
value that quantity will take. We can then calculate your expectation for the
quantity. While there are subtleties we will return to later, the basic idea of an
expectation is to multiply each value the quantity might take by your credence
that it’ll take that value, then add up the results. So if you’re 30% confident the
batter will have one hit, 20% confident she’ll have two hits, and 50% confident
she’ll have three, your expectation for the number of hits is
1 ∙ 0.30 +2 ∙ 0.20 + 3 ∙ 0.50 = 2.2 (7.1)
Your expectation of a quantity is not the value you anticipate the quantity will
actually take, or even the value you think it’s most probable the quantity will
take—in the baseball example, you’re certain the batter won’t have 2.2 hits in
tonight’s game! Your expectation of a quantity is a kind of estimate of the value
the quantity will take. When you’re uncertain about the value of a quantity, a
good estimate may straddle the line between multiple options.
While your expectation for a quantity isn’t necessarily the exact value you
think it will take on a given occasion, it should equal the average value you
expect that quantity to take in the long run. Suppose you’re certain that our
batter will play in many, many games. The law of large numbers says that if
you satisfy the probability axioms, you’ll have credence 1 that as the number
of games increases, her average number of hits per game will tend toward your
expectation for that quantity. In other words, you’re highly confident that as
the number of games approaches the limit, the batter’s average hits per game
will approach 2.2.1
We’ve already calculated expectations for a few different quantities in this
book. For example, when you lack inadmissible evidence the Principal Prin
ciple requires your credence in a proposition to equal your expectation of its
chance. (See especially our calculation in Equation (5.7).) But by far the most
commonly calculated expectations in life are monetary values. For example,
suppose you have the opportunity to buy stock in a company just before it
248 DECISION THEORY
announces quarterly earnings. If the announcement is good you’ll be able to

sell shares at $100 each, but if the announcement is bad you’ll be forced to sell at
$10 apiece. The value you place in these shares depends on your confidence in
a good report. If you’re 40% confident in a good earnings report, your expected
value for each share is
$100 ∙ 0.40 + $10 ∙ 0.60 = $46 (7.2)
As a convention, we let positive monetary values stand for money accrued to

the agent; negative monetary values are amounts the agent pays out. So your
expectation of how much money you will receive for each share is $46.
An agent’s fair price for an investment is what she takes to be that invest
ment’s break-even point—she’d pay anything up to that amount of money
in exchange for the investment. If you use expected values to make your
investment decisions, your fair price for each share of the stock just described
will be $46. If you buy shares for less than $46 each, your expectation for that
transaction will be positive (you’ll expect to make money on the deal). If you
buy shares for more than $46, you’ll expect to lose money.
The idea that your fair price for an investment should equal your expectation
of its monetary return dates to Blaise Pascal, in a famous seventeenth-century
correspondence with Pierre Fermat (Fermat and Pascal 1654/1929). There are
a couple of reasons why this is a sensible idea. First, suppose you know you’re
going to be confronted with this exact investment situation many, many times.
The law of large numbers says that you should anticipate a long-run average
return of $46 per share. So if you’re going to adopt a standing policy for buying
and selling such investments, you are highly confident that any price higher
than $46 will lose you money and any price lower than $46 will make you
money in the long term. Second, expectations vary in intuitive ways when
conditions change. If you become more confident in a good earnings report,
each share becomes more valuable to you, and you should be willing to pay
a higher price. This is exactly what the expected value calculation predicts. If
you learn that a good earnings report will send the share value to only $50, this
decreases the expected value of the investment and also decreases the price you
should be willing to pay.
An investment is a type of bet, and fair betting prices play a significant role
in Bayesian lore. (We’ll see one reason why in Chapter 9.) A bet that pays $1 if
proposition P is true and nothing otherwise has an expected value of
$1 ∙ cr(P) + $0 ∙ cr(~P) = $cr(P) (7.3)

7∙1 CALCULATING EXPECTATIONS 249
If you use expectations to calculate fair betting prices, your price for a gamble
that pays $1 on P equals your unconditional credence in P.
We can also think about fair betting prices using odds. We saw in Section
2.3.4 that an agents odds against P equal cr(~P) : cr(P). So if the agents
credence in P is 0.25, her odds against P are 3 : 1. What will she consider a
fair bet on P? Consider what the casinos would call a bet on P at 3 : 1 odds. If
you place such a bet and win, you get back the original amount you bet plus
three times that amount. If you lose your bet, you’re out however much you
bet. In terms of net returns, a bet at 3 : 1 odds offers you a possible net gain
that’s three times your possible net loss.
So suppose an agent with 0.25 credence in P places a $20 bet on P at 3 : 1
odds. Her expected net return is
(net return on winning bet) ∙ cr(P) + (net return on losing bet) ∙ cr(~P)
= $60 ∙ 0.25 + —$20 ∙ 0.75 = $0 (7.4)
This agent expects a bet on P at 3 : 1 odds to be a break-even gamble—from

her perspective, it’s a fair bet. She will be willing to bet on P at those odds or
anything higher. In general, an agent who bets according to her expectations
will accept a bet on a proposition at odds equal to her odds against it, or
anything higher. Remember that an agent’s odds against a proposition increase
as her credence in the proposition decreases. So if an agent becomes less
confident in P, you need to offer her higher odds on P before she’ll be willing
to gamble.
A lottery ticket is a type of bet, and in the right situation calculating its
expected value can be highly lucrative. Ellenberg (2014, Ch. 11) relates the
story of Massachusetts’s Cash WinFall state lottery game, which was structured
in such a way that if the jackpot got high enough, the expected payout for a
single ticket grew larger than the price the state charged for that ticket. For
example, on February 7, 2005 the expected value of a $2 lottery ticket was
$5.53. The implications of this arrangement were understood by three groups
of individuals—led respectively by an MIT student, a medical researcher in
Boston, and a retiree in Michigan who had played a short-lived similar game
in his home state. Of course, the expected value of a ticket isn’t necessarily what
you will win if you buy a single ticket, but because of the long-run behavior of
expectations your confidence in a net profit goes up the more tickets you buy.
So these groups bought a lot of tickets. For instance, on August 13, 2010 the
MIT group bought around 700,000 tickets, almost 90% of the Cash WinFall
tickets purchased that day. Their $1.4 million investment netted about $2.1
250 DECISION THEORY
million in payouts, for a 50% profit in one day. Expected value theory can be
extremely effective.
7.1.1 The move to utility
Yet sometimes we value something other than money. For example, suppose
its late at night, its cold out, you’re trying to catch a bus that costs exactly $1
to ride, and you’ve got no money on you. A stranger offers either to give you
$1 straight up, or to flip a fair coin and give you $2.02 if it comes up heads. It
might be highly rational for you to prefer the guaranteed dollar even though
its expected monetary value is less than that of the coin bet.
Decision theorists and economists explain this preference with the notion of
utility. Introduced by Daniel Bernoulli and Gabriel Cramer in the eighteenth
century,2 utility is a numerical quantity meant to directly measure how much
an agent values an arrangement of the world. Just as we suppose that each
agent has her own credence distribution, we will suppose that each agent has
a real-valued utility distribution over the propositions in language £. The
utility an agent assigns to a proposition represents how much she values that
proposition’s being true (or if you like, how happy that proposition’s being
true would make her). If an agent would be just as happy for one proposition
to be true as another, she assigns them equal utility. But if it would make her
happier for one of those propositions to be true, she assigns it the higher utility
of the two.
Utilities provide a uniform value-measurement scale. In the bus example
above, you don’t value each dollar equally. Going from zero dollars to one
dollar would mean a lot to you; it would get you out of the cold and on your way
home. Going from one dollar to two dollars would not mean nearly as much
in your present context. Not every dollar represents the same amount of value
in your hands, so counting the number of dollars in your possession is not a
consistent measure of how much you value your current state. On the other
hand, utilities measure value uniformly. We stipulate that each added unit of
utility (sometimes called a util) is equally valuable to an agent. She is just as
happy to go from —50 utils to —49 as she is to go from 1 util to 2, and so on.
Having introduced this uniform value scale, we can explain your preferences
in the bus case using expectations. Admittedly, the coin flip gamble has a higher
expected monetary payoff ($1.01) than the guaranteed dollar. But monetary
value doesn’t always translate neatly to utility, and utility reflects the values on
which you truly make your decisions. Let’s say that having no money is worth
7∙2 EXPECTED UTILITY THEORY 251
0 utils to you in this case, receiving one dollar and being able to get on the bus
is worth 100 utils, and receiving $2.02 is worth 102 utils. (The larger amount
of money is still more valuable to you; just not much more valuable.) When we
calculate the expected utility of the gamble, it only comes to 51 utilsi which is
much less than the 100 expected utils associated with the guaranteed dollar. So
you prefer the dollar guarantee.
The setup of this example is somewhat artificial, because it makes the value
of money change radically at a particular cutoff point. But economists think
money generally has a decreasing marginal utility for agents. While an agent
always receives some positive utility from each additional dollar (or peso, or
yuan, or...), the more dollars she already has the less extra utility it will be. The
first billion you earn makes your family comfortable; the second billion doesn’t
have as much significance for your life. Postulating an underlying locus of value
distinguishable from monetary worth helps explain why we don’t always chase
the next dollar as hard as we chased the first.
With that said, quantifying value on a numerical scale introduces many of
the same problems we found with quantifying confidence. First, it’s not clear
that a real agent’s psychology will always be as nuanced as a numerical utility
structure seems to imply. And second, the moment you assign numerical
utilities to every arrangement of the world you make them all comparable;
the possibility of incommensurable values is lost. (Compare Section 1.2.2.)
7.2 Expected utility theory
7.2.1 Preference rankings and money pumps
A decision problem presents an agent with a partition of acts, from which she
must choose exactly one. Decision theory aims to lay down rational principles
governing choices in decision problems. It does so by supposing that a rational
agent’s choice of acts tracks her preferences among those acts. If the available
acts are A and B, and she prefers A to B (we write A > B), then the agent decides
to perform action A. A similar point applies when B> A. Yet it might be that
the agent is indifferent between A and B (we write A ~ B), in which case she is
rationally permitted to choose either one.
Sometimes a decision among acts is easy. If the agent is certain how much
utility will be generated by the performance of each act, the choice is simple—
she prefers the act leading to the highest-utility result. Yet the utility resulting
from an act often depends on features of the world beyond the agent’s control
252 DECISION THEORY
(think, for instance, of the factors determining whether a particular career

choice turns out well), and the agent may be uncertain how those features
stand. In that case, the agent needs a technique for factoring uncertainty into
her decision. She needs a technique for combining credences and utilities to
generate preferences.
Decision theory responds to this problem by providing a valuation func
tion, which combines credences and utilities to assign each act a numerical
score. The agents preferences are assumed to match these scores: A > B just in
case A receives a higher score than B, while A ~ B when the scores are equal.
Given a particular decision problem, a rational agent will select the available
act with the highest score (or—if there are ties at the top—one of the acts with
the highest score).
Here’s an example of a valuation function, just to convey the idea: Suppose
you assign each act a numerical score by considering all the possible worlds
to which you assign nonzero credence, finding the one in which that act
produces the lowest utility, and then assigning that minimal utility value as
the act’s score. This valuation function generates preferences satisfying the
maximin rule, so called because it selects the act with the highest minimum
utility payoff. Maximin attends to only the worst case scenario for each
available act.
While maximin is just one valuation function (we’ll see others later), any
approach that ties preferences to numerical scores assigned over acts imposes
a certain structure on an agent’s preferences. For instance, it guarantees that
her preferences will display:
Preference Transitivity: For any acts A, B, and C, if the agent prefers A to B

and B to C, then the agent prefers A to C.
This follows from the simple fact that numerical inequalities are transitive:
each act’s score is a number, so if act As score is greater than act B’s, and B’s is
greater than C’s, then A’s must be greater than C’s as well.
Preference Transitivity will be endorsed as a rational constraint by any
decision theory that ties preferences to numerical valuation functions. One
might object that an agent may prefer A to B and prefer B to C, but never
have thought to compare A to C. In other words, one might think that such an
agent’s preference ranking could go silent on the comparison between A and C
and still be rational. Yet by coordinating preference with a numerical valuation
over the entire partition of acts, we have already settled this issue; we have
required the agent’s preferences to form a complete ranking. Since every act
-J.Z EXPECTED UTILITY THEORY 253
receives a score, every act is comparable, and our theory demands the agent
assign a preference (or indifference) between any two acts. Decision theorists
sometimes express this as:
Preference Completeness: For any acts A and B, exactly one of the following
is true: the agent prefers A to B, the agent prefers B to A, or the agent
is indifferent between the two.
Notice that Preference Completeness entails the following:
Preference Asymmetry: There do not exist acts A and B such that the agent
both prefers A to B and prefers B to A.
To recap: Decision theory begins by requiring an agents’ choices to reflect

her preferences, then coordinates those preferences with a numerical valua
tion function combining credences and utilities. By making the latter move,
decision theory requires preferences to satisfy Preference Transitivity and
Asymmetry. Hopefully it’s intuitive that rational preferences satisfy these two
conditions. But we can do better than that: We can provide an argument that
Preference Transivity and Asymmetry are rational requirements.
Consider a situation in which some of us find ourselves frequently. On any
given weeknight, I would prefer to do something else over washing the dishes.
(Going to a movie? Great! Watching the game? Good idea!) But when the week
ends and the dishes have piled up, I realize that I would’ve preferred foregoing
one of those weeknight activites in order to avoid a disgusting kitchen. Each of
my individual decisions was made in accordance with my preferences among
the acts I was choosing between at the time, yet together those local preferences
added up to a global outcome I disprefer.
A student once suggested to me that he prefers eating out to cooking for
himself, prefers eating at a friend’s to eating out, but prefers cooking for himself
to eating at a friend’s. Imagine one night my student is preparing himself
dinner, then decides he’d prefer to order out. He calls up the takeout place,
but before they pick up the phone he decides he’d rather drive to his friend’s
for dinner. He gets in his car and is halfway to his friend’s, when he decides
he’d rather cook for himself. At which point he turns around and goes home,
having wasted a great deal of time and energy. Each of those choices reflects
the student’s preference between the two options he considers at the time, yet
their net effect is to leave him right back where he started meal-wise and out a
great deal of effort overall.
254 DECISION THEORY
My student’s preferences violate Transitivity; as a result he’s susceptible to

a money pump. In general, a money pump against intransitive preferences
(preferring A to B, B to C, and C to A~) can be constructed like this: Suppose
you’re about to perform act B, and I suggest I could make it possible to do
A instead. Since you prefer A to B, there must be some amount of something
(we’ll just suppose it’s money) you’d be willing to pay me for the option to
perform A. So you pay the price, are about to perform A, but then I hold out
the possibility of performing C instead. Since you prefer C to A, you pay me
a small amount to make that switch. But then I offer you the opportunity to
perform B rather than C—for a small price, of course. And now you’re back to
where you started with respect to A, B, and C, but out a few dollars for your
trouble. To add insult to injury, I could repeat this set of trades again, and
again, milking more and more money out of you until I decide to stop. Hence
the “money pump” terminology.3
Violating Preference Transitivity leaves one susceptible to a money
pumping set of trades. (If you violate Preference Asymmetry, the money
pump is even simpler.) In a money pump, the agent proceeds through a series
of exchanges, each of which looks favorable given his preferences between the
two acts involved. But when those exchanges are combined, the total package
produces a net loss (which the agent would prefer to avoid). The money pump
therefore seems to reveal an inconsistency between the agent’s local and global
preferences, as in my dishwashing example. (We will further explore this kind
of inconsistency in our Chapter 9 discussion of Dutch Books.) The irrationality
of being susceptible to a money pump has been taken as a strong argument
against violating Preference Asymmetry or Transitivity.4
7.2.2 Savage’s expected utility
Savage (1954) frames decision problems using a partition of acts available to

the agent and a partition of states the world might be in. A particular act
performed with the world in a particular state produces a particular outcome.
Agents assign numerical utility values to outcomes; given partial information
they also assign credences over states.5
Here’s a simple example: Suppose you’re trying to decide whether to carry
an umbrella today, but you’re uncertain whether it’s going to rain. This table
displays the utilities you assign various outcomes:
y.τ EXPECTED UTILITY THEORY 255
rain dry
take 0 -1
umbrella
leave -10 0
it
You have two available acts, represented in the rows of the table. There are
two possible states of the world, represented in the columns. Performing a
particular act when the world is in a particular state produces a particular
outcome. If you leave your umbrella behind and it rains, the outcome is you
walking around wet. The cells in the table report your utilities for the outcomes
produced by various act/state combinations. Your utility for walking around
wet is —10 utils, while carrying an umbrella on a dry day is inconvenient but
not nearly as unpleasant (—1 util).
How should you evaluate available acts and set your preferences among
them? For a finite partition {S1,S2, ...,Sn} of possible states of the world,
Savage offers the following valuation function:
EUsav(A) = u(A & S1) ∙ cr(S1) + u(A & S2) ■ cr(S2)

+ ... + u(A & Sn) ∙ cr(Sn)
Here A is the particular act being evaluated. Savage evaluates acts by calculat
ing their expected utilities; EUsav(A) represents the expected utility of act A
calculated in the manner Savage prefers. (We’ll see other ways of calculating
expected utility later on.) cr(Sz∙) is the agents unconditional credence that the
world is in state Si∙, u(A & Si) is the utility she assigns to the outcome that
will eventuate should she perform act A in state Si.6 So EUsav calculates the
weighted average of the utilities the agent might receive if she performs A,
weighted by her credence that she will receive each one. Savage holds that given
a decision among a partition of acts, a rational agent will set her preferences in
line with her expected utilities. She will choose to perform an act with at least
as great an expected utility as that of any act on offer.
Now suppose that in the umbrella case you have a 0.30 credence in rain. We
can calculate expected utilities for each of the available acts as follows:
EUSAV(take) = 0 ∙ 0.30 + -1 ∙ 0.70 = -0.7

(7.6)
EUSAV(leave) = —10 ∙ 0.30 + 0 ∙ 0.70 = —3
256 DECISION THEORY
Taking the umbrella has the higher expected utility, so Savage thinks that if
you’re rational you’ll prefer to take the umbrella. You’re more confident it’ll
be dry than rain, but this is outweighed by the much greater disutility of a
disadvantageous decision in the latter case than the former.
EUsav is a valuation function that combines credences and utilities in a
specific way to assign numerical scores to acts. As a numerical valuation
function, it generates a preference ranking satisfying Preference Asymmetry,
Transitivity, and Completeness. But calculating expected utilities this way also
introduces new features not shared by all valuation functions. For example,
Savage’s expected utility theory yields preferences that satisfy the
Dominance Principle: If act A produces a higher-utility outcome than act B

in each possible state of the world, then A is preferred to B.
The Dominance Principle7 seems intuitively like a good rational principle. Yet,
surprisingly, there are decision problems in which it yields very bad results.
Since Savage’s expected utility theory entails the Dominance Principle, it can
be relied upon only when we don’t find ourselves in decision problems like that.
7.2.3 Jeffrey’s theory
To see what can go wrong with dominance reasoning, consider this example
from (Weirich 2012):
A student is considering whether to study for an exam. He reasons that if he

will pass the exam, then studying is wasted effort. Also, if he will not pass the
exam, then studying is wasted effort. He concludes that because whatever will
happen, studying is wasted effort, it is better not to study.
The student entertains two possible acts—study or don’t study—and two

possible states of the world—he either passes the exam or he doesn’t. His utility
table looks something like this:
pass fail
study 18 -5
don’t 20 -3
study
Because studying costs effort, passing having not studied is better than passing
having studied, and failing having not studied is also better than failing
having studied. So whether he passes or fails, not studying yields a higher
utility. By the Dominance Principle, the student should prefer not studying to
studying.
This is clearly a horrible argument; it ignores the fact that whether the
student studies affects whether he passes the exam.8 The Dominance Principle—
and Savages expected utility theory in general—breaks down when the state
of the world is influenced by which act the agent performs. Savage recognizes
this limitation, and so requires that the acts and states used in framing decision
problems be independent of each other. Jeffrey (1965), however, notes that in
real life we often analyze decision problems in terms of dependent acts and
states. Moreover, he worries that agents might face decision problems in which
they are unable to identify independent acts and states.9 So it would be helpful
to have a decision theory that didn’t require acts and states to be independent.
Jeffrey offers just such a theory. The key innovation is a new valuation
function that calculates expected utilities differently from Savages. Given an
act A and a finite partition {S1, S2, ..., Sn} of possible states of the world,10
Jeffrey calculates
EUedt(A) = u(A & S1) ∙ cr(S11 A) + u(A & S2) ∙ cr(S2 ∣ A)

+ ... + u(A & Sn) ∙ cr(Sπ ∣ A)
I’ll explain the “EDT” subscript later on; for now, it’s crucial to see that Jeffrey
alters Savage’s approach (Equation (7.5)) by replacing the agent’s unconditional
credence that a given state Si obtains with the agent’s conditional credence that
Si obtains given A. This incorporates the possibility that performing the act the
agent is evaluating will change the probabilities of various states of the world.
To see how this works, consider Jeffrey’s example of a guest deciding whether
to bring white or red wine to dinner. The guest is certain his host will serve
either chicken or beef, but doesn’t know which. The guest’s utility table is as
follows:
chicken beef
white 1 -1
red 0 1
For this guest, bringing the right wine is always pleasurable. Red wine with
chicken is merely awkward, while white wine with beef is a disaster.
258 DECISION THEORY
At a typical dinner party, the entree for the evening is settled well before the
guests arrive. But let’s suppose that tonights host is especially accommodating,
and will select a meat in response to the wine provided. (Perhaps the host has
a stocked pantry, and waits to prepare dinner until the wine has arrived.) The
guest is 75% confident that the host will select the meat that best pairs with
the wine provided. Thus the state (meat served) depends on the agents act
(wine chosen). This means the agent cannot assign a uniform unconditional
credence to each state prior to his decision. Instead, the guest assigns one
credence to chicken conditional on his bringing white, and another credence
to chicken conditional on his bringing red. These credences are reflected in the
following table:
chicken beef
white 0.75 0.25
red 0.25 0.75
It’s important to read the credence table differently from the utility table. In the
utility table, the entry in the white/chicken cell is the agent’s utility assigned
to the outcome of chicken served and white wine. In the credence table, the
white/chicken entry is the agent’s credence in chicken served given white wine.
The probability axioms and Ratio Formula together require all the credences
conditional on white wine sum to 1, so the values in the first row sum to 1. The
values in the second row sum to 1 for a similar reason. (In this example the
values in each column sum to 1 as well, but that won’t always be the case.)
We can now use Jeffrey’s formula to calculate the agent’s expected utility for
each act. For instance:
EUedt (white) = u(white & chicken) ∙ cr(chicken ∣ white)

+ u(white & beef) ∙ cr(beef ∣ white)
= 1 ∙ 0.75 + -1 ∙ 0.25 (7'8^
= 0.5
(We multiply the values in the first row of the utility table by the corresponding
values in the first row of the credence table, then sum the results.) A similar
calculation yields EUEDT(red) = 0.75. Bringing red wine has a higher expected
utility for the agent than bringing white, so the agent should prefer bring
ing red.
Earlier I said somewhat vaguely that Savage requires acts and states to be
“independent”; Jeffrey’s theory gives that notion a precise meaning. EUedt
7.2 EXPECTED UTILITY THEORY 259
revolves around an agents conditional credences, so for Jeffrey the relevant

notion of independence is probabilistic independence relative to the agents
credence distribution. That is, an act A and state Sj are independent for Jeffrey
just in case
cr(Si ∣ A) = cr(Sz∙) (7.9)
In the special case where the act A being evaluated is independent of each
state Si, the cr(Si ∣ A) expressions in Jeffreys formula may be replaced with
cr(Sz∙) expressions. This makes Jeffreys expected utility calculation identical
to Savages. When acts and states are probabilistically independent, Jeffrey’s
theory yields the same preferences as Savages. And since Savage’s theory
entails the Dominance Principle, Jeffrey’s theory will also embrace Dominance
in this special case.
But what happens to Dominance when acts and states are dependent7. Here
Jeffrey offers a nuclear deterrence example. Suppose a nation is choosing
whether to arm itself with nuclear weapons, and knows its rival nation will
follow its lead. The possible states of the world under consideration are war
versus peace. The utility table might be:
war peace
arm -100 0
disarm -50 50
Wars are worse when both sides have nuclear arms; peace is also better without
nukes on hand (because of nuclear accidents, etc.). A dominance argument is
available since whichever state obtains, disarming provides the greater utility.
So applying Savage’s theory to this example would yield a preference for
disarming.
Yet the advocate of nuclear deterrence takes the states in this example to
depend on the acts. The deterrence advocate’s credence table might be:
war peace
arm 0.1 0.9
disarm 0.8 0.2
The idea of deterrence is that if both countries have nuclear arms, war becomes
much less likely. If arming increases the probability of peace, the acts and states
in this example are probabilistically dependent. Jeffrey’s theory calculates the
following expected utilities from these tables:
260 DECISION THEORY
EUEDT(arm) = -100 ∙ 0.1 + 0 ■ 0.9 = -10

ed (7.10)
EUEDT(disarm) = —50 ∙ 0.8 + 50 ∙ 0.2 = —30
Relative to the deterrence advocate’s credences, Jeffreys theory yields a prefer

ence for arming. Act/state dependence has created a preference ranking at odds
with the Dominance Principle.11 When an agent takes the acts and states in a
decision problem to be independent, Jeffrey’s and Savages decision theories
are interchangeable, and dominance reasoning is reliable. But Jeffreys theory
also provides reliable verdicts when acts and states are dependent, a case in
which Savages theory and the Dominance Principle may fail.
7.2.4 Risk aversion and Allais’ Paradox
Different people respond to risks differently. Many agents are risk-averse;

they would rather have a sure $10 than take a 50-50 gamble on $30, even
though the expected dollar value of the latter is greater than that of the
former.
Economists have traditionally explained this preference by appealing to the
declining marginal utility of money. If the first $10 yields much more utility
than the next $20 for the agent, then the sure $10 may in fact have a higher
expected utility than the 50-50 gamble. This makes the apparently risk-averse
behavior perfectly rational. But it does so by portraying the agent as only
apparently risk-averse. On this explanation, the agent would be happy to take
a risk if only it offered her a higher expectation of what she really values:
utility. But might some agents be genuinely risk-averse—might they be willing
to give up a bit of expected utility if it meant they didn’t have to gamble? If we
could offer agents a direct choice between a guaranteed 10 utils and a 50-50
gamble on 30, might some prefer the former? (Recall that utils are defined so
as not to decrease in marginal value.) And might that preference be rationally
permissible?
Let’s grant for the sake of argument that simple risk-aversion cases involving
monetary gambles can be explained by attributing to the agent a utility
distribution with decreasing marginal utility over dollars. Other documented
responses to risk cannot be explained by any kind of utility distribution.
Suppose a fair lottery is to be held with 100 numbered tickets. You get to choose
between two gambles, with the following payoffs should particular tickets be
drawn:
Ticket 1 Tickets 2-11 Tickets 12-100
Gamble A $1M $1M $1M

Gamble B $0 $5M $1M
(Here “$1M” is short for 1 million dollars.) Which gamble would you prefer?
After recording your answer somewhere, consider the next two gambles (on
the same lottery) and decide which of them you would prefer if they were your
only options:
Ticket 1 Tickets 2-11 Tickets 12-100
Gamble C $1M $1M $0

Gamble D $0 $5M $0
When subjects are surveyed, they often prefer Gamble D to C; they’re probably
not going to win anything, but if they do they’d like a serious shot at $5 million.
On the other hand, many of the same subjects prefer Gamble A to B, because
A guarantees them a payout of $1 million.
Yet anyone who prefers A to B while at the same time preferring D to C
violates Savage’s12
Sure-Thing Principle: If two acts yield the same outcome on a particular

state, any preference between them remains the same if that out
come is changed.
In our example, Gambles A and B yield the same outcome for tickets 12
through 100:1 million dollars. If we change that common outcome to 0 dollars,
we get Gambles C and D. The Sure-Thing Principle requires an agent who
prefers A to B also to prefer C to D. Put another way: if the Sure-Thing Principle
holds, we can determine a rational agent’s preferences between any two acts
by focusing exclusively on the states for which those acts produce different
outcomes. In both the decision problems here, tickets 12 through 100 produce
the same outcome no matter which act the agent selects. So we ought to be
able to determine her preferences by focusing exclusively on the outcomes for
tickets 1 through 11. Yet if we focus exclusively on those tickets, A stands to
B in exactly the same relationship as C stands to D. So the agent’s preferences
across the two decisions should be aligned.
The Sure-Thing Principle is a theorem of Savage’s decision theory. It is
therefore also a theorem of Jeffrey’s decision theory for cases in which acts
262 DECISION THEORY
and states are independent, as they are in the present gambling example. Thus
preferring A to B while preferring D to C—as real-life subjects often do—is
incompatible with those two decision theories. And here we can’t chalk up the
problem to working with dollars rather than utils. There is no possible utility
distribution over dollars on which Gamble A has a higher expected utility than
Gamble B while Gamble D has a higher expected utility than Gamble C. (See
Exercise 7.10.)
Jeffrey and Savage, then, must shrug off these commonly paired preferences
as irrational. Yet Maurice Allais, the Nobel-winning economist who intro
duced the gambles in his (1953), thought that this combination of preferences
could be perfectly rational. Because it’s impossible to maintain these seemingly
reasonable preferences while hewing to standard decision theory, the example
is now known as Allais’ Paradox. Allais thought the example revealed a deep
flaw in the decision theories we’ve been considering.13
We have been discussing decision theories as normative accounts of how
rational agents behave. Economists, however, often assume that decision
theory provides an accurate descriptive account of real agents’ market deci
sions. Real-life subjects’ responses to cases like the Allais Paradox prompted
economists to develop new descriptive theories of agents’ behavior, such as
Kahneman and Tversky’s Prospect Theory (Kahneman and Tversky 1979;
Tversky and Kahneman 1992). More recently, Buchak (2013) has proposed
a generalization of standard decision theory that accounts for risk aversion
without positing declining marginal utilities, and is consistent with the Allais
preferences many real-life subjects display.
7.3 Causal Decision Theory
Although we have been focusing on the expected values of propositions

describing acts, Jeffrey’s valuation function can be applied to any sort
of proposition. For example, suppose my favorite player has been out of
commission for weeks with an injury, and I am waiting to hear whether he will
play in tonight’s game. I start wondering whether I would prefer that he play
tonight or not. Usually it would make me happy to see him on the field, but
there’s the possibility that he will play despite his injury’s not being fully healed.
That would definitely be a bad outcome. So now I combine my credences
about states of the world (is he fully healed? is he not?) with my utilities for the
various possible outcomes (plays fully healed, plays not fully healed, etc.) to
determine how happy I would be to hear that he’s playing or not playing.
7∙3 CAUSAL DECISION THEORY 263
Having calculated expected utilities for both “plays” and “doesn’t play”
I decide whether Γd prefer that he play or not.
Put another way, I can use Jeffreys expected utility theory to determine
whether I would consider it good news or bad were I to hear that my favorite
player will be playing tonight. And I can do so whether or not I have any influ
ence on the truth of that proposition. Jeffrey’s theory is sometimes described
as calculating the “news value” of a proposition.
Even for propositions describing our own acts, Jeffrey’s expected utility
calculation assesses news value. I might be given a choice between a sure $ 1 and
a 50-50 chance of $2.02.1 would use my credences and utility distribution to
determine expected values for each act, then declare which option I preferred.
But notice that this calculation would go exactly the same if instead of my
selecting among the options, someone else was selecting on my behalf. What’s
ultimately being compared are the proposition that I receive a sure dollar and
the proposition that I receive whatever payoff results from a particular gamble.
Whether I have the ability to make one of those propositions true rather than
the other is irrelevant to Jeffrey’s preference calculations.
7.3.1 Newcombs Problem
Jeffrey’s focus on news value irrespective of agency leads him into trouble with
Newcomb’s Problem. This problem was introduced to philosophy by Robert
Nozick, who attributed its construction to the physicist William Newcomb.
Here’s how Nozick introduced the problem:
Suppose a being in whose power to predict your choices you have enormous
confidence. (One might tell a science-fiction story about a being from another
planet, with an advanced technology and science, who you know to be
friendly, etc.) You know that this being has often correctly predicted your
choices in the past (and has never, so far as you know, made an incorrect
prediction about your choices), and furthermore you know that this being
has often correctly predicted the choices of other people, many of whom are
similar to you, in the particular situation to be described below. One might
tell a longer story, but all this leads you to believe that almost certainly this
being’s prediction about your choice in the situation to be discussed will be
correct.
There are two boxes. [The first box] contains $1,000. [The second box]
contains either $1,000,000, or nothing.... You have a choice between two
264 DECISION THEORY
actions: (1) taking what is in both boxes (2) taking only what is in the second
box.
Furthermore, and you know this, the being knows that you know this, and
so on:
(I) If the being predicts you will take what is in both boxes, he does not put
the $1,000,000 in the second box.
(II) If the being predicts you will take only what is in the second box, he does
put the $1,000,000 in the second box.
The situation is as follows. First the being makes its prediction. Then it puts
the $1,000,000 in the second box, or does not, depending upon what it has
predicted. Then you make your choice. What do you do? (1969, pp. 114-15)
Historically, Newcomb’s Problem prompted the development of a new kind

of decision theory, now known as Causal Decision Theory (sometimes just
“CDT”). At the time of Nozick’s discussion, extant decision theories (such as
Jeffrey’s) seemed to recommend taking just one box in Newcomb’s Problem
(so-called “one-boxing”). But many philosophers thought two-boxing was the
rational act.14 By the time you make your decision, the being has already made
its prediction and taken its action. So the money is already either in the second
box, or it’s not—nothing you decide can affect whether the money is there.
However much money is in the second box, you’re going to get more money
($1,000 more) if you take both boxes. So you should two-box.
I’ve quoted Nozick’s original presentation of the problem because in the
great literature that has since grown up around Newcomb, there is often debate
about what exactly counts as “a Newcomb Problem”. Does it matter whether
the agent is certain that the prediction will be correct? Does it matter how
the predictor makes its predictions, and whether backward causation (some
sort of information fed backwards from the future) is involved? Perhaps more
importantly, who cares about such a strange and fanciful problem?
But our purpose is not generalized Newcombology—we want to understand
why Newcomb’s Problem spurred the development of Causal Decision Theory.
That can be understood by working with just one version of the problem. Or
better yet, it can be understood by working with a kind of problem that comes
up in everyday life, and is much less fanciful:
Γm standing at the bar, trying to decide whether to order a third appletini.

I reason through my decision as follows: Drinking a third appletini is the
kind of act highly typical of people with addictive personalities. People with
addictive personalities also tend to become smokers. Γd kind of like to have

another drink, but I really don’t want to become a smoker (smoking causes
lung cancer, is increasingly frowned-upon in my social circle, etc.). So I don’t
order that next appletini.
Let’s work through the reasoning just described using decision theory. First,
stipulate that I have the following utility table:
smoker non
third -99 1
appletini
stop -100 0
at two
Ordering the third appletini is a dominant act. But dominance should dictate
preference only when acts and states are independent, and my concern here is
that they’re not. My credence distribution has the following features (with A,
S, and P representing the propositions that I order the appletini, that I become
a smoker, and that I have an addictive personality, respectively):
cr(S ∣ P) > cr(S ∣ ~P) (7.11)

cr(P∣A)>cr(P∣~A) (7.12)
Γm more confident I’ll become a smoker if I have an addictive personality than

if I don’t. And having that third appletini is a positive indication that I have an
addictive personality. Combining these two equations (and making a couple
more assumptions I won’t bother spelling out), we get:
cr(S ∣ A) > cr(S ∣ ~A) (7.13)
From my point ofview, ordering the third appletini is positively correlated with
becoming a smoker. Looking back at the utility table, I do not consider the
states listed along the top to be probabilistically independent of the acts along
the side. Luckily, Jeffrey’s decision theory works even when acts and states are
dependent. So I apply Jeffrey’s valuation function to calculate expected utilities
for the two acts:
EUedt(A) = -99 ∙ cr(S ∣ A) + 1 ∙ cr(~S ∣ A)

(7.14)
EUedt(~A) = —100 ∙ cr(S ∣ ~A) + 0 ∙ cr(~S ∣ ~A)
266 DECISION THEORY
Looking at these equations, you might think that A receives the higher
expected utility. But I assign a considerably higher value to cr(S ∣ A) than
cr(S ∣ ~A), so the —99 in the top equation is multiplied by a significantly larger
quantity than the —100 in the bottom equation. Assuming the correlation
between S and A is strong enough, ~A receives the higher expected utility and
I prefer to perform ~A.
But this reasoning is all wrong! Whether I have an addictive personality is
(let’s say) determined by genetic factors, not anything I could possibly affect at
this point in my life. The die is cast (so to speak); I either have an addictive
personality or I don’t; it’s already determined (in some sense) whether an
addictive personality is going to lead me to become a smoker. Nothing about
this appletini—whether I order it or not—is going to change any of that. So
I might as well enjoy the drink.15
Assuming the reasoning in the previous paragraph—rather than the reason
ing originally presented in the example—is correct, it’s an interesting question
why Jeffrey’s decision theory yields the wrong result. The answer is that on
Jeffrey’s theory, ordering the appletini gets graded down because it would be
bad news about my future. If I order the drink, that’s evidence that I have an
addictive personality (as indicated in Equation (7.12)). Having an addictive
personality is unfortunate because of its potential consequences for becoming
a smoker. I expect the world in which I order another drink to be a worse
world than the world in which I don’t, and this is reflected in the EUbdt
calculation. Jeffrey’s theory assesses the act of ordering a third appletini not
in terms of outcomes it will cause to come about, but instead in terms of
outcomes it provides evidence for. For this reason Jeffrey’s theory is described
as an Evidential Decision Theory (or “EDT”).
The trouble with Evidential Decision Theory is that an agent’s performing
an act may be evidence of an outcome that it’s too late for her to cause (or
prevent}. Even though the act indicates the outcome, it seems irrational to
factor the value of that outcome into a decision about whether to peform the
act. As Skyrrms (1980a, p. 129) puts it, my not having the third drink in order to
avoid becoming a smoker would be “a futile attempt to manipulate the cause
by suppressing its symptoms.” In making decisions we should focus on what
we can control—the causal consequences of our acts. Weirich writes:
Deliberations should attend to an act’s causal influence on a state rather than

an act’s evidence for a state. A good decision aims to produce a good outcome
rather than evidence of a good outcome. It aims for the good and not just
signs of the good. Often efficacy and auspiciousness go hand in hand. When
they come apart, an agent should perform an efficacious act rather than an
auspicious act. (2012)
smoker (S) third appletini (A)

Figure 7.1 Third drink causal fork
7.3.2 A causal approach
The causal structure of our third drink example is depicted in Figure 7.1. As
we saw in Chapter 3, correlation often indicates causation—but not always.
Propositions on the tines of a causal fork will be correlated even though neither
causes the other. This accounts for A’s being relevant to S on my credence
distribution (Equation (7.13)) even though my ordering the third appletini
has no causal influence on whether I’ll become a smoker.
The causally spurious correlation in my credences affects Jeffreys expected
utility calculation because that calculation works with credences in states
conditional on acts (cr(Sz∙ ∣ A)). Jeffrey replaced Savages cr(S,) with this con
ditional expression to track dependencies between states and acts. The Causal
Decision Theorist responds that while credal correlation is a kind of depen
dence, it’s not the kind of dependence that decisions should track. Preferences
should be based on causal dependencies. So the Causal Decision Theorist’s
valuation function is:
EUcdt(A) = u(A & S1). cr(A o→ S1) + u(A & ⅞) ∙ cr(A ⅞)

+ ... + u(A & Sn) ∙ cr(A □→ Sn)
Here A □→ S represents the subjunctive conditional “If the agent were to

perform act A, state S would occur.”16 Causal Decision Theory uses such
conditionals to track causal relations in the world.17 Of course, an agent maybe
uncertain what consequences a given act A would cause. So EUcdt looks across
the partition {S1,..., Sn}, and invokes the agent’s credences that A would cause
various states Si to occur.
For many decision problems, Causal Decision Theory yields the same results
as Evidential Decision Theory. In Jeffrey’s wine example, it’s plausible that
cr(chicken ∣ white) = cr(white □→ chicken) = 0.75 (7.16)
The guest’s credence that chicken is served on the condition that she brings
white wine is equal to her credence that if she were to bring white, chicken
268 DECISION THEORY
would be served. So one may be substituted for the other in expected utility
calculations, and CDT’s evaluations turn out the same as Jeffrey’s.
But when conditional credences fail to track causal relations (as in cases
involving causal forks), the two theories may yield different results. This is in
part due to their differing notions of independence. EDT treats act A and state
S as independent when they are probabilistically independent relative to the
agents credence distribution—that is, when cr(S ∣ A) = cr(S). CDT focuses on
whether the agent takes A and S to be causally independent, which occurs just
when
cr(A LHS) = cr(S) (7.17)
When an agent thinks A has no causal influence on S, her credence that S will
occur if she performs A is just her credence that S will occur. In the third drink
example my ordering another appletini may be evidence that I’ll become a
smoker, but I know it has no causal bearing on whether I take up smoking.
So from a Causal Decision Theory point of view, the acts and states in that
problem are independent. When acts and states are independent, dominance
reasoning is appropriate, so CDT would have me prefer the dominant act and
order the third appletini.
Now we can return to the Newcomb Problem, focusing on a version of it
that distinguishes Causal from Evidential Decision Theory. Suppose that the
“being” in Nozick’s story makes its prediction by analyzing your brain state
prior to your making the decision and applying a complex neuro-psychological
theory. The being’s track record makes you 99% confident that its predictions
will be correct. And to simplify matters, let’s suppose you assign exactly 1 util
to each dollar, no matter how many dollars you already have. Then your utility
and credence matrices for the problem are:
Utilities Credences
Pl P2 Pl P2
T1 1,000,000 0 Tι 0.99 0.01
T2 1,001,000 1,000 T2 0.01 0.99
where T1 and T2 represent the acts of taking one box or two boxes (respec
tively), and P1 and P2 represent the states of what the being predicted.
Jeffrey calculates expected values for the acts as follows:
7.3 CAUSAL DECISION THEORY 269
Figure 7.2 Newcomb Problem causal fork
EUedt(T1) = u(T1 & P1) ∙ cr(P11 T1) + u(T1 & P2) ∙ cr(P2 ∣ T1) = 990,000
EUedt(T2) = u(T2 & P1) ∙ cr(P11 T2) + u(T2 & P2) ∙ cr(P2 ∣ T2) = 11,000
(7.18)
So Evidential Decision Theory recommends one-boxing. Yet we can see from

Figure 7.2 that this version of the Newcomb Problem contains a causal fork;
the being’s prediction is based on your brain state, which also has a causal
influence on the number of boxes you take. This should make us suspicious
of EDT’s recommendations. The agent’s act and the being’s prediction are
probabilistically correlated in the agent’s credences, as the credence table
reveals. But that’s not because the number of boxes taken has any causal
influence on the prediction.
Causal Decision Theory calculates expected utilities in the example like this:
EUcdt(T1) = u(T1 & P1) ∙ cr(T1 O→ P1) + u(T1 & P2) ∙ cr(T1 cw P2)
= 1,000,000 ∙ cr(T1 □→ P1) + 0 ∙ cr(T1 □→ P2)
EUcdt(T2) = u(T2 & P1) ∙ cr(T2 □→ P1) + u(T2 & P2) ∙ cr(T2 □→ P2)
= 1,001,000 ∙ cr(T2 □→ P1) + 1,000 ∙ cr(T2 □→ P2)
(7.19)
It doesn’t matter what particular values the credences in these expressions take,
because the act has no causal influence on the prediction. That is,
cr(T1 □→ P1) = cr(P1) = cr(T2 □t→ P1) (7.20)
and
cr(T1 □→ P2) = cr(P2) = cr(T2 □→ P2) (7.21)

270 DECISION THEORY
With these causal independencies in mind, you can tell by inspection of

Equation (7.19) that EUcdt(T2) will be greater than EUcdt(T1), and Causal
Decision Theory endorses two-boxing.18
7.3.3 Responses and extensions
So is that it for Evidential Decision Theory? Philosophical debates rarely end

cleanly; Evidential Decision Theorists have made a number of responses to the
Newcomb Problem.
First, one might respond that one-boxing is the rationally mandated act.
Representing the two-boxers, David Le∙wis once wrote:
The one-boxers sometimes taunt us: if you’re so smart, why airicha rich?
They have their millions and we have our thousands, and they think this goes
to show the error of our ways. They think we are not rich because we have
irrationally chosen not to have our millions. (198 lb, p. 377)
Lewis’s worry is this: Suppose a one-boxer and a two-boxer each go through

the Newcomb scenario many times. As a highly accurate predictor, the being
in the story will almost always predict that the one-boxer will one-box, and so
place the $1,000,000 in the second box for him. Meanwhile, the two-boxer will
almost always find the second box empty. The one-boxer will rack up millions
of dollars, while the two-boxer will gain only thousands. Each agent has the
goal of making as much money as possible, so one-boxing (and, by extension,
EDT) seems to provide a better rational strategy for reaching one’s goals than
two-boxing (and CDT).
The Causal Decision Theorist’s response (going at least as far back as
Gibbard and Harper 1978/1981) is that some unfortunate situations reward
agents monetarily for behaving irrationally, and the Newcomb Problem is one
of them. The jury is still out on whether this response is convincing. In Novem
ber 2009, the PhilPapers Survey polled over three thousand philosophers,
and found that 31.4% of them accepted or leaned toward two-boxing in the
Newcomb Problem, while 21.3% accepted or leaned toward one-boxing. (The
remaining respondents were undecided or offered a different answer.) So not
everyone considers EDT’s embrace of one-boxing a fatal defect. Meanwhile,
there are other cases in which EDT seems to give the intuitively rational result
while CDT does not (Egan 2007).
7-4 EXERCISES 271
Jeffrey, on the other hand, was convinced that two-boxing is rationally

required in the Newcomb Problem. So he tried to reconcile Evidential Deci
sion Theory with that verdict in a variety of ways. In the second edition of The
Logic of Decision (1983), Jeffrey added a ratifiability condition to his EDT.
Ratifiability holds that an act is rationally permissible only if the agent assigns
it the highest expected utility conditional on the supposition that she chooses
to perform it. Ratifiability avoids regret—if choosing to perform an act would
make you wish you’d done something else, then you shouldn’t choose it. In
the Newcomb Problem, supposing that you’ll choose to one-box makes you
confident that the being predicted one-boxing, and so makes you confident
that the $1,000,000 is in the second box. So supposing that you’ll choose to
one-box makes two-boxing seem the better choice. One-boxing is unratifiable,
and so can be rationally rejected.
We won’t cover the technical details of ratifiability here, in part because
Jeffrey ultimately abandoned that response. Jeffrey eventually (1993, 2004)
came to believe that the Newcomb Problem isn’t really a decision problem,
and therefore isn’t the kind of thing against which a decision theory (like EDT)
should be tested. Suppose that in the Newcomb Problem the agent assigns the
credences we described earlier because she takes the causal structure of her
situation to be something like Figure 7.2. In that case, she will see her physical
brain state as having such a strong influence on how many boxes she takes that
whether she one-boxes or two-boxes will no longer seem like a free choice.
Jeffrey held that in order to make a genuine decision, an agent must see her
choice as the cause of the act (and ultimately the outcome) produced. Read in
this light, the Newcomb case seemed to involve too much causal influence on
the agent’s act from factors beyond her choice. In the final sentences of his last
work, Jeffrey wrote, “I now conclude that in Newcomb problems, ‘One box or
two?’ is not a question about how to choose, but about what you are already
set to do, willy-nilly. Newcomb problems are not decision problems” (2004,
p. 113).
7.4 Exercises
and Ratio Formula. You may also assume that whenever a conditional cre
dence expression occurs, the needed proposition has nonzero unconditional
credence so that conditional probabilities are well defined.
T12 DECISION THEORY
Problem 7.1. When you play craps in a casino there are a number of
different bets you can make at any time. Some of these are “proposition bets”
on the outcome of the next roll of two fair dice. Below is a list of some
proposition bets, and the odds at which casinos offer them:
Name of bet Wins when Odds paid
Big red Dice total 7 4 : 1

Any craps Dice total 2, 3, or 12 7 : 1
Snake eyes Dice total 2 30 : 1
Suppose you place a $1 bet on each proposition at the odds listed above. Rank
the three bets from highest expected net return to lowest.
Problem 7.2. Suppose you’re guarding Stephen Curry in an NBA game and
he is about to attempt a three-point shot. You have to decide whether to foul
him in the act of shooting.
(a) If you don’t foul him, he will attempt the shot. During the 2014-15 NBA
season, Steph Curry made 44.3% of his three-point shot attempts. What
is the expected number of points you will yield on Curry’s shot attempt
if you decide not to foul him?
(b) Suppose that if you decide to foul Curry, you can ensure he doesn’t get
a three-point shot attempt off. However, your foul will send him to the
free-throw line, where he will get three attempts, each worth one point
if he makes it. During the 2014-15 NBA season, Curry made 91.4% of
his free-throw attempts. Assuming that the result of each free-throw
attempt is probabilistically independent of the results of all the others,
what is the expected number of points you will yield on Curry’s free
throws if you foul him?
(c) Given your calculations from parts (a) and (b), should you foul Steph
Curry when he attempts a three-pointer?
Problem 7.3. The St. Petersburg game is played as follows: A fair coin is flipped
repeatedly until it comes up heads. If the coin comes up heads on the first toss,
the player wins $2. Heads on the second toss pays $4, heads on the third toss
pays $8, etc.19
(a) If you assign fair prices equal to expected monetary payouts (and
credences equal to objective chances), how much should you be willing
to pay to play the St. Petersburg game?
7∙4 EXERCISES 273
(b) 0 If you were confronted with this game in real life, how much would
you be willing to pay to play it? Explain your answer.
Problem 7.4. Asked to justify his decision to bring along his chicken-
replace-inator, Dr. Doofenshmirtz replies: “I’d rather have it and not need it
than need it and not have it.”
(a) Supposing the relevant states of the world are N^ (need-replace-inator)
and ~N, and the relevant acts are B (bring-replace-inator) and ~B, what
two outcomes is Doofenshmirtz referencing, and how is he claiming
their utilities compare for him?
(b) Explain why on Savages utility theory, this fact about Doofenshmirtzs
utilities does not necessarily make his decision rationally permissible.
Problem 7.5. Consider once again the utility table for the umbrella decision
problem on page 255. Given this utility distribution, how confident would you
need to be in rain for Savages decision theory to recommend that you take
your umbrella?
Problem 7.6. Imagine there’s some proposition P in which Γm highly

interested (and whose truth I view as probabilistically independent of my
behavior). Learning of my interest, a nefarious character offers to sell me the
following betting ticket for $0.70:
This ticket entitles the bearer

to $1 if P is true,
and nothing otherwise.
(a) For my fair betting price for this ticket to be exactly $0.70, what would
my credence in P have to be?
(b) The nefarious character also has a second ticket available, which he
offers to sell me for $0.70 as well:

to $1 if ~P is true,
For my fair betting price in this second ticket to be exactly $0.70, what
would my credence in ~P have to be?
(c) Suppose I throw caution to the wind and purchase both tickets, each at
a price of $0.70. Without knowing my actual credences in P and ~P, can
274 DECISION THEORY
you nevertheless calculate my expected total monetary value for the two
tickets combined—taking into account both what I spent to get them
and what they might pay out?
Problem 7.7. Jt>

(a) Suppose an agent is indifferent between two gambles with the following
utility outcomes:
P ~P
Gamble 1 X y
Gamble 2 y X
where P is a proposition about the state of the world, and x and y are
utility values with x ≠ y. Assuming this agent maximizes EUsav, what
can you determine about the agent’s cr(P)?
(b) Suppose the same agent is also indifferent between these two gambles:
P ~P
Gamble 3 d w
Gamble 4 m m
where cr(P) = cr(~P), d = 100, and w = —100. What can you determine
about m?
(c) Finally, suppose the agent is indifferent between these two gambles:
Q ~Q
Gamble 5 r s
Gamble 6 t t
where r = 100, s = 20, and t = 80. What can you determine about cr(Q)?
Problem 7.8. You are confronted with a decision problem involving two
possible states of the world (S and ~S) and three available acts (A, B, and C).
(a) Suppose that of the three S-outcomes, B & S does not have the highest
utility for you. Also, of the three ~S-outcomes, B &. ~S does not have
the highest utility. Applying Savage’s decision theory, does it follow that
you should not choose act B? Defend your answer.
(b) Suppose that of the S-outcomes, B&S has the lowest utility for you. Also,
of the three ~S-outcomes, B & ~S has the lowest utility. Still applying
Savage’s decision theory, does it follow that you should not choose act
B? Defend your answer.
7-4 EXERCISES 275
(c) Suppose now that you apply Jeffrey’s decision theory to the situation in
part (b). Do the same conclusions necessarily follow about whether you
should choose act B? Explain.20
Problem 7.9. Suppose an agent faces a decision problem with two acts A
and B and finitely many states.
(a) Prove that if the agent sets her preferences using EUsav, those prefer
ences will satisfy the Dominance Principle.
(b) If the agent switches from EUsav to EUedt, exactly where will your proof
from part (a) break down?
Problem 7.10. Referring to the payoff tables for Allais’ Paradox in Section
7.2.4, show that no assignment of values to u($0), u($lM), and u($5M) that
makes EUedt(A) > EUedt(B) will also make EUedt(D) > EUedt(C). (You may
assume that the agent assigns equal credence to each numbered tickets being
selected, and this holds regardless of which gamble is made.)
Problem 7.11. Having gotten a little aggressive on a routine single to

center field, you’re now halfway between first base and second base. You must
decide whether to proceed to second base or run back to first.
The throw from the center fielder is in midair, and given the angle you can’t
tell whether it’s headed to first or second base. But you do know that this
center fielder has a great track-record at predicting where runners will go—
your credence in his throwing to second conditional on your going there is
90%, while your credence in his throwing to first conditional on your going to
first is 80%.
If you and the throw go to the same base, you will certainly be out, but if
you and the throw go to different bases you’ll certainly be safe. Being out has
the same utility for you no matter where you’re out. Being safe at first is better
than being out, and being safe at second is better than being safe at first by the
same amount that being safe at first is better than being out.
(a) Of the two acts available (running to first or running to second), which
should you prefer according to Evidential Decision Theory (that is,
accoring to Jeffrey’s decision theory)?
(b) Does the problem provide enough information to determine which
act is preferred by Causal Decision Theory? If so, explain which act is
preferred. If not, explain what further information would be required
and how it could be used to determine a preference.
276 DECISION THEORY
Problem 7.12. φ In the Newcomb Problem, do you think its rational to take
just one box or take both boxes? Explain your thinking.
7.5 Further reading
Michael D. Resnik (1987). Choices: An Introduction to Decision Theory.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Martin Peterson (2009). An Introduction to Decision Theory. Cambridge
Introductions to Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Each of these provides a book-length general introduction to decision theory,

including chapters on game theory and social choice theory.
Classic Texts
Leonard ∫. Savage (1954). The Foundations of Statistics. New York: Wiley
Savages classic book laid the foundations for modern decision theory and
much of contemporary Bayesian statistics.
Richard C. Jeffrey (1983). The Logic of Decision. 2nd edition. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press
In the first edition, Jeffrey’s Chapter 1 introduced a decision theory capable

of handling dependent acts and states. In the second edition, Jeffrey added
an extra section to this chapter explaining his “ratifiability” response to the
Newcomb Problem.
Extended Discussion
Lara Buchak (2013). Risk and Rationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Presents a generalization of the decision theories discussed in this chapter that

is consistent with a variety of real-life agents’ responses to risk. For instance,
Buchak’s theory accommodates genuine risk-aversion, and allows agents to
notes 277
simultaneously prefer Gamble A to Gamble B and Gamble D to Gamble C in

Allais’ Paradox.
James M. Joyce (1999). The Foundations of Causal Decision Theory. Cam

bridge: Cambridge University Press
A systematic explanation and presentation of causal decision theory, unifying

that approach under a general framework with evidential decision theory and
proving a representation theorem that covers both.
Notes
1. The law of large numbers comes in many different forms, each of which has slightly
different conditions and a slightly different conclusion. Most versions require the
repeated trials to be independent and identically distributed (IID), meaning that each
trial has the same probability of yielding a given result and the result on a given
trial is independent of all previous results. (In other words, you think our batter is
consistent across games and unaffected by previous performance.) Most versions also
assume Countable Additivity for their proof. Finally, since we are dealing with results
involving the infinite, we should remember that in this context credence 1 doesn’t
necessarily mean certainty. An agent who satisfies the probability axioms, the Ratio
Formula, and Countable Additivity will assign credence 1 to the averages approaching
the expectation in the limit, but that doesn’t mean she rules out all possibilities in which
those values don’t converge. (For Countable Additivity and cases of credence-1 that
don’t mean certainty, see Section 5.4. For more details and proofs concerning laws of
large numbers, see Feller 1968, Ch. X.)
2. See Bernoulli (1738/1954) for both his discussion and a reference to Cramer.
3. The first money pump was presented by Davidson, McKinsey, and Suppes (1955,
p. 146), who attributed the inspiration for their example to Norman Dalkey. I don’t
know who introduced the “money pump” terminology.
By the way, ifyou’ve ever read Dr. Seuss’s story “The Sneetches”, the Fix-it-Up Chappie
(Sylvester McMonkey McBean) gets a pretty good money pump going before he packs
up and leaves.
4. Though Quinn (1990) presents a case (“the puzzle of the self-torturer”) in which it may
be rational for an agent to have intransitive preferences.
5. While Savage thought of acts as functions from states to outcomes, it will be simpler for
us to treat acts, states, and outcomes as propositions—the proposition that the agent
will perform the act, the proposition that the world is in a particular state, and the
proposition that a particular outcome occurs.
6. For simplicity’s sake we set aside cases in which some Si make particular acts impossible.
Thus A & Si will never be a contradiction.
7. The Dominance Principle I’ve presented is sometimes known as the Strong Dominance
Principle. The Weak Dominance Principle says that if A produces at least as good an
T7⅛ DECISION THEORY
outcome as B in each possible state of the world, plus a better outcome in at least one
possible state of the world, then A is preferred to B. The names of the principles can be a
bit confusing—it’s not that Strong Dominance is a stronger principle-, it’s that it involves a
stronger kind of dominance. In fact, the Weak Dominance Principle is logically stronger
than the Strong Dominance Principle, in the sense that the Weak Dominance Principle
entails the Strong Dominance Principle. (Thanks to David Makinson for suggesting this
clarification.)
Despite being a logically stronger principle, Weak Dominance is also a consequence
of Savage’s expected utility theory, and has the same kinds of problems as Strong
Dominance.
8. In a similar display of poor reasoning, Shakespeare’s Henry V (Act 4, Scene 3) responds
to Westmoreland’s wish for more troops on their side of the battle—“O that we now had
here but one ten thousand of those men in England, that do no work today”—with the
following:
If we are marked to die, we are enough to do our country loss;
and if to live, the fewer men, the greater share of honor.
God’s will, I pray thee wish not one man more.
9. For a brief discussion and references, see Jeffrey (1983, § 1.8).
10. Instead of referring to “acts”, “states”, “outcomes”, and “utilities”, Jeffrey speaks of “acts”,
“conditions”, “consequences”, and “desirabilities” (respectively). As in my presentation
of Savage’s theory, I have made some changes to Jeffrey’s approach for the sake of
simplicity, and consistency with the rest of the discussion.
11. The decision-theoretic structure here bears striking similarities to Simpsons Paradox.
We saw in Section 3.2.3 that while DeMar DeRozan had a better overall field-goal
percentage than James Harden during the 2016-17 NBA season, from each distance
(two-pointer versus three-pointer) Harden was more accurate. This was because a much
higher proportion of DeRozaris shot attempts were two-pointers, which are much
easier to make. So if you selected a DeRozan attempt at random, it was much more
likely than a Harden attempt to have been a two-pointer, and so much more likely
to have been made. Similarly, the deterrence utility table shows that disarming yields
better outcomes than arming on each possible state of the world. Yet arming is much
more likely than disarming to land you in the peace state (the right-hand column of the
table), and so get you a desirable outcome.
12. While Savage coined the phrase “Sure-Thing Principle”, it’s actually a bit difficult to tell
from his text exactly what he meant by it. I’ve presented a contemporary cleaning-up
of Savage’s discussion, inspired by the Sure-Thing formulation in Eells (1982, p. 10).
It’s also worth noting that the Sure-Thing Principle is intimately related to decision-
theoretic principles known as Separability and Independence, but we wont delve into
those here.
13. Heukelom (2015) provides an accessible history of the Allais Paradox, and of Allais’
disputes with Savage over it. Another well-known counterexample to Savage’s deci
sion theory based on risk aversion is the Ellsberg Paradox, which we’ll discuss in
Section 14.1.3.
notes 279
14. In case you’re looking for a clever way out of Newcombs Problem, Nozick specifies in a
footnote that if the being predicts you will decide what to do via some random process
(like flipping a coin), he does not put the $1,000,000 in the second box.
15. Eells (1982, p. 91) gives a parallel example from theology: “Calvinism is sometimes
thought to involve the thesis that election for salvation and a virtuous life are effects of a
common cause: a certain kind of soul. Thus, while leading a virtuous life does not cause
one to be elected, still the probability of salvation is higher conditional on a virtuous
life than conditional on an unvirtuous life. Should one lead a virtuous life?”
16. It’s important for Causal Decision Theory that A □→ S conditionals be “causal” coun-
terfactuals rather than “backtracking” counterfactuals; we hold facts about the past
fixed when assessing A’s influence on S. (See Lewis 1981a for the distinction and some
explanation.)
17. There are actually many ways of executing a causal decision theory; the approach
presented here is that of Gibbard and Harper (1978/1981), drawing from Stalnaker
(1972/1981). Lewis (1981a) thought Causal Decision Theory should instead return
to Savage’s unconditional credences and independence assumptions, but with the
specification that acts and states be causally independent. For a comparison of these
approaches along with various others, plus a general formulation of Causal Decision
Theory that attempts to cover them all, see Joyce (1999).
18. If you feel like Newcomb’s Problem is too fanciful and our appletini example too
frivolous to merit serious concern, consider that Gallo et al. (2018) found substantial
evidence that smoking more cigarettes or smoking for a longer time is correlated with
a decreased risk of developing Parkinson’s disease. If Reichenbach’s Principle of the
Common Cause (Section 3.2.4) is true, then either smoking has a causal effect on
whether one develops Parkinson’s, Parkinson’s somehow affects whether one smokes,
or some other cause makes one both more likely to smoke and less likely to develop
Parkinson’s. Pursuing this third, causal-fork option, the researchers speculated that a
dopamine shortage in the brain might contribute both to Parkinson’s and to a “low-risk
taking personality trait” that makes people less likely to smoke or more likely to quit. If
that’s right, then should you take up smoking to avoid Parkinson’s? Other studies have
found that high levels of education correlate positively with developing Parkinson’s
(Frigerio et al. 2005). Should you cut short your education to avoid the disease?
19. This game was invented by Nicolas Bernoulli in the eighteenth century.
20. This problem was inspired by a problem of Brian Weathersori’s.
PART IV
ARGUMENTS FOR BAYESIANISM
To my mind, the best argument for Bayesian epistemology is the uses to which
it can be put. In the previous part of this book we saw how the Bayesian
approach interacts with confirmation and decision theory, two central topics
in the study of theoretical and practical rationality (respectively). The five core
normative Bayesian rules grounded formal representations of how an agent
should assess what her evidence supports and how she should make decisions
in the face of uncertainty. These are just two of the many applications of
Bayesian epistemology, which have established its significance in the minds
of contemporary philosophers.
Nevertheless, Bayesian history also offers more direct arguments for the
normative Bayesian rules. The idea is to prove from premises plausible on
independent grounds that, say, a rational agents unconditional credences
satisfy Kolmogorovs probability axioms. The three most prominent kinds of
arguments for Bayesianism are those based on representation theorems, Dutch
Books, and accuracy measurements. This part of the book will devote one
chapter to each type of argument.
Some of these argument-types can be used to establish more than just
the probability axioms as requirements of rationality; the Ratio Formula,
Conditionalization, Countable Additivity, and other norms we have discussed
may be argued for. Each argument-type has particular norms it can and can’t
be used to support; ∏l mention these applications as we go along. But they all
can be used to argue for probabilism.
As I mentioned in Chapter 2, probabilism is the thesis that a rational agents
unconditional credence distribution at a given time satisfies Kolmogorovs
three axioms. (I sometimes call a distribution that satisfies the axioms a
“probabilistic” distribution.) Among the probability axioms, by far the most
difficult to establish as a rational requirement is Finite Additivity. We’ll see
why as we dig into the arguments’ particulars, but it’s worth a quick reminder
at this point what Finite Additivity does.
282 ARGUMENTS FOR BAYESIANISM
Chapter 2 introduced three characters: Mr. Prob, Mr. Weak, and Mr. Bold.
We imagine there is some single proposition P for which the three of them
assign the following credences:
Mr. Prob: cr(F) = 0 cr(P) =1/6 cr(~P) = 5/6 cr(T) = 1

Mr. Weak: cr(F) = 0 cr(P) = 1/36 cr(~P) = 25/36 cr(T) = 1
Mr. Bold: cr(F) = 0 cr(P) = l/y/6 cr(~P) = y∣~5∕y∣6 cr(T) = 1
All three of these characters satisfy the Non-Negativity and Normality axioms.
They also satisfy such intuitive credence norms as Entailment—the rule that
a proposition must receive at least as much credence as any proposition that
entails it. We could easily introduce conditional credences that have them
satisfy the Ratio Formula as well. Yet of the three, only Mr. Prob satisfies Finite
Additivity. This demonstrates that Finite Additivity is logically independent of
these other norms; they can be satisfied even if Finite Additivity is not.
Mr. Weak’s credences are obtained by squaring each of Mr. Prob’s. This
makes Mr. Weak’s levels of confidence in logically contingent propositions
(P, ~P) lower than Mr. Prob’s. Mr. Weak is comparatively conservative,
unwilling to be very confident in contingent claims. So while Mr. Weak is
certain of P V ~P, his individual credences in P and ~P sum to less than 1.
Mr. Bold’s distribution, on the other hand, is obtained by square-rooting Mr.
Prob’s credences. Mr. Bold is highly confident of contingent propositions, to
the point that his credences in P and ~P sum to more than 1.
When we argue for Finite Additivity as a rational norm, we are arguing
that Mr. Weak and Mr. Bold display a rational flaw not present in Mr. Prob.
It’s worth wondering in exactly what respect Mr. Weak and Mr. Bold make a
rational mistake. This is especially pressing because empirical findings suggest
that real humans consistently behave like Mr. Bold: they assign credences
to mutually exclusive disjuncts that sum to more than their credence in the
disjunction. Tversky and Koehler (1994) summarize a great deal of evidence
on this front. In one particularly striking finding, subjects were asked to write
down the last digit of their phone number and then estimate the percentage
of American married couples with exactly that many children. The subjects
with numbers ending in 0,1, 2, and 3 each assigned their digit a value greater
than 25%. If we suppose the reported values express estimates common to all
of these subjects, then each of them assigns estimates summing to more than
100% before we even get to families with more than three kids!
Each of the three argument-types we consider will explain what’s wrong with
violating Finite Additivity in a slightly different way. And for each argument,
I will ultimately have the same complaint. Finite Additivity is a linearity
FURTHER READING 283
constraint; it requires a disjunctions credence to be a linear combination of

the credences in its mutually exclusive disjuncts. In order to support Finite
Additivity, each of the arguments assumes some other linearity constraint,
whose normative credentials are no more clear than those of Finite Additivity.
I call this the Linearity In, Linearity Out problem: We want to establish
that treating credences additively is required by more fundamental rational
principles. But ultimately we rely on principles that are additive (or intimately
bound up with additive distributions) themselves. Instead of demonstrating
that some deep aspect of rationality demands linearity, we have snuck in the
linearity through our premises.
If traditional arguments for probabilism are question-begging in this man
ner, then probabilism’s applications become all the more significant as reasons
to endorse probabilistic norms. Near the end of Chapter 10 I’ll ask whether
Finite Additivity is really necessary for those applications. We’ll briefly exam
ine whether Bayesian epistemology’s successes in confirmation and decision
theory could be secured without such a strong commitment to probabilism.
Further Reading
Alan Hajek (2009a). Arguments for—or against—Probabilism? In: Degrees

of Belief. Ed. by Franz Huber and Christoph Schmidt-Petri. Vol. 342.
Synthese Library. Springer, pp. 229-51
Excellent introduction to, and assessment of, all the arguments for probabilism
discussed in this part of the book.
8
Representation Theorems
Decision theory aligns a rational agents preferences among available acts

with her credence and utility distributions. It does so in two steps: first, a
valuation function combines the agents credences and utilities to assign each
act a numerical score; second, the rational agent prefers acts with higher
scores.
Savages decision theory evaluates an act A by calculating its expected utility
as follows:
EU(A) = u(A<‰S1)∙cr(S1) + u(A<‰S2)∙cr(S2) + ... +u(A&S„)-cr(S„) (8.1)
where u represents the agents utilities, cr represents her credences, and states
S1 through Sn form a finite partition. A rational agent has
A > B just in case

u(A & S1) ∙ cr(S1) + ... + u(A & S„) ∙ cr(Sπ) (8.2)
> u(B & S1) ∙ cr(S1) + ... + u(B & Sn) ∙ cr(Sn)
where “A > B” indicates that the agent prefers act A to act B.

Equation (8.2) relates three types of attitudes that impact an agents practical
life: her preferences among acts, her credences in states, and her utilities over
outcomes.1 Its a bit like an equation with three variables; if we know two of
them we can solve for the third. For instance, if I specify a rational agents full
utility and credence distributions, you can determine her preference between
any two acts using Equation (8.2). Going in a different direction, de Finetti
(1931/1989) showed that if you know an agents utilities and her preferences
among certain kinds of betting acts, you can determine her credences. Mean
while von Neumann and Morgenstern (1947) showed that given an agents
preferences over risky acts with specified credal profiles (called “lotteries”),
one can determine her utilities. (See Figure 8.1.)2
Yet at some point during the 1920s, Frank Ramsey discovered how to do
something remarkable: given only one of the variables in Equation (8.2), he
figured out how to determine the other two. (The relevant paper, (Ramsey

286 REPRESENTATION THEOREMS
Author Preferences Utilities Credences

(straightforward) determine given given
de Finetti (1931) given given determine
von Neumann and given determine given
Morgenstern (1947)
Ramsey (1931) given determine determine
Figure 8.1 Results deriving some decision-theoretic attitudes from others
1931), was published after Ramseys death in 1930 at age 26.) Given an agents
full preference ranking over acts, Ramsey showed how to determine both
that agents credences and her utilities. Ramseys method laid the groundwork
for representation theorems later proven by Savage and others. And these
representation theorems ground an important argument for probabilism.
This chapter begins with an overview of Ramsey’s method for determining
credences and utilities from preferences. I will then present Savages
representation theorem and discuss how it is taken to support probabilism.
Finally, I will present contemporary criticisms of the representation theorem
argument for probabilism. Especially eager readers may skip over the Ramsey
section; strictly speaking one needn’t know how Ramsey pulled the trick
to understand representation theorems and their relation to probabilism.
Yet I will not be presenting any proof of the representation theorem, so
if you want to know how it’s possible to get both credences and utilities
from preferences it may be worth studying Ramsey’s approach. Ramsey’s
process also illustrates why certain structural assumptions are necessary for
the theorems that came later.
One note before we begin: Readers familiar with decision theory (perhaps
from Chapter 7) will know that many contemporary decision theorists have
found fault with Savage’s expected utility formula as a valuation function.
But since we will mainly be discussing Savage’s representation theorem, I will
use Savage-style expected utilities (as defined in Equation (8.1)) throughout
this chapter. One can find similar representation theorems for Jeffrey-style
Evidential Decision Theory in (Jeffrey 1965), and for Causal Decision Theory
in (Joyce 1999).
8.1 Ramsey’s four-step process
Here’s how Ramsey’s process works. We imagine we are given an agent’s

complete preference ranking over acts, some of which are acts of accepting
various “gambles” (which provide one outcome if a proposition is true, another
8.ι ramsey’s four-step process 287
outcome if that proposition is false). We assume that the agent assigns finite
numerical utilities, credences satisfying the probability axioms, and prefer
ences in line with her (Savage-style) expected utilities. Yet we are given no
further information about which credence and utility values she assigns to
particular propositions. That’s what we want to determine.
Ramsey’s process works by sorting through the agent’s preference rankings
until we find preferences that fit certain patterns. Those patterns allow us
to determine particular features of the agent’s credences and utilities, which
we then leverage to determine further features, until we can set a utility and
credence value for each proposition in the agent’s language £.
Step One: Find ethically neutral propositions

Ramsey defines a proposition P as ethically neutral for an agent if the agent is
indifferent between any two gambles whose outcomes differ only in replacing
P with ~P. The intuitive idea is that an agent just doesn’t care how an ethically
neutral proposition comes out, so she values any outcome in which P occurs
just as much as she values an otherwise-identical outcome in which ~P
occurs. (Despite the terminology, Ramsey is clear that a proposition’s “ethical
neturality” has little to do with ethics at all.) For instance, a particular agent
might care not one whit about hockey teams and how they fare; this lack of
caring will show up in her preferences among various acts (including gambles).
Suppose this agent is confronted with two acts: one will make the Blackhawks
win the Stanley Cup and also get her some ice cream, while another will
make the Blackhawks lose but still get her the same ice cream. If propositions
about hockey results are ethically neutral for the agent, she will be indifferent
between performing those two acts.
In Step One of Ramsey’s process, we scour the agent’s preferences to find
a number of propositions that are ethically neutral for her. We can tell an
ethically neutral proposition P because every time P appears in the outcomes
of a gamble, she will be indifferent between that gamble and another gamble
in which every P in an outcome has been replaced by a ~p.
Step Two: Find ethically neutral P, ~P with equal credence

We now examine the agent’s preferences until we find three propositions X, Y,
and P such that P is ethically neutral for the agent and the agent is indifferent
between these two gambles:
P ~P
Gamble 1 X&P Y&~P
Gamble 2 Y&P X&~P
In this decision table the possible states of the world are listed across the top
row, while the acts available to the agent are listed down the first column. Since
we don’t know the agents utility values, we can’t put them in the cells. So I’ve
listed there the outcome that will result from each act-state pair. For instance,
Gamble 1 yields outcome X & P if P is true, Y & ~P if P is false. If we’ve
established in Step One that hockey results are ethically neutral for our agent,
then Gamble 1 might make it the case that the agent receives chocolate ice
cream (X) if the Blackhawks win and vanilla (Y) if they lose, while Gamble 2
gives her vanilla if they win and chocolate if they lose.
If the agent is indifferent between the acts of making Gamble 1 and Gamble
2, and if the agent’s preferences reflect her expected utilities, then we have
u(X& P) ∙ cr(P) + u(K & ~P) ∙ cr(~P) = EU(Gamble 1)

(8.3)
= EU(Gamble 2) = u( Y & P) ∙ cr(P) + u(X & ~P) ∙ cr(~P)
But we’ve already ascertained that P is ethically neutral for the agent—she
doesn’t care whether P is true or false. So
u(X & P) = u(X & ~P) = u(X) (8.4)
Since the agent gets no utility advantage from P’s being either true or false, her
utility for X & P is just her utility for X, which is also her utility for X & ~P.3
A similar equation holds for Y. Substituting these results into Equation (8.3),
we obtain
u(X) ∙ cr(P) + u(Y) ∙ cr(~P) = u(Y) ∙ cr(P) + u(X) ∙ cr(~P) (8.5)
which we can rewrite as
u(X)[cr(P) — cr(~P)] = u(Y)[cr(P) - cr(~P)] (8.6)
One way to make this equation true is to have u(X) = u(Γ). How can we deter
mine whether those utilities are equal strictly from the agent’s preferences? We
might offer her a gamble that produces X no matter what—sometimes called
a constant act—and another gamble that produces Y no matter what. If the
agent is indifferent between the constant act that produces X and the constant
act that produces Y, she must assign X and Y the same utilities.
But now suppose we offer the agent a choice between those constant acts and
she turns out to have a preference between X and Y. With u(X) ≠ u(Y), the
8.ι ramsey’s four-step process 289
only way to make Equation (8.6) true is to have cr(P) = cr(~P), so that cr(P) —
cr(~P) = 0. If the agent is indifferent between Gambles 1 and 2, considers P
ethically neutral, and assigns distinct utilities to X and Y, she must be equally
confident in P and ~P.
Intuitively, here’s how this step works: If you prefer one outcome to another
then you’ll lean toward gambles that make you more confident you’ll receive
the preferred result. The only way you’ll be indifferent between a gamble that
gives you the preferred outcome on P and a gamble that gives you that preferred
outcome on ~P is if your confidence in P is equal to your confidence in ~P.
To return to our earlier example: Suppose hockey propositions are ethically
neutral for our agent, she prefers chocolate ice cream to vanilla, and she is
offered two gambles. The first gamble provides chocolate on a Blackhawks
win and vanilla on a loss; the second provides vanilla on a Blackhawks win
and chocolate on a loss. If she thinks the Blackhawks are likely to win she’ll
prefer the first gamble (because she wants that chocolate); if she thinks the
Blackhawks are likely to lose she’ll prefer the second. Being indifferent between
the gambles makes sense only if she thinks a Blackhawks loss is just as likely
as a win.
Step Three: Determine utilities

We’ve now found at least one ethically neutral proposition P that the agent
takes to be as likely as not. Next we survey the agent’s preferences until we
find three propositions D, M, and W satisfying the following two conditions:
First, u(D) > u(M) > u(W). (We can determine this by examining the agent’s
preferences among constant acts involving D, M, and W.) Second, the agent is
indifferent between these two gambles:
P ~P
Gamble 3 D&P W&~P
Gamble 4 M&P M&~p
Because P is ethically neutral for the agent, u(D) = u(D & P), u( W) = u(Wr &
~P), and u(M) = u(M & P) = u(Λf & ~P). So the agent’s indifference between
these gambles tell us that
u(D) ∙ cr(P) + u(W) ∙ cr(~P) = u(Λf) ∙ cr(P) ÷ u(Λf) ∙ cr(~P) (8.7)
We’ve also selected a P such that cr(P) = cr(~P). So we can just divide through
by this value, leaving
u(D) + u(W) = u(M) + u(M) (8.8)

u(D) - u(M) = u(M) - u(IV) (8.9)
In other words, the gap between the agents utilities in D and Mmust equal the
gap between her utilities in M and W.
Intuitively: The agent prefers D to M, so if P is true then the agent would
rather have Gamble 3 than Gamble 4. On the other hand, the agent prefers
M to IV, so if ~P then the agent would rather have Gamble 4. If the agent
considered P much more likely than ~P, then a small preference for D over M
could balance a much stronger preference for M over W. But we’ve chosen a P
that the agent finds just as likely as ~P. So if the agent is indifferent between
Gambles 3 and 4, the advantage conferred on Gamble 3 by its potential to
provide D instead of M must precisely balance out the advantage conferred on
Gamble 4 by its potential to provide M rather than IV. The agent must value D
over M by the exact same amount that she values M over W.
This kind of gamble allows us to establish equal utility gaps among various
propositions. In this case, the utility gap between D and M must equal that
between M and W. Suppose we stipulate that u(D) = 100 and u(IV) = —100.
(As we’ll see in the next section, any finite values would’ve worked equally well
here as long as u(D) > u(IV).) Equation (8.9) then tells us that u(M) = 0.
By repeatedly applying this technique, we can find a series of benchmark
propositions for the agent’s utility scale. For example, we might find a propo
sition C such that the utility gap between C and D is equal to that between D
and M. In that case we know that u(C) = 200. On the other hand, we might
find a proposition I whose utility is just as far from M as it is from D; I has
utility 50. Then we find proposition G with utility 75. As we find more and
more of these propositions with special utility values, we can use them to
establish the utilities of other propositions (even propositions that don’t enter
into convenient Gambles like 3 and 4 between which the agent is indifferent).
If the agent prefers the constant act that produces E to the constant act that
produces G, her utility for E must be greater than 75. But if she prefers D,s
constant act to E,s, u(E) must be less than 100. By drawing finer and finer such
distinctions, we can specify the agent’s utility for an arbitrary proposition to as
narrow an interval as we like. Repeated applications of this step will determine
the agent’s full utility distribution over a propositional language to any desired
level of precision.
Step Four: Determine credences

We’ve now determined the agent’s utilities for every proposition in her lan
guage; the final step is to determine her credences. To determine the agent’s
8.2 savage’s representation theorem 291
credence in an arbitrarily selected proposition Q, we find propositions R, S,

and T such that the agent is indifferent between a constant act providing T
and the following gamble:
Q -Q
Gamble 5 R&Q 8&~Q
We then have
u(T) = u(R & Q) ∙ cr(Q) + u(S & ~Q) ∙ cr(~Q) (8.10)
We assumed at the outset that the agents credence distribution satisfies the
probability axioms. So we can replace cr(~Q) with 1 — cr(Q), yielding
u(T) = u(R & Q) ∙ cr(Q) + u(S & ~Q) ∙ [1 — cr(Q)] (8.11)
We then apply a bit of algebra to obtain
= u(T)-u(S⅛~Q)
(8.12)
u(A & Q) — u(S & ~Q)
Since we already know the agents utilities for every proposition in her lan
guage, we can fill out all the values on the right-hand side and calculate her
credence in Q. And since this method works for arbitrarily selected Q, we can
apply it repeatedly to determine the agent’s entire credence distribution over
her language.4
8.2 Savage’s representation theorem
The previous section didn’t flesh out all the details of Ramsey’s process for
determining credences and utilities from preferences. But Savage (1954)
proved a representation theorem which guarantees that the necessary details
can be provided. I’ll start by presenting the theorem, then explain some of its
individual parts.
Representation Theorem: If an agent’s preferences satisfy certain con

straints, then there exists a unique probabilistic credence dis
tribution and unique utility distribution (up to positive affine
transformation) that yield those preferences when the agent
maximizes expected utility.
We saw the basic idea in Ramseys four-step process: The Representation

Theorem says that starting from an agent’s preferences, we’ll always be able
to construct a unique probabilistic credence distribution and unique utility
distribution (up to positive affine transformation, which I’ll explain shortly)
that generate those preferences through expected utility maximization.
In order for this to work, the preferences must satisfy certain constraints,
often called the preference axioms. These constraints are called “axioms”
because we take the agents satisfaction of them as given in applying the
representation theorem; calling them “axioms” does not mean they cannot be
independently argued for.
For example, Savage assumes the preferences under discussion will satisfy
these two constraints (introduced in Chapter 7):
Preference Asymmetry: There do not exist acts A and B such that the agent
both prefers A to B and prefers B to A.
Preference Transitivity: For any acts A, B, and C, if the agent prefers A to B
and B to C, then the agent prefers A to C.
Section 7.2. Γs money pump argument tries to show that these axioms will be
satisfied by the preferences of any rational agent.5
Preference Asymmetry and Transitivity are substantive constraints on an
agents preferences—the kinds of things we might rationally fault her for failing
to meet. Yet many of Savages axioms merely require the agents preference
structure to display a certain level of richness; Suppes (1974) calls these
“structure axioms”. We saw one good example in Chapter 7:
Preference Completeness: For any acts A and B, exactly one of the following
is true: the agent prefers A to B, the agent prefers B to A, or the agent
is indifferent between the two.
Even more demanding assumptions6 popped up in Ramsey’s four-step process:

At various stages, we had to assume that if we combed through enough of the
agent’s preferences, we’d eventually find propositions falling into a very specific
preference pattern. In Step Four, for example, we assumed that for any arbitrary
proposition Q there would be propositions R, S, and T such that the agent was
indifferent between Ts constant act and a gamble that generated R on Q and S
otherwise. More generally, we assumed a large supply of propositions the agent
treated as ethically neutral, and among those some propositions the agent took
to be as likely as not.
8.2 savage’s representation theorem 293
It’s doubtful that any agent has ever had preferences rich enough to satisfy
all of these assumptions. And we wouldn’t want to rationally fault agents for
failing to do so. Yet decision theorists tend to view the structure axioms as
harmless assumptions added in to make the math come out nicely. Since
Savage’s work, a number of alternative representation theorems have been
proven, many of which relax his original structural assumptions.7
If an agent’s preferences satisfy the preference axioms, Savage’s Represen
tation Theorem guarantees the existence of a unique probabilistic credence
distribution for the agent and a unique utility distribution “up to positive
affine transformation”. Why can’t we determine a unique utility distribution
for the agent full stop? Recall that in Step Three of Ramsey’s process—the
step in which we determined the agent’s utility distribution—we stipulated
that proposition D had a utility of 100 and proposition W a utility of —100.
I chose those values because they were nice round numbers; they had no
special significance, and we easily could have chosen other values (as long
as D came out more valuable than W). Stipulating other utilities for these
propositions would have affected our utility assignments down the line. For
example, if we had chosen u(D) = 100 and u( W) = 0 instead, the proposition
M that we proved equidistant between D and W would have landed at a utility
of 50 (rather than 0).
Yet I hope it’s clear that differing utility scales resulting from different utility
stipulations for D and W would have many things in common. This is because
they measure the same underlying quantity: the extent to which an agent values
a particular arrangement of the world. Different numerical scales that measure
the same underlying quantity may be related in a variety of ways; we will
be particularly interested in measurement scales related by scalar and affine
transformations.
Two measurement scales are related by a scalar transformation when
values on one scale are constant multiples of values on the other. A good
example are the kilogram and pound measurement scales for mass. An object’s
mass in pounds is its mass in kilograms times 2.2. Thus the kilogram and
pound scales are related by a scalar transformation. In this case the multiplying
constant (2.2) is positive, so we call it a positive scalar transformation. Scalar
transformations maintain zero points and ratios, and positive scalar transfor
mations maintain ordinal ranks. Taking these one at a time: Anything that
weighs 0 kilograms also weighs 0 pounds; the pound and kilogram scales have
the same zero point. Moreover, if Γm twice as heavy as you in kilograms then
I’ll be twice as heavy as you in pounds. Scalar transformations preserve ratios
among values. Finally, since it’s a positive scalar transformation, ordering a
group of people from lowest to highest weight in kilograms will also order
them from lowest to highest weight in pounds.
Affine transformations are a bit more complex: the conversion not only
multiplies by a constant but also adds a constant. Celsius and Fahrenheit
temperatures are related by an affine transformation; to get Fahrenheit from
Celsius you multiply by 1.8 then add 32. This is a positive affine transformation
(determined again by the sign of the multiplying constant). Positive affine
transformations maintain ordinal ranks, but not necessarily zero points or
ratios among values. Again, one at a time: Tahiti is hotter than Alaska whatever
temperature scale you use; a positive affine transformation keeps things in the
same order from lowest to highest. While 0oC is the (usual) freezing point of
water, 0oF is a much colder temperature. So a value of 0 does not indicate the
same worldly situation on both temperature scales. Positive affine transforma
tions may also distort ratios: 20oC is twice 10oC, but their equivalents 680F
and 50oF (respectively) do not fall in a ratio of 2 to 1. Affine transformations
do, however, preserve facts about gap equality. Suppose I tell you, “Tomorrow
will be hotter than today by the same number of degrees that today was hotter
than yesterday.” This will be true on the Fahrenheit scale just in case it’s true on
the Celsius scale. (Scalar transformations preserve gap equality as well, since
scalar transformations are the special case of affine transformations in which
the constant added is 0.)
Savages representation theorem guarantees that if an agents preferences
satisfy the preference axioms, we will be able to find a probabilistic cre
dence distribution and a utility distribution that match those preferences via
expected utility maximization. In fact, we will be able to find many such
utility distributions, but all the utility distributions that match this particular
agents preferences will be related by positive affine transformation. Decision
theorists tend to think that if two utility distributions are related by a positive
affine transformation, there is no real underlying difference between an agents
having one and the agents having another. Each distribution will rank states of
affairs in the same order with respect to value, and when put into an expected
utility calculation with the same credence distribution, each will produce
the same preferences among acts.8 The real difference between such utility
distributions lies in the particular utility values we—the utility measurers—
stipulate to set up our measurement scale. Whether we choose to represent an
agent’s love for chocolate ice cream with a utility score of one hundred or one
million, the agent will still prefer chocolate ice cream to vanilla, and vanilla ice
cream to none. And our choice of measurement scale will not change the facts
about whether she prefers chocolate to vanilla by exactly the same amount that
8.3 REPRESENTATION THEOREMS AND PROBABILISM 295
she prefers vanilla to none. (Affine transformations preserve the equivalence

of gaps; establishing equivalent utility gaps was the main business of Ramsey’s
third step.)
This equanimity among utility scales related by positive affine transforma
tion does lose us absolute zero points and ratios among utility assignments.
Different utility scales will yield different results about whether our agent likes
chocolate ice cream twice as much as vanilla. If we’re going to treat each of
those measurement scales as equally accurate, we’ll have to deny that there’s
any fact of the matter about the ratio between the agent’s utility for chocolate
and utility for vanilla. But it’s unclear what it would even mean for an agent to
value chocolate twice as much as vanilla (especially since such facts could have
no bearing on her preferences among acts). So decision theorists tend not to
mourn their inability to make utility ratio claims.
8.3 Representation theorems and probabilism
It’s time to pause and ask what decision theory—and representation

theorems—are really/or. Kenny Easwaran writes:
Naive applications of decision theory often assume that it works by taking

a specification of probabilities and utilities and using them to calculate the
expected utilities of various acts, with a rational agent being required to take
whichever act has the highest (or sufficiently high) expected utility. However,
justifications of the formal framework of expected utility theory generally
work in the opposite way—they start with an agent’s preferences among acts,
and use them to calculate an implied probability and utility function....
The orthodox view of decision theory endorsed by Savage (1954) and
Jeffrey (1965) takes preferences over acts with uncertain outcomes to be the
fundamental concept of decision theory, and shows that if these preferences
satisfy a particular set of axioms, then they can be represented by a probability
function and a utility function.... This conflicts with a naive reading of the
concept of expected utility, which was perhaps the dominant understanding
of theories that were popular in the 17th to 19th centuries. One often assumes
that utilities and probabilities are prior to preference, and that decision theory
says that you should prefer an act with a higher expected utility over any act
with a lower expected utility. And this is how the theory of expected utility is
often applied in practical contexts, (2014a, pp. 1-2, emphasis in original)
Decision theory is often presented (and was largely presented in Chapter 7)

as a first-personal guide to decision-making and problem-solving. (Blaise
Pascal initiated his famous calculations of expected returns because he and
Pierre Fermat wanted to find the proper way of settling up the payouts for
a casino game (Fermat and Pascal 1654∕1929)). Once an agent has assigned
her credences that various states of the world obtain, and her utilities to all
the relevant outcomes, she can combine them via a valuation function to
determine which available act she ought rationally to prefer.
Representation theorems belong to a fairly different approach to decision
theory—what we might call a third-personal approach. Suppose an economist
has been studying a particular subject, noting the decisions she has made
when confronted by various choices in the past. This reveals some of the
subject’s preferences to the economist, but certainly not all. Suppose the
economist also assumes that the subject is rational in the sense that her total
set of preferences (both revealed and as-yet-unrevealed) together satisfies the
preference axioms (Transitivity, Asymmetry, Completeness, etc.). A repre
sentation theorem then guarantees that the agent can be understood as if
her past and future preferences are the result of maximizing expected utility
relative to some utility distribution and probabilistic credence distribution.
So the economist can take the subject’s past preferences and deduce features
of credence and utility distributions that would generate those preferences
were she maximizing expected utility. The economist then uses what’s known
about those (imagined) credences and utilities to predict preferences not yet
observed. The subject’s future preferences must match these predictions, on
pain of violating the preference axioms. (In part (b) of Exercise 8.3 you’ll use
Ramsey’s four-step process to make a prediction in this way.) To the extent that
decision theorists and economists can assume real agents satisfy the preference
axioms, this makes decision theory a powerful predictive tool.
The third-personal approach can also be applied in a more abstract fashion.
Since any agent who is rational in the sense of satisfying the preference axioms
is representable as maximizing expected utility, we can prove results about
the preferences of rational agents by proving that maximizing expected utility
requires certain kinds of preference relationships. For instance, we could argue
that any agent displaying the preferences in the Allais Paradox (Section 7.2.4)
must be irrational by showing that no possible utility distribution would
generate those preferences for an expected-utility maximizer.
All of these third-personal results—both abstract and particular—suppose
at some point that the agent sets her preferences by maximizing expected
utility relative to a utility distribution and probabilistic credence distribution.
But this supposition is a kind of bridge, taking the theorist from premises about
the agent’s preferences to conclusions that concern her preferences as well. To
get the relevant results, we need not demonstrate that the agent actually sets
her preferences using utilities and probabilistic credences. Expected-utility
maximization acts as a mathematical model, making the acquisition of prefer
ence results more tractable.9 Resnik (1987, p. 99) writes, “the [representation]
theorem merely takes information already present in facts about the agents
preferences and reformulates it in more convenient numerical terms.”
Could we do more? Some Bayesian epistemologists have used representa
tion theorems to argue that rational agents must have probabilistic degrees of
belief. At a first pass, the argument runs something like this:
Representation Theorem Argument for Probabilism
(Premise) Every rational agent has preferences satisfying the preference

axioms.
(Theorem) Any agent whose preferences satisfy the preference axioms can
be represented as maximizing expected utility relative to a prob
abilistic credence distribution.
(Conclusion) Every rational agent has a probabilistic credence distribution.
The rest of this chapter investigates whether any argument in the vicinity of
this one is sound. I want to emphasize, though, that even if representation
theorems cannot be employed in a convincing argument for probabilism, that
does not undermine their usefulness for the third-person modeling projects
just described.
8.3.1 Obj ections to the argument
As usual, a first approach to refuting this Representation Theorem Argument

would be to deny its premise. Whatever representation theorem one uses in
the argument (Savages or one of its descendents), that theorem will assume
that every rational agent satisfies some particular set of preference axioms. One
might then deny that rationality requires satisfying those axioms. For example,
some philosophers have argued that Preference Transitivity is not a rational
requirement. (See Chapter 7, note 4.)
On the other hand one might accept the premise, but read it in a way
that doesn’t generate the desired conclusion. Chapter 1 distinguished practical
rationality, which concerns connections between attitudes and action, from

theoretical rationality, which assesses representational attitudes considered
as such. The preference axioms, being constraints on preferences between
acts, are requirements of practical rationality. So if its successful, the Repre
sentation Theorem Argument demonstrates that any agent who satisfies the
requirements of practical rationality has probabilistic credences. As Ramsey
put it after laying out his four-step process,
Any definite set of degrees of belief which broke [the probability rules] would
be inconsistent in the sense that it violated the laws of preference between
options, such as that preferability is a transitive asymmetrical relation.
(1931, p. 84)
Yet we have offered probabilism as a thesis about theoretical rationality. The

Representation Theorem Argument seems to show that an agent with non-
probabilistic credences will make irrational decisions about how to behave in
her life. But we wanted to show that non-probabilistic credences are flawed
as representations in themselves, independently of how they lead to action.
Adding the word “practically” before the word “rational” in the argument’s
Premise forces us to add “practically” before “rational” in its Conclusion as
well, but that isn’t the Conclusion we were hoping to obtain.10
Setting aside concerns about the Premise, one might worry about the
validity of the Representation Theorem Argument as I’ve reconstructed it.
Logically, the Premise and Theorem together entail that every rational agent
can be represented as maximizing expected utility relative to a probabilistic
credence distribution. How does it follow that every rational agent has proba
bilistic credences?
To establish that a rational agent has probabilistic credences, we need to
establish two claims: (1) that the agent has numerical credences to begin with;
and (2) that those credences satisfy the probability axioms. It’s unclear that the
Representation Theorem Argument can establish even the first of these claims.
Alan Hajek explains the trouble as follows:
The concern is that for all we know, the mere possibility of representing you
one way or another might have less force than we want; your acting as if
the representation is true of you does not make it true of you. To make this
concern vivid, suppose that I represent your preferences with Voodooism,
My voodoo theory says that there are warring voodoo spirits inside you.
When you prefer A to B, then there are more A-favouring spirits inside
you than B-favouring spirits. I interpret all of the usual rationality axioms
in voodoo terms. Transitivity: if you have more A-favouring spirits than
B-favouring spirits, and more B-favouring spirits than C-favouring spirits,
then you have more A-favouring spirits than C-favouring spirits.... And so
on. I then prove’ Voodooism: if your preferences obey the usual rationality
axioms, then there exists a Voodoo representation of you. That is you act as if
there are warring voodoo spirits inside you in conformity with Voodooism.
Conclusion: rationality requires you to have warring Voodoo spirits in you.
Not a happy result, (2009a, p. 238, emphases in original)
It’s possible to defend the representation theorem approach—and close this

gap in the argument—by adopting a metaphysically thin conception of the
attitudes in question. Voodoo (or Voudou) is a complex set of cultural tra
ditions involving a variety of ontological and metaphysical commitments.
Demonstrating that an agent behaves as if there were voodoo spirits inside her
seems insufficient to establish such metaphysical claims. On the other hand,
one might define the notion of a credence such that all there is to possessing
a particular credence distribution is acting according to preferences with a
particular structure. At one point Ramsey writes, “I suggest that we introduce
as a law of psychology that [an agent’s] behaviour is governed by what is called
the mathematical expectation.... We... define degree of belief in a way which
presupposes the use of the mathematical expectation” (1931, p. 76). Bruno
de Finetti (1937/1964) employs a similar definitional approach. On such a
metaphysically thin behaviorist or functionalist account,11 an agent’s acting
as if she has probabilistic credences may be tantamount to her having such
credences. (This point of view also makes it less worrisome that the argument’s
Premise invokes constraints of practical rationality.)
The prominence of such operationalist views during parts of the twentieth
century explains why so little distance was perceived between conclusions
that follow uncontroverisally from Savage’s Representation Theorem and the
more controversial claims of the Representation Theorem Argument. Yet such
straightforward, metaphysically thin operationalisms have fallen out of favor,
for a variety of reasons. For example, even if we identify mental states using
their functional roles, it’s too restrictive to consider only roles related to
preferences among acts. Doxastic attitudes have a variety of functions within
our reasoning, and may even be directly introspectible. Christensen (2004)
also notes that even if they aren’t directly introspectible, degrees of belief affect
other mental states that can be introspected, such as our emotions. (Consider
how confidence that you will perform well affects your feelings upon taking
the stage.) With a thicker conception of credences in place, it’s difficult to

imagine that merely observing an agent’s preferences among acts would suffice
to attribute such doxastic attitudes to her.12
Perhaps, then, we can scale back what the Representation Theorem Argu
ment is meant to show. Suppose we have convinced ourselves on independent
grounds that agents have numerical degrees of belief, perhaps via consid
erations about comparisons of confidence like those adduced in Chapter 1.
With the existence of credences already established, could the Representation
Theorem Argument show that rationality requires those credences to satisfy
the probability axioms? Unfortunately the logic of the argument prevents it
from achieving even that.
Go back and carefully reread the Representation Theorem on page 291.
The phrase “there exists a unique probabilistic credence distribution” contains
a key ambiguity. One might be tempted to read it as saying that given an
agent’s full preference ranking of acts, there will be exactly one credence
distribution that matches those preferences via expected utility maximization,
and moreover that credence distribution will be probabilistic. But that’s not
how the theorem works. The proof begins by assuming that we’re looking
for a probabilistic credence distribution, and then showing that out of all
the probabilistic distributions, there is exactly one that will match the agent’s
preferences. (If you look closely at Step Four of Ramsey’s process—the step
that determines credence values—you’ll notice that halfway through we had
to assume those values satisfy the probability axioms.) In the course of an
argument for probabilism, this is extremely question-begging—how do we
know that there isn’t some other, non-probabilistic distribution that would
lead to the same preferences by expected utility maximization? What if it
turns out that any agent who can be represented as if she is maximizing
expected utility with respect to a probabilistic distribution can also be rep
resented as maximizing expected utility with respect to a non-probabilistic
distribution? This would vitiate the argument’s ability to privilege probabilistic
distributions.13
8.3.2 Reformulating the argument
We can address these questions by proving a new version of the Representation

Theorem:14
Revised Representation Theorem: If an agent’s preferences satisfy certain

constraints, then there exists a unique credence distribution (up to
positive scalar transformation) and unique utility distribution (up

to positive affine transformation) that yield those preferences when
the agent maximizes expected utility. Moreover, one of those scalar
credence transforms satisfies the probability axioms.
The revised theorem shows that if an agent maximizes expected utility, her
full set of preferences narrows down her credences to a very narrow class of
possible distributions. These distributions are all positive scalar transforma
tions of each other; they all satisfy Non-Negativity and Finite Additivity; and
they all satisfy something like Normality. The main difference between them
is in the particular numerical value they assign to tautologies. For instance,
one of the distributions will assign a credence of 100 to every logical truth (we
can think of this distribution as working on a percentage scale), while another
distribution will assign tautologies degree of belief 1. For any particular
proposition P, the former distribution will assign a value exactly 100 times that
assigned by the latter. If we stipulate that our credence scale tops out at 1, there
will be only one credence distribution matching the agents preferences, and
that distribution will satisfy the Kolomogorov axioms. Given the stipuation
of maximal credence 1, the Revised Representation Theorem demonstrates
that any agent who generates preferences satisfying the preference axioms by
maximizing expected utilities has a probabilistic credence distribution.
The revised theorem provides a revised argument:
Revised Representation Theorem Argument for Probabilism
(Premise 1) Every rational agent has preferences satisfying the preference

axioms.
(Premise 2) Every rational agent has preferences that align with her cre
dences and utilities by expected utility maximization.
(Theorem) If an agent’s preferences satisfy the preference axioms and align
with her credences and utilities by expected utility maximiza
tion, then that agent has probabilistic credences (up to a positive
scalar transformation).
(Conclusion) Every rational agent has a probabilistic credence distribution (or
a positive scalar transformation thereof).
This argument has the advantage of being valid. Its conclusion isn’t quite
probabilism, but if we treat the maximum numerical credence value as a
stipulated matter, it’s close enough to probabilism to do the trick. So this
version of the argument makes real progress: if an agent assigns rational
preferences that align with her credences and utilities by maximizing expected
utility, then we can show not merely that she’s representαWe as satisfying
certain constraints; we can show that she must assign essentially probabilistic
credences.
Yet by clearing out some of our earlier problems, this version of the argu
ment highlights the truly central assumption of representation theorems,
enshrined in Premise 2 of the argument and the antecedent of the conditional
that ended the previous paragraph. Why should we assume that rational pref
erences maximize expected utility? Savages expected utility equation is just
one of many valuation functions that could be used to combine credences and
utilities into preferences. In Chapter 7 we considered other valuation functions
endorsed by Jeffrey and by causal decision theorists. But those valuation
functions all maximized expected utilities in some sense—they worked by
calculating linear averages. An agent might instead determine her preferences
using a “squared credence” rule instead:
A> B just in case

u(A & S1) ∙ cr(S1)2 + ... + u(A & Sn) ∙ cr(Sπ)2 (8.13)
> u(B & S1) ∙ cr(S1)2 + ... + u(B & Sn) ■ cr(Sn)2
This valuation function behaves differently than the expected utility rules.
For example, if an agent has a 2/3 credence that a particular bet will pay
her $4 and a 1/3 credence that it will pay her nothing, applying the squared
credence rule will lead her to prefer a guaranteed $2 to this gamble. Expected
utility maximization, on the other hand, recommends taking the bet. Squared-
credence valuations are more risk-averse than expected utilities.
Here’s another interesting feature of the squared credence rule: Return to
our friends Mr. Prob and Mr. Bold from the introduction to this part of the
book. Mr. Prob’s credences are probabilistic, while Mr. Bold’s credence in any
proposition is the square-root of Mr. Prob’s. Mr. Bold satisfies Non-Negativity
and Normality, but not Finite Additivity. His credence in any contingent
proposition is higher than Mr. Prob’s. Now suppose that while Mr. Prob
determines his preferences by maximizing Savage-style expected utilities, Mr.
Bold’s preferences are generated using Equation (8.13). In that case, Mr. Prob
and Mr. Bold have the exact same preferences between any two acts.15 It’s
easy to see why: Mr. Bold’s credence in a given state Si is the square-root
of Mr. Prob’s, but Mr. Bold squares his credence values in the process of
calculating his valuation function. Mr. Bold’s aggressive attitude assignments

and risk-averse act selections cancel out precisely, leaving him with preferences
identical to Mr. Prob’s. This means that if Mr. Prob’s preferences satisfy the
preference axioms, Mr. Bold’s do as well.16
If all you know about an arbitrary agent is that her preferences satisfy the
preference axioms, it will be impossible to tell whether she has probabilistic
credences and maximizes expected utility, or has non-probabilistic credences
and a different valuation function. If I assure you that this agent is fully rational,
does that break the tie? Why does rationality require maximizing expected
utility—what’s rationally wrong with the way Mr. Bold proceeds?
For the (revised) Representation Theorem Argument to succeed, we need a
convincing argument that maximizing expected utility is rationally required.17
The argument cannot be that any agent who fails to maximize expected
utility will adopt intuitively unappealing preferences among acts. (This was the
strategy of our money pump argument for some of the preference axioms.) The
alternative to maximizing expected utility we’re considering here is capable of
generating all the same act preferences—intuitively appealing or otherwise—
that expected utilities can.
I said in the introduction to this part of the book that Finite Additivity is the
most difficult to establish of Kolmogorov’s axioms. The revised Representation
Theorem Argument shows that if we can assume rational agents set their
preferences by maximizing expected utility, then Finite Additivity is entailed
by the preference axioms. But now we have a Linearity In, Linearity Out
problem. We want to demonstrate that rational agents satisfy Finite Additivity,
which calculates the credence of a disjunction as a linear combination of the
credences of its mutually exclusive disjuncts. To make that demonstration,
we assume that rational agents maximize expected utility, which calculates a
valuation as a linear combination of state credences. We can criticize Mr. Bold
for being non-linear in his credences only if it’s antecedently permissible to
criticize him for making non-linear valuations.
To be clear: I have no problem with a decision theory that lists both probabil-
ism and expected-utility maximization among its rationally required norms.
We saw earlier how these norms complement each other and allow rational
choice theorists to derive interesting and substantive results. My complaint
is with expected-utility maximization as a premise in what’s meant to be an
independent argument for probabilism. Representation theorem arguments
for probabilism rely on an assumption that looks just as nonobvious and in
need of independent support as probabilism did.18
8.4 Exercises
Problem 8.1. f) Show that any real-number measurement scale with finite
upper and lower bounds can be converted by a positive affine transformation
into a scale with the bounds 0 and 1.
Problem 8.2.φ
(a) List three different real-life examples of two distinct measuring scales
that measure the same quantity and are related by a positive scalar trans
formation. (Measurements of mass cannot be one of your examples.)
(b) List three different real-life examples of two distinct measuring scales
that measure the same quantity and are related by a positive affine
transformation that is not a scalar transformation. (Measurements of
temperature cannot be one of your examples.)
Problem 8.3. to Shane is a graduate student who doesn’t care about the
outcomes of sporting events (though he has opinions about which outcomes
will occur). Assume the propositions the Heat win the NBA Finals and the
Blackhawks win the Stanley Cup are ethically neutral for Shane. Among Shanes
preferences between various acts and gambles are the following:
Go to movie
—preferred to—
Read book
—indifferent with—
Go to movie if Heat win the NBA Finals,
work on dissertation if Heat don’t win
Go to movie if Heat don’t win, dissertate if Heat win
—preferred to—
Go to gym
Read book if Heat win, dissertate if Heat don’t win
Go to movie if Blackhawks win the Stanley Cup,
dissertate if Blackhawks don’t win
—preferred to—
Dissertate
8.4 EXERCISES 305
For the sake of definiteness, suppose Shane assigns a utility of 100 to going to a
movie and a utility of 0 to working on his dissertation. Suppose also that Shanes
preferences satisfy the preference axioms, his credences satisfy the probability
axioms, and he determines his preferences by maximizing expected utilities as
prescribed by Savage.
(a) Use Ramseys four-step process to determine as much about Shanes
utility and credence values as you can. Be sure to explain your method.
(b) Imagine Shane is offered a gamble on which he reads a book if the
Blackhawks win the Stanley Cup, but dissertates if they don’t win.
Would Shane prefer to accept this gamble or go to the gym?
Problem 8.4.
(a) Suppose an agent assigns cr(P) — 1/3 and sets her preferences according
to Savage-style expected utilities. Explain how she might nevertheless
prefer a guaranteed $10 to a gamble that pays $40 on P and nothing
otherwise, if dollars have declining marginal utility for her.
(b) Now suppose the agent doesn’t have declining marginal utility for
money—-in fact, she assigns exactly 1 util per dollar gained or lost, no
matter how many she already has. Show that such an agent could still
prefer a guaranteed $10 to a gamble that pays $40 on P and nothing
otherwise, if she assigns preferences using the “squared credences”
valuation function of Equation (8.13).
Problem 8.5. Suppose I’ve been cross-examining an agent for some

time about her preferences, and all the preferences I’ve elicited satisfy
the preference axioms. Mr. Prob comes along and calculates a utility
distribution and probabilistic credence distribution that would generate
the elicited preferences if the agent is an expected-utility maximizer.
Mr. Bold then claims that Mr. Prob is wrong about the agent’s credence
values—according to Mr. Bold, the agent’s nonextreme credences are actually
the square-root of what Mr. Prob has suggested, but the agent is a squared-
credence maximizer.
Do you think there’s any way to tell if Mr. Prob or Mr. Bold is correct about
the agent’s credence values? Could there even be a fact of the matter to the
effect that one of them is right and the other is wrong?
8.5 Further reading
Richard C. Jeffrey (1965). The Logic of Decision. 1st edition. McGraw-Hill

Series in Probability and Statistics. New York: McGraw-Hill
Chapter 3 carefully explains techniques for drawing out credences and utilities
from preferences, including a step-by-step walkthrough of Ramseys approach
with examples.
Classic Texts
Frank P. Ramsey (1931). Truth and Probability. In: The Foundations of

Mathematics and Other Logic Essays. Ed. by R. B. Braithwaite. New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Company, pp. 156-98
Ramsey inspired all future representation theorems with his four-step process
for determining an agents credences and utilities from her preferences.
Leonard J. Savage (1954). The Foundations of Statistics. New York: Wiley
Though the proof is spread out over the course of the book, this work contains
the first general representation theorem.
Extended Discussion
Patrick Maher (1993). Betting on Theories. Cambridge Studies in Probability,

Induction, and Decision Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Mark Kaplan (1996). Decision Theory as Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press
David Christensen (2004). Putting Logic in its Place. Oxford: Oxford Uni
versity Press
Each of these authors explains and defends some version of a representation

theorem argument for rational constraints on degrees of belief: Maher in his
Chapter 8, Kaplan in his Chapter 1, and Christensen in his Chapter 5.
NOTES 307
Lyle Zynda (2000). Representation Theorems and Realism about Degrees of

Belief. Philosophy of Science 67, pp. 45-69
Demonstrates that rational preferences representable as maximizing expected

utilities based on probabilistic credences can also be represented as maximiz
ing some other quantity based on non-probabilistic credences, then explores
the consequences for realism about probabilistic credence.
Christopher J.G. Meacham and Jonathan Weisberg (2011). Representation

Theorems and the Foundations of Decision Theory. Australasian Journal
of Philosophy 89, pp. 641-63
A critical examination of representation theorem arguments, assessing their

potential to establish both descriptive and normative claims about degrees of
belief.
Notes
1. As in Chapter 7, we will read “A” as the proposition that the agent performs a partic
ular act and uSiy, as the proposition that a particular state obtains. Thus preferences,
credences, and utilities will all be propositional attitudes.
2. Alan Hajek was the first person to explain to me the significance of Ramseys result by
comparing it with these other results as in Figure 8.1.
3. To be slightly more careful about Equation (8.4): Standard expected utility theories
(such as Savages) entail a principle for utilities similar to the Conglomerability principle
for credences we saw in Section 5.4—for any X and P, u(X & P) and u(X & ~P) set the
bounds for u(X). If u(X & P) = u(X & ~P), u(X) must equal this value as well.
4. Ramsey points out that this approach will not work for propositions Q with extreme
unconditional credences. But those can be ferreted out easily: for instance, if the agent
is certain of Q then she will be indifferent between receiving D for certain and a gamble
that yields D on Q and M on ~Q.
Also, we have to be sure in Step 4 that we’ve selected Q, R, S, T such that u(T) ≠ u(S &
~Q)≠u(R⅛Q).
5. Maher (1993, Chs 2 and 3) provides an excellent general defense of the preference
axioms as rational requirements.
6. As I pointed out in Chapter 7, Preference Completeness actually has some substantive
consequences when considered on its own. For example, it entails Preference Asym
metry. But decision theorists often think of these principles in the following order: If
we first take on substantive constraints such as Preference Asymmetry and Transitivity,
then adding Preference Completeness is just a matter of requiring preference rankings
to be complete.
7. See Fishburn (1981) for a useful survey. One popular move is to replace the requirement
that an agent’s preference ranking actually satisfy a particular richness constraint with
a requirement that the ranking be extendable into a fuller ranking satisfying that
constraint. For more on this move of constraining incomplete rankings by asking
whether they can be extended to complete rankings with particular features—and the
justification for it—see Section 14.1.3.
8. The Hypothetical Priors Theorem presented in Section 4.3.3 may be thought of as a
representation theorem of sorts. It says that any agent whose credence distributions
over time satisfy the core Bayesian norms can be represented as if those distributions
are all generated by conditionalizing an underlying hypothetical prior. The full details
of that hypothetical prior are usually underspecified by the agent’s history of credence
assignments, but it doesn’t matter because all the hypothetical priors suited to the
job will make the same predictions about her future responses to possible evidence
streams. The family of hypothetical priors matching an agent’s sequence of credence
distributions is rather like the family of utility distributions matching her preferences.
9. In every case where a result about rational preferences is obtained by assuming those
preferences align with numerical utilities and probabilistic credences, the same result
could have been derived directly from the preference axioms and the subject’s given
preferences, without invoking utilities and credences at all. Yet the “direct” derivation
may be extended and difficult, while the utility-maximization representation saves a
great deal of work.
10. Of course, if one holds the position (mentioned in Section 1.1.2) that all requirements
of theoretical rationality ultimately boil down to requirements of practical rationality,
this objection may not be a concern.
11. Historically, it’s interesting to consider exactly what philosophy of mind Ramsey was
working with. On the one hand, he was surrounded by a very positivist, behaviorist
milieu. (Among other things, Ramsey was Wittgenstein’s supervisor at Cambridge and
produced the first English translation of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.) On the other
hand, Ramsey’s writings contain suggestions of an early functionalism. Brian Skyrms
writes that, “Ramsey thinks of personal probabilities as theoretical parts of an imperfect
but useful psychological model, rather than as concepts given a strict but operational
definition” (1980b, p. 115).
12. That’s not to say that the links between credence and rational preference become useless
once operationalism about doxastic attitudes is abandoned. Savage (1954, pp. 27-8) has
a nice discussion of the advantages of determining an agent’s numerical credence values
by observing her preferences over determining them by asking her to introspect.
13. This concern is forcefully put by Meacham and Weisberg (2011).
14. This revised theorem was proven for a relevant set of preference axioms by myself and
Lara Buchak. For a sketch of the proof, see the appendix to Titelbaum (2019). The result
is a fairly straightforward extension of proofs used in standard Dutch Book arguments
for probabilism.
15. The idea of mimicking a probabilistic agent’s preference structure by giving a non-
probabilistic agent a non-standard valuation function comes from Zynda (2000) (with
a precursor in Arrow 1951).
NOTES 309
16. One might have thought that I dismissed our original Representation Theorem Argu
ment for Probabilism too quickly, for the following reason: Even if we’re not opera
tio nalists about degrees of belief, we might think that if probabilistic degrees of belief
figure in the simplest, most useful explanation of observed rational agent preferences
then that’s a good reason to maintain that rational agents possess them. In this vein,
Patrick Maher writes:
I suggest that we understand attributions of probability and utility as
essentially a device for interpreting a person’s preferences. On this
view, an attribution of probabilities and utilities is correct just in
case it is part of an overall interpretation of the person’s preferences
that makes sufficiently good sense of them and better sense than
any competing interpretation does.... If a person’s preferences all
maximize expected utility relative to some cr and u, then it provides
a perfect interpretation of the person’s preferences to say that cr
and u are the person’s probability and utility functions. Thus, having
preferences that all maximize expected utility relative to cr and u is
a sufficient (but not necessary) condition for cr and u to be one’s
probability and utility functions. (1993, p. 9)
Suppose we accept Maher’s criterion for correct attitude attribution. The trouble is
that even if the interpretation of a rational agent’s preferences based on probabilistic
credences and maximizing expected utilities is a perfect one, the alternate interpretation
based on Bold-style credences and the squared credence valuation function looks just
as perfect as well. Thus the probabilist interpretation fails to make better sense than
competing interpretations, and a representation theorem argument for probabilism
cannot go through.
17. Notice that in our earlier quote from Ramsey (1931, p. 76), Ramsey simply introduces
“as a law of psychology” that agents maximize expected utility.
18. In Section 7.1 we suggested that the law of large numbers provides one reason to use
expectations in estimating values. The idea is that one’s expectation of a numerical
quantity equals the average value one anticipates that quantity will approach in the limit.
Why doesn’t this provide an argument for making decisions on the basis of expected
utilities?
One might worry here that using the long-run average smuggles in a linear bias. But
there’s an even deeper problem with the proposed argument: The law of large numbers
says that if you satisfy the probability axioms, then you’ll have credence 1 that the
average in the limit equals your expectation. A result that assumes probabilism cannot
be used to support maximizing expected utility if we hope to use the latter as part of
our argument for probabilism.
Dutch Book Arguments
Chapter 8 presented the Representation Theorem Argument for probabilism.

In its best form, this argument shows that any agent who satisfies certain
preference axioms and maximizes expected utility assigns credences satisfy
ing Kolmogorovs probability rules.1 Contraposing, an agent who maximizes
expected utility but fails to assign probabilistic credences will violate at least
one of the preference axioms.
But why should rationality require satisfying the preference axioms? In
Chapter 7 we argued that an agent who violates certain of the preference
axioms (such as Preference Asymmetry or Preference Transitivity) will be sus
ceptible to a money pump: a series of decisions, each of which is recommended
by the agents preferences, but which together leave her back where she started
with less money on her hands. It looks irrational to leave yourself open to such
an arrangement, and therefore irrational to violate the preference axioms.
While money pumps may be convincing, it’s an awfully long and compli
cated road from them to probabilism. This chapter assesses a set of arguments
that are similar to money pump arguments, but which constrain credences in
a much more direct fashion. These arguments show that if an agents credences
violate particular constraints, we can construct a Dutch Book against her: a set
of bets, each of which the agent views as fair, but which together guarantee
that she will lose money come what may. Dutch Books can be constructed not
only against agents whose credences violate Kolmogorovs probability axioms,
but also against agents whose credences violate the Ratio Formula, updating
by Conditionalization, or some of the other credal constraints we considered
in Chapter 5.
Historically, Dutch Book Arguments were a very important motivation
for probabilism. de Finetti (1937/1964) called Dutch-Bookable credence dis
tributions “incoherent”, and thought them rationally inconsistent.2 When a
Bayesian proposed a new constraint on credences, she would often vindicate
that new requirement by showing that agents who violated it were susceptible
to a Dutch Book.
In this chapter we will work through a variety of Bayesian norms, showing
how to construct Dutch Books against agents who violate each one. We will

9∙1 DUTCH BOOKS 311
then ask whether the fact that a Dutch Book can be constructed against agents
who violate a particular norm can be turned into an argument that that norm is
rationally required. After offering the most plausible version of a Dutch Book
Argument we can find, we will canvass a number of traditional objections to
that argument.
9.1 Dutch Books
Dutch Book Arguments revolve around agents’ betting behavior, so we’ll begin
by discussing how an agent’s credences influence the bets she’ll accept. For
simplicity’s sake we will assume throughout this chapter that an agent assigns
each dollar the same amount of utility (no matter how many dollars she already
has). That way we can express bets in dollar terms instead of worrying about
the logistics of paying off a bet in utils.
Suppose I offer to sell you the following ticket:

to $1 if P is true,
for some particular proposition P. If you’re rational, what is your fair price for
that ticket—how much would you be willing to pay to possess it? It depends
how confident you are that P is true. If you think P is a long shot, then you
think this ticket is unlikely to be worth anything, so you won’t pay much for it.
The more confident you are in P, however, the more you’ll pay for the ticket.
For example, if P is the proposition that a fair coin flip comes up heads, you
might be willing to pay anything up to $0.50 for the ticket. If you pay exactly
$0.50 for the ticket, then you’ve effectively made a bet on which you net $0.50
if P is true (coin comes up heads) but lose $0.50 if P is false (coin comes up
tails). Seems like a fair bet.
A ticket that pays off on P is worth more to a rational agent the more
confident she is of P. In fact, we typically assume that a rational agent’s fair
betting price for a $1 ticket on P is $cr(P)—she will purchase a ticket that pays
$1 on P for any amount up to cr(P) dollars.
For example, suppose neither you nor I know anything about the day of the
week on which Frank Sinatra was born. Nevertheless, I offer to sell you the
following ticket:
312 DUTCH BOOK ARGUMENTS

to $1 if Sinatra was born on a weekend,
If you spread your credences equally among the days of the week, then $2/7—
or about $0.29—is your fair betting price for this ticket. To buy the ticket at that
price is to place a particular kind of bet that the selected day fell on a weekend.
If you lose the bet, you’re out the $0.29 you paid for the ticket. If you win the
bet, it cost you $0.29 to buy a ticket which is now worth $1, so you’re up $0.71.
Why do you demand such a premium—why do you insist on a higher potential
payout for this bet than the amount of your potential loss? Because you think
you’re more likely to lose than win, so you’ll only make the bet if the (unlikely)
payout is greater than the (probable) loss.
Now look at the same transaction from my point of view—the point of view
of someone who’s selling the ticket, and will be on the hook for $1 if Sinatra
was born on a weekend. You spread your credences equally among the days,
and are willing to buy the ticket for up to $0.29. If I spread my credences in
a similar fashion, I should be willing to sell you this ticket for at least $0.29.
On the one hand, Γm handing out a ticket that may entitle you to $1 from me
once we find out about Sinatra’s birthday. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s
very likely that I’ll have to pay out, so Γm willing to accept as little as $0.29 in
exchange for selling you the ticket. In general, an agent’s fair betting price for
a gambling ticket is both the maximum amount she would pay for that ticket
and the minimum amount for which she would sell it.
All the tickets we’ve considered so far pay out $ 1 if a particular proposition is
true. Yet tickets can be bought or sold for other potential payoffs. We generally
assume that the rational fair betting price for a ticket that pays $S if P is true
and nothing otherwise is $S ∙ cr(P).3 (You might think of this as the fair betting
price for S tickets, each of which pays $1 on P.) This formula works both for
run-of-the-mill betting cases and for cases in which the agent has extreme
opinions. For instance, consider an agent’s betting behavior when her credence
in P is 0. Our formula sets her fair betting price at $0, whatever the stakes S.
Since the agent doesn’t think the ticket has any chance of paying off, she will
not pay any amount of money to possess it. On the other hand, she will be
willing to sell such a ticket for any amount you like, since she doesn’t think
she’s incurring any liability in doing so.
Bayesians (and bookies) often quote bets using odds instead of fair betting
prices. For instance, a bet that Sinatra was born on a weekend would typically
go off at 5 to 2 odds. This means that the ratio of your potential net payout to
9-1 DUTCH BOOKS 313
your potential net loss is 5:2 (0.71 : 0.29). A rational agent will accept a bet
on P at her odds against P (that is, cr(~P) : cr(P)) or better. Yet despite the
ubiquity of odds talk in professional gambling, we will use fair betting prices
going forward.
9.1.1 Dutch Books for probabilism
Suppose we have an agent who violates the probability axioms by assigning

bothcr(P) = 0.7andcr(~P) = 0.7 for some particular proposition?. (Perhaps
he’s a character like Mr. Bold.) Given his credence in P, this agents fair betting
price for a ticket that pays $1 if P is true will be $0.70. Given his credence in
~P, his fair betting price for a ticket that pays $1 if ~P is true will also be $0.70.
So let’s sell him both of these tickets, at $0.70 each.
Our agent is now in trouble. He has paid a total of $1.40 for the two tickets,
and there’s no way he can make all that money back. If P is true, his first ticket
is worth $1 but his second ticket is worth nothing. If P is false, his first ticket is
worth nothing and his second ticket pays only $ 1. Either way, he’ll be out $0.40.
We can summarize this agent’s situation with the following table:
P ~P
Ticket pays on P 0.30 -0.70
Ticket pays on ~P -0.70 0.30
TOTAL -0.40 -0.40
The columns of this table partition the possible states of the world. In this
case, our partition contains the propositions P and ~P. The agent purchases
two tickets; each ticket is recorded on one row. The entries in the cells report
the agent’s net payout for that ticket in that state; all values are in dollars, and
negative numbers indicate a loss. So, for instance, the upper-right cell reports
that if ~P is true then the agent loses $0.70 on his P ticket (the ticket cost him
$0.70, and doesn’t win him anything in that state). The upper-left cell records
that the P ticket cost the agent $0.70, but he makes $1 on it if P is true, for
a net profit of $0.30. The final row reports the agent’s total payout for all his
tickets in a given state of the world. As we can see, an agent who purchases
both tickets will lose $0.40 no matter which state the world is in. Purchasing
this set of tickets guarantees him a net loss.
A Dutch Book is a set of bets, each placed with an agent at her fair betting
price (or better), that together guarantee her a sure loss come what may.4 The
idea of a Dutch Book is much like that of a money pump (Section 7.2.1): we
make a series of exchanges with the agent, each of which individually looks fair
(or favorable) from her point of view, but which together yield an undesirable
outcome. In a Dutch Book, each bet is placed at a price the agent considers
fair given her credence in the proposition in question, but when all the bets
are added up she’s guaranteed to lose money no matter which possible world
is actual.
Ramsey (1931, p. 84) recognized a key point about Dutch Books, which was
proven by de Finetti (1937/1964):
Dutch Book Theorem: If an agent’s credence distribution violates at least

one of the probability axioms (Non-Negativity, Normality, or Finite
Additivity), then a Dutch Book can be constructed against her.
We will prove this theorem by going through each of the axioms one at
a time, and showing how to make a Dutch Book against an agent who
violates it.
Non-Negativity and Normality are relatively easy. An agent who violates
Non-Negativity will set a negative betting price for a ticket that pays $1 on
some proposition P. Since the agent assigns a negative betting price to that
ticket, she is willing to sell it at a negative price. In other words, this agent is
willing to pay you some amount of money to take a ticket which, if P is true,
entitles you to a further $ 1 from her beyond what she paid you to take it. Clearly
this is a losing proposition for the agent.
Next, suppose an agent violates Normality by assigning credence greater
than 1 to a tautology. Say, for instance, an agent assigns cr(P V ~P) = 1.4. This
agent will pay $1.40 for a ticket that pays $1 if P V ~P is true. The agent will
definitely win that $1, but will still have lost money overall. On the other hand,
if an agent assigns a credence less than 1 to a tautology, she will sell for less
than $1 a ticket that pays $1 if the tautology is true. The tautology will be true
in every possible world, so in every world the agent will lose money on this
bet.
Now let’s turn to Finite Additivity. Suppose that for mutually exclusive P and
Q, an agent violates Finite Additivity by assigning cr(P) = 0.5, cr(Q) = 0.5, and
cr(P V Q) = 0.8. Because of these credences, the agent is willing to pay $0.50
for a ticket that pays $1 on P, and $0.50 for a ticket that pays $1 on Q. Then we
have her sell us for $0.80 a ticket that pays $1 if P V Q.
At this point, the agent has collected $0.80 from us and paid a total of $1
for the two tickets she bought. So she’s down $0.20. Can she hope to make this
money back? Well, the tickets she’s holding will be worth $1 if either P or Q
is true. She can’t win on both tickets, because P and Q were stipulated to be
mutually exclusive. So at most, the agent’s tickets are going to earn her $1. But
if either P or Q is true, P V Q will be true as well, so she will have to pay out
$1 on the ticket she sold to us. The moment she earns $1, she’ll have to pay it
back out. There’s no way for the agent to make her money back, so no matter
what happens she’ll be out a net $0.20.
The situation is summed up in this table:
P&-Q -P&Q ~P&~Q

Ticket pays on P 0.50 -0.50 -0.50
Ticket pays on Q -0.50 0.50 -0.50
Ticket pays on P V Q -0.20 -0.20 0.80
TOTAL -0.20 -0.20 -0.20
Since P and Q are mutually exclusive, there is no possible world in which P& Q
is true, so our partition has only three members. On the first row, the P-ticket
for which the agent paid $0.50 nets her a positive $0.50 in the state where P
is true. Similarly for Q on the second row. The third row represents a ticket
the agent sold, so she makes $0.80 on it unless P V Q is true, in which case
she suffers a net loss. The final row sums the rows above it to show that each
possible state guarantees the agent a $0.20 loss from her bets. A similar Book
can be constructed for any agent who assigns cr(P V Q) < cr(P) + cr(Q). For
a Book against agents who violate Finite Additivity by assigning cr(P V Q) >
cr(P) + cr(Q), see Exercise 9.1.
9.1.2 Further Dutch Books
We can also construct Dutch Books against agents who violate other credence
requirements. For example, suppose an agent has the probabilistic uncondi
tional credence distribution specified by the following probability table:
P Q cr
τ T 1/4
τ F 1/4
F T 1/4
F F 1/4
But now suppose that this agent violates the Ratio Formula by assigning
cr(P ∣ Q) = 0.6. To construct a Dutch Book against this agent, we first need
to understand conditional bets. Suppose we sell this agent the following ticket:
If Q is true, this ticket entitles the bearer

to $1 if P is true and nothing otherwise.
If Q is false, this ticket may be returned to
the seller for a full refund of its purchase price.
If Q turns out to be false, the agents full purchase price for this ticket will be
refunded to her. So if Q is false, it doesn’t matter what she pays; the ticket will
net her $0 no matter what. That means the agents purchase price for this ticket
should be dictated by her opinion of P in worlds where Q is true. In other
words, the agents purchase price for this ticket should be driven by cr(P ∣ Q).
We say that this ticket creates a conditional bet on P given Q. A conditional
bet on P given Q wins or loses money for the agent only if Q is true; if the payoff
on P (given Q) is $1, the agents fair betting price for such a bet is cr(P ∣ Q). In
general, conditional bets are priced using conditional credences.
Our agent who assigns cr(P ∣ Q) = 0.6 will purchase the ticket above for
$0.60. We then have her sell us two more tickets:
1. We pay the agent $0.25 for a ticket that pays us $1 if P & Q.

2. We pay the agent $0.30 for a ticket that pays us $0.60 if —Q.
Notice that Ticket 2 is for stakes other than $1; we’ve calculated the agent’s fair
betting price for this ticket ($0.30) by multiplying her credence in —Q (1/2) by
the ticket’s payoff ($0.60).
The agent has received $0.55 from us, but she’s also paid out $0.60 for the
conditional ticket. So she’s down $0.05. If Q is false, she’ll get a refund of $0.60
for the conditional ticket, but she’ll also owe us $0.60 on Ticket 2. If Q is true
and P is true, she gets $ 1 from the conditional ticket but owes us $ 1 on Ticket 1.
And if Q is true and P is false, she neither pays nor collects on any of the tickets
and so is still out $0.05. No matter what, the agent loses $0.05. The following
table summarizes the situation:
P&Q -P&Q ~Q
Ticket 1 -0.75 0.25 0.25
Ticket 2 0.30 0.30 -0.30
Conditional ticket 0.40 -0.60 0
TOTAL -0.05 -0.05 -0.05
A similar Dutch Book can be constructed against any agent who violates the
Ratio Formula.
David Lewis figured out how to turn this Dutch Book against Ratio Formula
violators into a strategy against anyone who fails to update by Conditionali-
zation.5 Suppose we have an agent who assigns the unconditional credence
distribution described above at ti, satisfies the Ratio Formula, but will assign
crj∙(P) = 0.6 if she learns Q between ti and ty∙. Since she satisfies the Ratio
Formula, this agent assigns cri(P ∣ Q) = 0.5. That means the cr7(P) value she
will assign upon learning Q does not equal her crf(P ∣ Q) value, leaving her in
violation of Conditionalization.
We take advantage of this agents Conditionalization violation by first
purchasing the Tickets 1 and 2 described above from her at ti. The prices on
these tickets match the agents unconditional ti credences, so she will be willing
at ti to sell them at the prices listed. We then implement the following strategy:
If the agent learns Q between ti and t7∙, we sell her a ticket at t7∙ that pays $1 on
P. We know that this agent will assign cry∙(P) = 0.6 if she learns Q, so in that
circumstance she’ll be willing to buy this ticket for $0.60. If the agent doesn’t
learn Q between ti and tj, we make no transactions with her beyond Tickets
1 and 2.6
Putting all this together, the agent’s payoffs once more are:
P&Q -P&Q ~Q
Ticket 1 -0.75 0.25 0.25
Ticket 2 0.30 0.30 -0.30
Ticket if Q learned 0.40 -0.60 0
TOTAL -0.05 -0.05 -0.05
(Because the agent purchases the third ticket only if Q is true, it neither costs
nor pays her anything if Q is false.)
This agent received $0.55 from us for selling two tickets at ti. If Q is false, no
more tickets come into play, but she owes us $0.60 on Ticket 2, so she’s out a
total of $0.05. If Q is true, she purchases the third ticket, and so is out $0.05. If
P is also true, she wins $1 on that third ticket but has to pay us $1 on Ticket 1,
so she’s still down $0.05. If P is false (while Q is true), none of the tickets pays,
and her net loss remains at $0.05. No matter what, the agent loses money over
the course of ti to tj.
A quick terminological remark: A Dutch Book is a specific set of bets
guaranteed to generate a loss. Strictly speaking, we haven’t just built a Dutch
Book against Conditionalization violators, because we haven’t described a
single set of bets that can be placed against the agent to guarantee a sure loss in
every case. Instead, we’ve specified two sets of bets, one to be placed if the agent
learns Q and the other to be placed if not. (The former set contains three bets,
while the latter contains two.) We’ve given the bookie a strategy for placing
different sets of bets in different circumstances, such that each potential set of
bets is guaranteed to generate a loss in the circumstances in which it’s placed.
For this reason, Lewis’s argument supporting Conditionalization is usually
known as a Dutch Strategy argument rather than a Dutch Book argument.7
Dutch Books or Strategies have been constructed to punish violators of
many of the additional Bayesian constraints we considered in Chapter 5: the
Principal Principle (Howson 1992), the Reflection Principle (van Fraassen
1984), Regularity (Kemeny 1955; Shimony 1955), Countable Additivity
(Adams 1962), and Jeffrey Conditionalization (Armendt 1980; Skyrms 1987b).
I will not work through the details here. Instead, we will consider the normative
consequences of these Dutch constructions.
9.2 The Dutch Book Argument
A Dutch Book is a set of bets, not an argument—and neither is the Dutch Book
Theorem on its own. But once we know that a Dutch Book can be constructed
for a particular kind of situation, we can use that fact to argue for a norm. For
example, there’s the
Dutch Book Argument for Probabilism
(Premise) No Dutch Book can be constructed against a rational agent.

(Theorem) If an agent’s credence distribution violates at least one of the
probability axioms, then a Dutch Book can be constructed
against her.
(Conclusion) Every rational agent has a probabilistic credence distribution.
The key premise is that no rational agent is susceptible to being Dutch

Booked; just as rational preferences help one avoid money pumps, so should
rational credences save us from Dutch Books. Once we have this premise,
similar Dutch Book Arguments can be constructed for the Ratio Formula,
Conditionalization, and all the other norms mentioned in the previous section.
But is the premise plausible? What if it turns out that a Dutch Book can
be constructed against any agent, no matter what rules her credences do or
9∙2 THE DUTCH BOOK ARGUMENT 319
don’t satisfy? In other words, imagine that Dutch Books were just a ram
pant, unavoidable fact of life. That would render the Dutch Book Argument s
premise false.
To reassure ourselves that we don’t live in this dystopian Book-plagued
world, we need a series of what Hajek (2009a) calls Converse Dutch Book
Theorems. The usual Dutch Book Theorem tells us that if an agent violates
the probability axioms, she is susceptible to a Dutch Book. A Converse Dutch
Book Theorem would tell us that if an agent satisfies the probability axioms, she
is not susceptible to a Dutch Book. If we had a Converse Dutch Book Theorem,
then we wouldn’t need to worry that whatever credences we assigned, we could
be Dutch Booked. The Converse Dutch Book Theorem would guarantee us
safety from Dutch bookies as long as we maintained probabilistic credences;
together with the standard Dutch Book Theorem, the Converse Theorem
would constitute a powerful consideration in favor of assigning probabilistic
over non-probabilistic credence distributions.
Unfortunately we can’t get a Converse Dutch Book Theorem of quite the
kind I just described. Satisfying the probability axioms with her uncondi
tional credences does not suffice to innoculate an agent against Dutch Books.
An agent whose unconditional credence distribution satisfies the probability
axioms might still violate the Ratio Formula with her conditional credences,
and as we’ve seen this would leave her open to Book. So it can’t be a theorem
that no agent with probabilistic credences can ever be Dutch Booked (because
that isn’t true!). Instead, our Converse Dutch Book Theorem has to say that
as long as an agent’s credences satisfy the probability axioms, she can’t be
Dutch Booked with the kind of Book we deployed against agents who violate
the axioms. For instance, if an agent satisfies Non-Negativity, there won’t
be any propositions to which she assigns a negative credence, so we won’t
be able to construct a Book against her that requires selling a ticket at a
negative fair betting price (as we did against the Non-Negativity violator).
Lehman (1955) and Kemeny (1955) each independently proved that if an
agent’s credences satisfy the probability axioms, she isn’t susceptible to Books
of the sort we considered in Section 9.1.1.8 This clears the way for the Dutch
Book Argument’s premise to be at least plausible.
Converse Dutch Book Theorems can also help us beat back another chal
lenge to Dutch Book Arguments. Hajek (2009a) defines a Czech Book as a
set of bets, each placed with an agent at her fair betting price (or better),
that together guarantee her a sure gain come what may. It’s easy to see that
whenever one can construct a Dutch Book against an agent, one can also
construct a Czech Book. We simply take each ticket contained in the Dutch
Book, leave its fair betting price intact, but have the agent sell it rather than
buy it (or vice versa). In the betting tables associated with each Book, this will
flip all the negative payouts to positive and positive payouts to negative. So the
total payouts on the bottom row of each column in the table will be positive,
and the agent will profit come what may.
According to the Dutch Book Theorem, a Dutch Book can be constructed
against any agent who violates a probability axiom. We now know that when
ever a Dutch Book can be constructed, a Czech Book can be as well. This gives
us the
Czech Book Theorem: If an agent’s credence distribution violates at least one

of the probability axioms, then a Czech Book can be constructed in
her favor.
Violating the probability axioms leaves an agent susceptible to Dutch Books,

which seems to be a disadvantage. But violating the probability axioms also
opens up the possibility that an agent will realize Czech Books, which seems
to be an advantage. Perhaps a rational agent would leave herself susceptible to
Dutch Books in order to be ready for Czech Books, in which case the premise of
our argument fails once more. In general, Hajek worries that any argument for
probabilism based on Dutch Books will be canceled by Czech Books, leaving
the Dutch Book Theorem normatively inert.
At this point, converse theorems become significant. A Converse Dutch
Book Theorem says that satisfying the probability axioms protects an agent
from the disadvantage of susceptibility to particular kinds of Dutch Book. But
there is no Converse Czech Book Theorem—it’s just not true that any agent
who satisfies the probability axioms must forgo Czech Books. That’s because
a rational agent will purchase betting tickets at anything up to her fair betting
price (and sell at anything at least that number). For instance, an agent who
satisfies the axioms will assign credence 1 to any tautology and so set $1 as
her fair betting price for a ticket that pays $1 if some tautology is true. But if
we offer her that ticket for, say, $0.50 instead, she will be perfectly happy to
take it off our hands. Since the ticket pays off in every possible world, the agent
will make a profit come what may. So here we have a Czech Book available to
agents who satisfy the probability axioms.
Non-probabilistic agents are susceptible to certain kinds of Dutch Books,
while probabilistic agents are not. Non-probabilistic agents can take advantage
of Czech Books, but probabilistic agents can too. The advantage goes to
probabilism.
9.2.1 Dutch Books depragmatized
Recent authors have reformulated the Dutch Book Argument in response

to two objections. First, like the Representation Theorem Argument of
Chapter 8, the Dutch Book Argument seems to move from a practical
premise to a theoretical conclusion. The argument establishes that an agent
with non-probabilistic credences may behave in ways that are practically
disadvantageous—buying and selling gambling tickets that together guarantee
a loss. But this shows only that it’s practically irrational to assign credences
violating the probability axioms. (As with the Representation Theorem
Argument, it feels like the word “practically” should be inserted before the
word “rational” in both the Dutch Book Arguments premise and conclusion.)
We wanted to establish the axioms as requirements of theoretical rationality
(see Chapter 1), and the argument seems unable to do that.
The distinction between requirements of practical and theoretical rational
ity might disappear if one understood doxastic attitudes purely in terms of
their effects on action, de Finetti, for example, explored a position that defines
an agents credences in terms of her betting behavior:
Let us suppose that an individual is obliged to evaluate the ratep at which he

would be ready to exchange the possession of an arbitrary sum S (positive or
negative) dependent on the occurrence of a given event E, for the possession
of the sum pS; we will say by definition that this number p is the measure of
the degree of probability attributed by the individual considered to the event
E, or, more simply, that p is the probability of E (according to the individual
considered). (1937/1964, pp. 101-2)
As we discussed in Chapter 8, this kind of behaviorism about mental states is

fairly unpopular these days. And even if we take this definitional approach, a
second objection to the Dutch Book Argument remains: As a practical matter,
susceptibility to Book doesn’t seem that significant. Few of us are surrounded
by bookies ready to press gambles on us should we violate the probability
axioms. If the Dutch Book Argument is supposed to talk us into probabilistic
credences on the grounds that failing to be probabilistic will lead to bad practi
cal consequences, those practical consequences had better be a realistic threat.
This second objection is a bit unfair as it stands. As Julia Staffel writes:
Dutch book arguments start from the idea that one central function of our
credences is guiding our actions. Using bets as stand-ins for actions more
generally, they are supposed to demonstrate that probabilistic credences are

suitable for guiding action, whereas incoherent credences are not.... Dutch
book arguments show us that coherent thinkers avoid guaranteed betting
losses, hence, given that we understand bets as stand-ins for actions more
generally, coherent credences are suitable for guiding our actions.
(2019, pp. 57-8)
The idea is that Dutch Books aren’t the only kind of practical trouble into which
non-probabilistic credences might lead an agent; they’re just a particularly
straightforward and vivid example. While none of us may ever face a Dutch
bookie, and some of us may avoiding betting entirely, there are nevertheless a
variety of practical situations in which non-probabilistic credences will drive
us to make sub-optimal decisions.
Still, if the concern behind Dutch Books is a practical one, shouldn’t we
investigate how often such situations really arise, and how much our non-
probabilistic credences are liable to cost us? Maybe it’s not worth the trouble
to correct our degrees of belief...
To avoid these sorts of objections (and others we’ll see later), recent authors
have recast the Dutch Book Argument as establishing a requirement of the
oretical rationality. They suggest that despite the Dutch Book’s pragmatic
appearance, the bookie and his Books are merely a device for dramatizing an
underlying doxastic inconsistency. These authors take their inspiration from
the original passage in which Ramsey mentioned Dutch Books:
These are the laws of probability, which we have proved to be necessarily

true of any consistent set of degrees of belief.... If anyone’s mental condition
violated these laws, his choice would depend on the precise form in which
the options were offered him, which would be absurd. He could have a book
made against him by a cunning better and would then stand to lose in any
event. (1931, p. 84)
Interpreting this passage, Skyrms writes that “for Ramsey, the cunning bettor
is a dramatic device and the possibility of a dutch book a striking symptom
of a deeper incoherence” (1987a, p. 227). Since the bookie is only a device for
revealing this deeper incoherence, it doesn’t matter whether we are actually
surrounded by bookies or not. (The fact that a child’s current medical condi
tion would lead her to break 100oF on a thermometer indicates an underlying
problem, whether or not any thermometers are around.) As Brad Armendt
puts it:
We should resist the temptation to think that a Dutch book argument

demonstrates that the violations (violations of probability, for the synchronic
argument) are bound to lead to dire outcomes for the unfortunate agent. The
problem is not that violators are bound to suffer, it is that their action-guiding
beliefs exhibit an inconsistency. That inconsistency can be vividly depicted
by imagining the betting scenario, and what would befall the violators were
they in it. The idea is that the irrationality lies in the inconsistency, when it is
present; the inconsistency is portrayed in a dramatic fashion when it is linked
to the willing acceptance of certain loss. The value of the drama lies not in the
likelihood of its being enacted, but in the fact that it is made possible by the
agent’s own beliefs, rather than a harsh, brutal world. (1992, p. 218)
To argue that Dutch Book vulnerability reveals a deeper rational inconsistency,

we start by relating credences to betting behavior in a more nuanced manner
than de Finetti’s. Howson and Urbach (2006), for instance, say that an agent
who assigns credence cr(P) to proposition P won’t necessarily purchase a $1
ticket on P at price $cr(P), but will regard such a purchase as fair. (This ties
the doxastic attitude of credence to another attitude—regarding as fair—rather
than tying credences directly to behavior.) The Dutch Book Theorem then tells
us that an agent with nonprobabilistic credences will regard each of a set of
bets as fair that together guarantee a sure loss. Since such a set of bets is clearly
unfair, a nonprobabilistic agent’s degrees of belief are theoretically inconsistent
because they regard as fair something that is guaranteed not to be.
Christensen (2004, Ch. 5) attenuates the connection between credences
and betting rates even further. As a purely descriptive matter, an agent with
particular degrees of belief may or may not regard any particular betting
arrangement as fair (perhaps she makes a calculation error; perhaps she
doesn’t have any views about betting arrangements; etc.). Nevertheless, Chris
tensen argues for a normative link between credences and fair betting prices. If
an agent assigns a particular degree of belief to P, that degree of belief sanctions
as fair purchasing a ticket for $cr(P) that pays $1 on P; it justifies the agent’s
evaluating such a purchase as fair; and it makes it rational for the agent to
purchase such a ticket at (up to) that price.
Christensen then argues to probabilism from three premises:9
Depragmatized Dutch Book Argument for Probabilism
(Premise) An agent’s degrees of belief sanction as fair monetary bets at

odds matching her degrees of belief. (Christensen calls this
premise “Sanctioning”.)
(Premise) A set of bets that is logically guaranteed to leave an agent mon

etarily worse off is rationally defective. (“Bet Defectiveness”)
(Premise) If an agents beliefs sanction as fair each of a set of bets, and
that set of bets is rationally defective, then the agent’s beliefs are
rationally defective. (“Belief Defectiveness”)
(Theorem) If an agents degrees ofbeliefviolate the probability axioms, there
exists a set of bets at odds matching her degrees of belief that is
logically guaranteed to leave her monetarily worse off.
(Conclusion) If an agents degrees of beliefviolate the probability axioms, that
agents degrees of belief are rationally defective.
The theorem in this argument is, once more, the Dutch Book Theorem, and
the argument’s conclusion is a version of probabilism. Christensen assesses this
kind of Dutch Book Argument (“DBA”) as follows:
This distinctively non-pragmatic version of the DBA allows us to see why

its force does not depend on the real possibility of being duped by clever
bookies. It does not aim at showing that probabilistically incoherent degrees
of belief are unwise to harbor for practical reasons. Nor does it locate the
problem with probabilistically incoherent beliefs in some sort of preference
inconsistency. Thus it does not need to identify, or define, degrees of belief
by the ideally associated bet evaluations. Instead, this DBA aims to show that
probabilistically incoherent beliefs are rationally defective by showing that, in
certain particularly revealing circumstances, they would provide justification
for bets that are rationally defective in a particularly obvious way. The fact
that the diagnosis can be made a priori indicates that the defect is not one of
fitting the beliefs with the way the world happens to be: it is a defect internal
to the agent’s belief system. (2004, p. 121, emphasis in original)
9.3 Objections to Dutch Book Arguments
If we can construct both a Dutch Book Theorem and a Converse Dutch Book
Theorem for a particular norm (probabilism, the Ratio Formula, updating by
Conditionalization, etc.), then we have a Dutch Book Argument that rational
ity requires honoring that norm. I now want to review various objections to
Dutch Book Arguments that have arisen over the years; these objections apply
equally well to depragmatized versions of such arguments.
9∙3 OBJECTIONS TO DUTCH BOOK ARGUMENTS 325
It’s worth beginning with a concern that is often overlooked. Dutch Book
Arguments assume that a rational agent’s fair betting price for a bet that pays
$1 on P is $cr(P). An author like de Finetti who identifies an agent’s credence
in P with the amount she’s willing to pay for a ticket that yields $1 on P is
free to make this move. But contemporary authors unwilling to grant that
identification need some argument that these betting prices are rationally
required.
A simple argument comes from expected value calculations. As we saw in
Chapter 7, Equation (7.3), an agent’s expected monetary payout for a ticket
that pays $1 on P is
$1 ∙ cr(P) + $0 ∙ cr(~P) = $cr(P) (9.1)
So an agent whose preferences are driven by expected value calculations

will assign that ticket a fair betting price of $cr(P). (The calculation can be
generalized to bets at other stakes.)
But this argument for the fair betting prices we’ve been assuming takes
as a premise that rational agents maximize expected utility. (Or expected
monetary return—recall that we assumed for the duration of this chapter that
agents assign constant marginal utility to money.) If we had that premise
available, we could argue much more directly for probabilism via the Revised
Representation Theorem of Chapter 8.10
So what else can we try? At the beginning of Section 9.1,1 tried to motivate
the typical formula for fair betting prices without appealing to expectations.
I invoked intuitions about how an agent’s fair betting price for a ticket should
rise and fall as her credences and the stakes change. Unfortunately, those
intuitive motivations can’t take us quite far enough. An agent could assign fair
betting prices that rise and fall in the manner described without setting those
fair betting prices equal to her credences.
Recall Mr. Bold, who assigns to each proposition the square-root of the
credence assigned by Mr. Prob. Mr. Prob’s credences satisfy the probability
axioms, while Mr. Bold’s violate Finite Additivity. Now suppose that Mr. Bold
sets his fair betting prices for various gambling tickets equal not to his cre
dences, but instead to the square of his credences. Mr. Bold’s fair betting
prices (for tickets on contingent propositions) will still rise and fall in exactly
the ways that intuition requires. In fact, he will be willing to buy or sell any
gambling ticket at exactly the same prices as Mr. Prob. And since Mr. Prob
isn’t susceptible to various kinds of Dutch Book, Mr. Bold won’t be either. In
general, an agent who assigns nonprobabilistic credences may be able to avoid
Book by assigning his betting prices in nonstandard fashion. Without a strong

assumption about how rational agents use their credences to set betting prices,
the Dutch Book Argument cannot show that nonprobabilistic credences are
irrational.11
9.3.1 The Package Principle
The objection just raised applies to any Dutch Book Argument, because it
questions how fair betting prices are set for the bets within a Book. Another,
more traditional objection applies only to Books involving more than one
gambling ticket; for instance, it applies to the Dutch Book against Finite Addi
tivity violators but not to the Books against Non-Negativity and Normality
offenders. (As I keep saying, Finite Additivity is the most difficult of the three
axioms to establish as a rational rule.)
This traditional objection begins with interference effects that may be
generated by placing a series of bets in succession. Interference effects occur
when the initial bets in a series interfere with an agents willingness to accept
the remaining bets. While she might have accepted the remaining bets as fair
had they been offered to her in isolation, the bets she’s made already turn her
against them. For example, the agent might have a personal policy never to tie
up more than a certain total amount of money in gambles at one time. Or the
third bet she’s offered might be on the proposition “I will never make more
than two bets in my life.” More to the point, suppose we have an agent whose
credences violate the probability axioms; we carefully construct a set of bets
guaranteeing a sure loss, each of which will be placed at odds matching her
degree of belief in the relevant proposition. We offer these bets to her one at
a time. There’s no guarantee that placing the first few wagers won’t interfere
with the agent’s willingness to accept the remainder. Besides the interference
effects just mentioned, the agent might see her sure loss coming down the pike,
and simply refuse to place any more bets past some point! Interference effects
undermine the claim that any agent with nonprobabilistic credences can be
trapped into placing a sure-loss set of bets.
Interference effects are often introduced (as I’ve just done) by talking about
placing bets with an agent one at a time. A Dutch Book defender might respond
by suggesting that the bookie place his bets with the agent all at once—as a
package deal. Yet the agent might still reject this package on the grounds that
she doesn’t like to tie up so much money in gambles, or that she can see a
sure loss on the way. The sequential offering of the bets over time is ultimately
irrelevant to the dialectic. A more promising response to interference effects

points out how heavily they rely on the transactional pragmatics of betting.
Depragmatized Dutch Book Arguments indict a nonprobabilistic agent on
the grounds that her credences sanction a sure-loss set of bets; whether
interference effects would impede her actuallypkcmg those bets is neither here
nor there.
Yet there’s a problem in the vicinity even for depragmatized arguments.
Howson and Urbach’s and Christensen’s arguments contend that Dutch Book
ability reveals an underlying doxastic inconsistency. What’s the nature of that
inconsistency? Earlier we saw Ramsey suggesting of the probability rules that,
“If anyone’s mental condition violated these laws, his choice would depend
on the precise form in which the options were offered him, which would be
absurd.” From this suggestion, Skyrms takes the principle that for a rational
agent, “A betting arrangement gets the same expected utility no matter how
described” (1987a, p. 230). Similarly, Joyce writes that an agent’s nonproba-
bilism “leads her to commit both the prudential sin of squandering happiness
and the epistemic sin of valuing prospects differently depending on how they
happen to be described”(1998, p. 96).
The rational inconsistency revealed by Dutch Bookability seems to be that
the agent evaluates one and the same entity differently depending on how it is
presented. Skyrms calls the entity being evaluated a “betting arrangement”. To
illustrate how one and the same betting arrangement might be presented in
two different ways, let’s return to our Dutch Book against a Finite Additivity
violator (Section 9.1.1). That Book begins by selling the agent a ticket that pays
$1 if P is true and another ticket that pays $1 on Q (call these the “P-ticket”
and the “Q-ticket”, respectively). The agent assigns cr(P) = cr(Q) = 0.5, so she
will buy these tickets for $0.50 each. At that point the agent has purchased a
package consisting of two tickets:
This ticket entitles the bearer This ticket entitles the bearer
to $1 if Pis true, to $1 if Q is true,
and nothing otherwise. and nothing otherwise.
Call this the “PQ-package”. We assume that since the agent is willing to pay
$0.50 for each of the two tickets in the package, she will pay $1 for the package
as a whole.
In the next step of the Finite Additivity Dutch Book, we buy the following
ticket from the agent (which we’ll call the “P V Q-ticket”):

to $1 if P V Q is true,
Our agent assigns cr(P V Q) = 0.8, so she sells us this ticket for $0.80.
Now compare the PQ-package with the P V Q-ticket, and keep in mind that
in this example P and Q are mutually exclusive. If either P or Q turns out to be
true, the PQ-package and the P V Q-ticket will each pay exactly $1. Simlarly,
each one pays $0 if neither P nor Q is true. So the PQ-package pays out the
same amount as the P V Q-ticket in every possible world. This is the sense in
which they represent the same “betting arrangement”. When we offer the agent
that betting arrangement as a package of two bets on atomic propositions, she
values the arrangement at $1. When we offer that arrangement as a single
bet on a disjunction, she values it at $0.80. She values the same thing—the
same betting arrangement—differently under these two presentations. If she’s
willing to place bets based on those evaluations, we can use them to take money
from her. (We sell the arrangement to her in the form she holds dear, then
buy it back in the form she’ll part with for cheap.) But even if the agent won’t
actually place the bets, the discrepancy in her evaluations reveals a rational
flaw in her underlying credences.
The general idea is that any Dutch Book containing multiple bets reveals a
violation of
Extensional Equivalence: If two betting arrangements have the same payoff

as one another in each possible world, a rational agent will value
them equally.
I certainly won’t question Extensional Equivalence. But the argument above

sneaks in another assumption as well. How did we decide that our agent valued
the PQ-package at $1? We assumed that since she was willing to pay $0.50 for
the P-ticket on its own and $0.50 for the Q-ticket as well, she’d pay $1 for these
two tickets bundled together as a package. We assumed the
Package Principle: A rational agent’s value for a package of bets equals the
sum of her values for the individual bets it contains.
Our argument needed the Package Principle to get going (as does every Dutch
Book consisting of more than one bet). We wanted to indict the set of credences
our agent assigns to P, Q, and P V Q. But bets based on those individual
propositions would not invoke Extensional Equivalence, because no two such

bets have identical payoffs in each possible world. So we combined the P- and
Q-tickets into the PQ-package, a betting arrangement extensionally equivalent
to the P V Q-ticket. We then needed a value for the PQ-package, a new object
not immediately tied to any of the agents credences. So we applied the Package
Principle.12
Is it legitimate to assume the Package Principle in arguing for Finite Addi
tivity? I worry that we face a Linearity In, Linearity Out problem once more.
In order to get a Dutch Book Argument for Finite Additivity, we need to
assume that a rational agents value for a package of bets on mutually exclusive
propositions is a linear combination of her values for bets on the individual
propositions. Schick (1986, p. 113) calls this “the unspoken assumption... of
value additivity” in Dutch Book Arguments; it seems to do exactly for bet
valuations what Finite Additivity does for credences.13 Without an indepen
dent argument for this Package Principle, the Dutch Book Argument for
probabilism cannot succeed.14
9.3.2 Dutch Strategy objections
The first objection discussed in this section—concerning fair betting prices—

applies to any Dutch Book. The Package Principle objection applies to Books
containing multiple bets. But even beyond those objections, special problems
arise for Dutch arguments involving credences assigned at different times.
I will focus here on Lewis’s Dutch Strategy Argument for Conditionalization;
similar points apply to Strategies supporting Jeffrey Conditionalization and
other potential diachronic norms.
To get the concern going, we need to focus on an aspect of Dutch Books
and Strategies that I haven’t mentioned yet. I keep saying that a Dutch Book
guarantees the agent will lose money in every possible world. What set of
possible worlds am I talking about? It can’t be the set of logically possible
worlds; after all, there are logically possible worlds in which no bets are ever
placed. When we say that a Dutch Book guarantees the agent a sure loss in
every world, we usually mean something like the agent’s doxastically possible
worlds—the worlds she entertains as a live option.
It makes sense to construct Dutch Books around worlds the agent considers
possible. Dutch Book susceptibility is supposed to be a rational flaw, and
rationality concerns how things look from the agent’s own point of view.
Imagine a bookie sells you for $0.50 a bet that pays $1 if a particular fair coin
flip comes up heads. The bookie then claims he has Dutch Booked you, because
he’s already seen the flip outcome and it came up tails! Your willingness to
purchase that bet didn’t reveal any rational flaw in your credences. Admittedly
there’s some sense in which the bookie sold you a bet that’s a loser in every
live possibility. But that’s a sense of “live possibility” to which you didn’t have
access when you placed the bet; relative to your information the bet wasn’t a
sure loss. To constrain our attention to Dutch Books or Strategies capable of
revealing rational flaws, we usually require them to generate a sure loss across
the agent’s space of doxastically possible worlds. A convenient way to do this
is to stipulate that the bookie in a Dutch Book or Strategy must be capable of
constructing the Book or implementing the Strategy without employing any
contingent information the agent lacks.
With that in mind, let’s return to Lewis’s Dutch Strategy against Condition-
alization violators. Here’s the particular set of bets we used in Section 9.1.2:
P&Q -P&Q ~Q
Ticket 1 -0.75 0.25 0.25
Ticket 2 0.30 0.30 -0.30
Ticket if Q learned 0.40 -0.60 0
TOTAL -0.05 -0.05 -0.05
This Strategy was constructed against an agent who assigns equal uncon
ditional credence to each of the four P/Q state-descriptions at ti, assigns
cri(P ∣ Q) = 0.5, yet assigns cry∙(P) = 0.6 if she learns that Q between ti and t7∙.
At a first pass, this Strategy seems to meet our requirement that the bookie
need not know more than the agent. Tickets 1 and 2 are purchased from the
agent at ti using betting prices set by her ti credences. The third ticket is sold to
the agent at tj only if she learns Q between ti and tj. But by t7∙ the agent (and the
bookie) know whether she has learned Q, so the bookie needn’t know more
than the agent to decide whether to sell that ticket.
Yet matters turn out to be more subtle than that. To see why, Γd suggest that
the reader construct a Dutch Strategy against an agent who assigns the same
ti credences as in our example but assigns cry∙(P) = 0.4 if she learns that Q
between ti and tj. Obviously the change in crj∙(P) value changes the bet made
if Q is learned; that bet must be keyed to the agent’s fair betting prices at the
later time. More interestingly, though, you’ll find that while the bets placed at
ti have much the same structure as Ticket 1 and Ticket 2, the bookie needs to
sell them at ti—rather than buying them—in order to guarantee the agent a
sure loss.
Now imagine a bookie is confronted at ti by an agent who assigns equal

credence to all four P/Q state-descriptions and satisfies the probability axioms
and Ratio Formula. The bookie wants to initiate a Dutch Strategy that will
cost the agent money should she fail to update by Conditionalization at ty∙. But
the bookie doesn’t know which Strategy to pursue: the Strategy against agents
who assign cr7∙(P) > 0.5, or the Strategy against cr7(P) < 0.5. These Strategies
require the bookie to take different sides on his ti bets, so in order to pursue
a course that will definitely cost the agent, the bookie must know at ti what
the agent’s credences will be at t7∙. Given our stipulation that the bookie knows
only what the agent does, this means that a Dutch Strategy can be constructed
against an agent who violates Conditionalization only if that agent knows in
advance how she’ll be violating it.
How might an agent know in advance what credences she’ll assign in
the future? One possibility is if the agent has a standing policy, or plan,
for updating in response to evidence. If the agent has such a plan, and it
recommends different credences than Conditionalization, then the agent (and
bookie) will be able to tell at ti that she’ll violate Conditionalization at ft
Moreover, if the agent knows at ti that, say, her updating plan would lead her
to assign cr7(P) = 0.6 upon learning that Q, the bookie can take advantage of
this information to set up a Dutch Strategy by placing the appropriate bets at ti.
By itself, violating Conditionalization doesn’t make an agent susceptible to
a Dutch Strategy. A Strategy can be implemented against an agent only if she
violates Conditionalization after planning to do so. To dramatize the point,
consider an agent who plans at ti to conditionalize, but when f comes around
actually violates Conditionalization. No Dutch Strategy can be implemented
against such an agent; since at ti the bookie won’t know the details of the
violation, he won’t be able to place the requisite ti bets.
Once we see this point, we might wonder whether the rational fault lies in
the plan, or in the implementation, van Fraassen writes:
Let us emphasize especially that these features are demonstrable beforehand,

without appeal to any but logical considerations, and the strategy’s imple
mentation requires no information inaccessible to the agent himself. The
general conclusion must be that an agent vulnerable to such a Dutch strategy
has an initial state of opinion and practice of changing his opinion, which
together constitute a demonstrably bad guide to life.
(1984, p. 240, emphasis in original)
According to van Fraassen, it’s the initial state of opinion plus the initialpractice
ofchanging opinion that together constitute a bad guide. If that’s right, then the
Dutch Strategy targets a synchronic inconsistency among stances adopted at

ti, not any truly diachronic inconsistency.
One might respond that it’s irrational for an agent to make one plan then
carry out another, so a rational agent plans to conditionalize just in case
she does so. (If that’s right, then any argument that a rational agent plans to
conditionalize is also an argument that she does conditionalize.) Notice first
that this biconditional deems it irrational to update without first planning to
do so—must rationality bar spontaneity? But setting that point aside, there’s a
legitimate question about how to argue for the diachronic rational requirement
that an agent update as she had planned. For the previous few paragraphs,
I’ve been trying to establish that this requirement cannot be established using
a Dutch Strategy. But if you still aren’t convinced, the following analogy
may help.
Suppose my sister and I each have credences satisfying the probability
axioms and Ratio Formula, but I assign cr(P) = 0.7, while she assigns
cr(~P) = 0.7. A clever bookie could place bets with each of us that together
guaranteed him a sure profit. Should this bother me? Or my sister? Not unless
we antecedently think there’s something wrong with our having differing
opinions.
Now consider an agent who, at ty∙, takes her credences to stand in the same
relation to her ti assignments that I take my credences to stand in to my
sister’s. This tz∙ agent doesn’t see anything rationally pressing about lining up
her credences with the credences or plans she made at ti. A bookie might place
a series ofbets with the agent’s ti and tj selves that together guarantee a sure loss.
But the tj agent will find that no more impressive than the sure-loss contract
constructible against me and my sister. If the tj agent doesn’t antecedently feel
any rational pressure to coordinate her current attitudes with those of her ti
self, pointing out that their combined activities result in a guaranteed loss will
not create that pressure.
A Dutch Strategy may establish that it’s rational for an agent to plan to
Conditionalize. But it cannot establish that an agent is rationally required at
a later time to do what she planned earlier. There may of course be other
arguments for such a diachronic rational requirement, but they must be
independently established before a Dutch Strategy can have any diachronic
bite. As Christensen puts it:
Without some independent reason for thinking that an agent’s present beliefs
must cohere with her future beliefs, her potential vulnerability to the Dutch
strategy provides no support at all for [conditionalization]. (1991, p. 246)
9∙4 EXERCISES 333
A Dutch Strategy Argument may fill out the details of rational updating norms
should any exist. But it is ill-suited to establish the existence of such norms in
the first place.15
9.4 Exercises
Problem 9.1. In Section 9.1.1 we constructed a Dutch Book against an

agent like Mr. Bold whose credences are subadditive. Now construct a Dutch
Book against an agent whose credences are superadditive: for mutually exclu
sive P and Q, he assigns cr(P) = 0.3, cr(Q) = 0.3,butcr(PvQ) = 0.8. Describe
the bets composing your Book, say why the agent will find each one acceptable,
and show that the bets guarantee him a loss in every possible world.
Problem 9.2. Roxannes credence distribution at a particular time

includes the following values:
cr(A & B) = 0.5 cr(A) = 0.1 cr(B) = 0.5 cr(A VB) = 0.8
(Do not assume that A and B are mutually exclusive!)

(a) Show that Roxannes distribution violates the probability axioms.
(b) Construct a Dutch Book against Roxannes credences. Lay out the bets
involved, then show that those bets actually constitute a Dutch Book
against Roxanne.
Note: The Book must be constructed using only the credences described
above; since Roxanne is non-probabilistic you may not assume anything
about the other credences she assigns. However, the Book need not take
advantage of all four credences.
(c) Construct a Czech Book in Roxannes favor. Lay out the bets involved
and show that they guarantee her a profit in every possible world.
(d) Does the success of your Dutch Book against Roxanne require her to
satisfy the Package Principle? Explain.
Problem 9.3. You are currently certain that you are not the best singer
in the world. You also currently satisfy the probability axioms and the Ratio
Formula. Yet you assign credence 0.5 that you will go to a karaoke bar tonight,
and are certain that if you do go to the bar, cheap beer and persuasive friends
will make you certain that you are the best singer in the world. Suppose a
bookie offers you the following two betting tickets right now:
This ticket entitles you

to $20 if you go to the bar,
If you go to the bar, this ticket entitles you

to $40 if you are not the worlds best singer,
and nothing if you are.
If you don’t go to the bar,
this ticket may be returned to the seller
for a full refund of its purchase price.
(a) Suppose that right now, a bookie offers to sell you the first ticket above
for $10 and the second ticket for $30. Explain why, given your current
credences, you will be willing to buy the two tickets at those prices.
(Remember that the second ticket involves a conditional bet, so its fair
betting price is determined by your current conditional credences.)
(b) Describe a Dutch Strategy the bookie can plan against you right now. In
particular, describe a third bet that he can plan to place with you later
tonight only if you’re at the bar and certain of your singing prowess,
such that he’s guaranteed to make a net profit from you come what may.
Be sure to explain why you’ll be willing to accept that third bet later on,
and how it creates a Dutch Strategy against you.16
Problem 9.4. 0 Do you think there is any kind of Dutch Book or Strategy that
reveals a rational flaw in an agent’s attitudes? If so, say why, and say which kinds
of Dutch Books/Strategies you take to be revealing. If not, explain why not.
9.5 Further reading
Susan Vineberg (2011). Dutch Book Arguments. In: The Stanford Encyclo
pedia of Philosophy. Ed. by Edward N. Zalta. Summer 2011
Covers all the topics discussed in this chapter in much greater depth, with
extensive citations.
notes 335
Classic Texts
Frank P. Ramsey (1931). Truth and Probability. In: The Foundations of

Mathematics and Other Logic Essays. Ed. by R. B. Braithwaite. New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Company, pp. 156-98
Bruno de Finetti (1937/1964). Foresight: Its Logical Laws, its Subjective
Sources. In: Studies in Subjective Probability. Ed. by Henry E. Kyburg Jr
and H.E. Smokier. New York: Wiley, pp. 94-158. Originally published
as “La prevision; ses lois logiques, ses sources subjectives” in Annales de
ITnstitut Henri Poincare, Volume 7,1-68
On p. 84, Ramsey notes that any agent whose degrees of belief violated the laws
of probability “could have a book made against him by a cunning better and
would then stand to lose in any event.” de Finetti goes on to prove it.
Frederic Schick (1986). Dutch Bookies and Money Pumps. The Journal of
Philosophy 83, pp. 112-19
Compares Dutch Book and money pump arguments, then offers a Package
Principle objection to each.
Paul Teller (1973). Conditionalization and Observation. Synthese 26,

pp. 218-58
First presentation of Lewis’s Dutch Strategy Argument for Conditionalization;

also contains a number of other interesting arguments for Conditionalization.
Extended Discussion
David Christensen (2001). Preference-based Arguments for Probabilism.

Philosophy of Science 68, pp. 356-76
Presents depragmatized versions of both the Representation Theorem and

Dutch Book Arguments for probabilism, then responds to objections.
Notes
1. Or something very close to Kolmogorovs rules—the agent may assign a maximal

credence other than 1.
2. Over the years, Bayesians have used the term coherent in a variety of ways, de Finetti
defined a “coherent” credence distribution as one that avoided Dutch Book, then proved
that coherence requires probabilistic credences. Other Bayesian authors take satisfying
the probability axioms as the definition of “coherence”. Some use “coherent” simply as
a synonym for “rationally consistent”, whatever such consistency turns out to require.
3. This formula is easy to derive if we assume that the agent selects her fair betting
prices so as to maximize expected dollar return, as we did in Section 7.1. Yet Γve
been scrupulously avoiding making that assumption here, for reasons I’ll explain in
Section 9.3.
4. A “book” is a common term for a bet placed with a “bookmaker” (or “bookie”), but why
Dutch? Hacking (2001, p. 169) attributes the term to Ramsey, and suggests it may have
been English betting slang of Ramseys day. Concerned to avoid using what is possibly
a slur, Hacking prefers to speak of “sure-loss contracts”. Yet I haven’t been able to find
the “Dutch” terminology anywhere in Ramsey’s text, so its origins remain a mystery to
me. Since the phrase “Dutch Book” is near-ubiquitous in the Bayesian literature, and
we have no evidence that (or how) it gives offence, I will continue to use it here. But Γd
be happy for Bayesians to move in another direction if more information came to light.
5. Lewis didn’t publish this argument against non-Conditionalizers. Instead it was
reported by Teller (1973), who attributed the innovation to Lewis.
6. Notice that the ticket sold to the agent at tj does not constitute a conditional bet. It’s a
normal ticket paying out $1 on P no matter what, and we set the agent’s fair betting price
for this ticket using her unconditional credences at tj. It’s just that we decide whether
to sell her this (normal, unconditional) ticket on the basis of what she learns between
ti and tj.
Notice also that for purposes of this example we’re assuming that the agent learns Q
between ti and tj just in case Q is true.
7. Because I like to keep things tidy, I have constructed all of my Dutch Books and Dutch
Strategies above so that the agent loses the same amount in each possible world. That
isn’t a requirement for Dutch Books or Strategies, and you certainly don’t have to follow
it when constructing your own—as long as the net payout in each world is negative, the
goal has been achieved.
8. The phrase “Books ofthe sort we considered in Section 9.1.1” underspecifies the precise
sets of Books in question; Lehman and Kemeny are much clearer about what kinds of
betting packages their results concern. See also an early, limited Converse result in (de
Finetti 1937/1964, p. 104).
9. I have slightly altered Christensen’s premises to remove his references to a “simple
agent”. Christensen uses the simple agent to avoid worries about the declining marginal
utility of money and about the way winning one bet may alter the value of a second’s
payout. Inserting the simple agent references back into the argument would not protect
it from the objections I raise in the next section.
10. For more on the question of whether rationality requires agents to set their fair betting
prices using expected utilities, see Hedden (2013), Wronski and Godziszewski (2017),
and Pettigrew (2021).
11. All this should sound very reminiscent of my criticisms of Representation Theorem
Arguments in Chapter 8. Mathematically, the proof of the Revised Representation
Theorem from that chapter is very similar to standard proofs of the Dutch Book
Theorem.
NOTES 337
12. A similar move is hidden in Christensen’s “Belief Defectiveness” principle. The princi
ple says that if an agents degrees of belief sanction as fair each bet in a set of bets, and
that set of bets is rationally defective, then the agents beliefs are rationally defective.
The intuitive idea is that beliefs which sanction something defective are themselves
defective. Yet without the Package Principle, an agent’s beliefs might sanction as fair
each of the bets in a particular set without sanctioning the entire set as fair. And it’s the
entire set of bets that is the rationally defective object—it’s the set that guarantees the
agent a sure loss.
13. Schick contends that money pump arguments for the Preference Axioms (Section 7.2.1)
also assume something like the Package Principle.
14. If we assume that rational agents maximize expected utility, we can generate straight
forward arguments for both Extensional Equivalence and the Package Principle. But
again, if we are allowed to make that assumption, then probabilism follows quickly. (In
fact, Extensional Equivalence is a key lemma in proving the Revised Representation
Theorem.)
15. For what it’s worth, one could make a similar point about Dutch Book Arguments for
synchronic norms relating distinct degrees of belief. To dramatize the point, imagine
that an agent’s propositional attitudes were in fact little homunculi, each assigned its
own proposition to tend to and adopt a degree of belief toward. If we demonstrated to
one such homunculus that combining his assignments with those of other homunculi
would generate a sure loss, he might very well not care.
The point of this fanciful scenario is that while Dutch Books may fill out the details
of rational relations among an agent’s degrees of belief at a given time, they are ill-suited
to establish that rationality requires such synchronic relations in the first place. Absent
an antecedent rational pressure to coordinate attitudes adopted at the same time, the
fact that such attitudes could be combined into a sure loss would be of little normative
significance. No one ever comments on this point about Dutch Books, because we all
assume in the background that degrees of belief assigned by the same agent at the same
time are required to stand in some relations of rational coherence.
16. I owe this entire problem to Sarah Moss.
10
Accuracy Arguments
The previous two chapters considered arguments for probabilism based on

Representation Theorems and Dutch Books. We criticized both types of argu
ment for beginning with premises about practical rationality—premises about
how a rational agent views certain acts (especially acts of placing bets). We
want to establish the probability axioms as requirements of theoretical ratio
nality on an agent’s credences, and it’s difficult to move from practical premises
to a theoretical conclusion.
This chapter builds arguments for probabilism from explicitly epistemic
premises. The basic idea is that, as representational attitudes, credences can
be assessed for accuracy. We often assess other doxastic attitudes, such as
binary beliefs, for accuracy: a belief in the proposition P is accurate if P is
true; disbelief in P is accurate if P is false. A traditional argument moves from
such accuracy assessments to a rational requirement that agents’ belief sets
be logically consistent (Chapter Γs Belief Consistency norm). The argument
begins by noting that if a set of propositions is logically inconsistent, then
by definition there is no (logically) possible world in which all of those
propositions are true. So if an agent’s beliefs are logically inconsistent, she’s
in a position to know that at least some of them are inaccurate. Moreover,
she can know this a priori—without invoking any contingent truths. (Since
an inconsistent set contains falsehoods in every possible world, no matter
which world is actual her inconsistent belief set misrepresents how things are.)
Such unavoidable, a priori inaccuracy reveals a rational flaw in any logically
inconsistent set of beliefs.1
There are plenty of potential flaws in this argument—starting with its
assumption that beliefs have a teleological “aim” of being accurate. But the
argument is a good template for the arguments for probabilism to be discussed
in this chapter. Whatever concerns you have about the Belief Consistency
argument above, keep them in mind as you consider accuracy arguments for
probabilism.
Assessing credences for accuracy isn’t as straightforward as assessing binary
beliefs: a credence of, say, 0.6 in proposition P doesn’t say that P is true, but
neither does it say that P is false. So we can’t assess the accuracy of this credence

10.1 ACCURACY AS CALIBRATION 339
by asking whether it assigns a truth-value to P matching P’s truth-value in

the world. Nor can we say that cr(P) = 0.6 is accurate just in case P is true
“to degree 0.6”; we’ve assumed that propositions are wholly true or wholly
false, full stop. So just as we moved from classificatory to quantitative doxastic
attitudes in Chapter 1, we need to move from a classificatory to a quantitative
concept of accuracy. This chapter will begin by considering various numerical
measures of just how accurate a credence (or set of credences) is. We’ll
start with historical “calibration” approaches that measure credal accuracy by
comparing credences with frequencies. Then we’ll reject calibration in favor of
contemporary “gradational accuracy” approaches.
The most commonly used gradational accuracy measure is known as the
Brier score. Using the Brier score, we will construct an argument for probabil-
ism similar to the Belief Consistency argument above: violating the probability
axioms impedes a credence set’s accuracy in every possible world. It will then
turn out that an argument like this can be constructed using not just the Brier
score, but any gradational accuracy measure in a class known as the “strictly
proper scoring rules”.
Which leads to the question of why strictly proper scoring rules are supe
rior to other accuracy-measurement options—especially options that rule out
probabilism. The spectre will arise once more that our argument for proba-
bilism has a question-begging, Linearity-In, Linearity-Out structure. This will
force us to ask something you may have started wondering over the last couple
of chapters: How important is it, really, that rational credences satisfy Finite
Additivity, as opposed to other norms with similar consequences for thought
and behavior?
Besides arguing for probabilism, Bayesian epistemologists have offered
accuracy-based arguments for other norms such as the Principal Principle
(Pettigrew 2013a), the Principle of Indifference (Pettigrew 2014), Reflec
tion (Easwaran 2013), and Conglomerability (Easwaran 2013). We’ll close
this chapter with an argument for Conditionalization based on minimizing
expected future inaccuracy. Unfortunately this argument has the same draw
back as Dutch Strategy arguments for Conditionalization: it is insufficient on
its own to establish truly diachronic norms.
10.1 Accuracy as calibration
In Section 5.2.1 we briefly considered a putative rational principle for matching

one’s credence that a particular outcome will occur to the frequency with
340 ACCURACY ARGUMENTS
which that kind of outcome occurs. In that context, the match was supposed to
be between one’s credence that outcome B will occur and the frequency with
which ones evidence suggests B-type outcomes occur. But we might instead
assess an agents credences relative to actual frequencies in the world: If events
of type A actually produce outcomes of type B with frequency x, an agents
credence that a particular A-event will produce a B-outcome is more accurate
the closer it is to x.
Now imagine that an agent managed to be perfectly accurate with respect to
the actual frequencies. In that case, she would assign credence 2/3 to types
of outcomes that occurred 2/3 of the time, credence 1/2 to outcome-types
that occurred 1/2 of the time, etc. Or—flipping this around—propositions to
which she assigned credence 2/3 would turn out to be true 2/3 of the time,
propositions to which she assigned credence 1/2 would turn out to be true 1/2
of the time, etc. This conception of accuracy—getting the frequencies right, as
it were—motivates assessing credences with respect to their
Calibration: A credence distribution over a finite set of propositions is

perfectly calibrated when, for any real x, out of all the propositions
to which the distribution assigns x, the fraction that turn out to be
true is x.
For example, suppose your weather forecaster comes on television every night
and reports her degree of confidence that it will snow the next day. You might
notice that every time she says she’s 20% confident of snow, it snows the next
day. In that case she’s not a very accurate forecaster. But if it snows on just
about 20% of those days, we’d say she’s doing her job well. If exactly 20% of the
days on which she’s 20% confident of snow turn out to have snow (and exactly
30% of the days on which she’s 30% confident... etc.), we say the forecaster is
perfectly calibrated.2 Calibration seems a plausible way to gauge accuracy.3
I’ve defined only what it means to be perfectly calibrated; there are also
numerical measures for assessing degrees of calibration short of perfection (see
Murphy 1973).4 But all the good and bad consequences of reading accuracy
as calibration can be understood by thinking solely about perfect calibra
tion. First, the good: van Fraassen (1983) and Abner Shimony (1988) both
argued for probabilism by showing that in order for a credence distribution
to be embeddable in larger and larger distributions with calibration scores
approaching perfection, that original credence distribution must satisfy the
probability axioms. This seems a powerful argument for probabilism—if we’re
on board with calibration as a measure of accuracy.
10.1 ACCURACY AS CALIBRATION 341
Here’s why we might not be. Consider two agents, Sam and Diane, who
assign the following credence distributions over propositions X1 through X4:
Xi ¾ ¾ x4
Sam 1/2 1/2 1/2 1/2
Diane 1 1 1/10 0
Now suppose that propositions X1 and X2 are true, while Xi and X4 are false.
Look at the table and ask yourself whose credences intuitively seem more
accurate.5
I take it the answer is Diane. Yet Sams credences are perfectly calibrated—
he assigns credence 1/2 to all four propositions, exactly half of which are
true—while Diane’s credences are not. This is an intuitive flaw with measuring
accuracy by calibration.
A similar point can be made by considering the following (real life!) exam
ple: On the morning of February 1, 2015,1 looked outside and found it was
snowing heavily. At least four inches had accumulated during the night, the
snow was still coming down, and it showed no signs of stopping. The online
weather report on my smartphone, however, showed an at-the-moment 90%
probability of snow. Why hadn’t the forecaster simply looked out her window
and updated the report to 100%?
I was suddenly struck by a possible explanation. Let’s imagine (what’s
probably not true) that the forecaster posts to the online weather report her
current credence that it will snow on the current day. Suppose also that weather
forecasting sites are graded for accuracy, and promoted on search engines
based on how well they score. Finally, suppose this accuracy scoring is done
by measuring calibration. What if, up to February 1, it had snowed every time
the forecaster reported a 100% credence, but it had snowed on only eight of
the nine occasions on which she had expressed a 90% credence? The snow on
February 1 would then present her with an opportunity. She could report her
true, 100% confidence in snow for February 1 on the website. Or she could post
a 90% probability of snow. Given that it was clearly snowing on February 1,
the latter option would bring her up to a perfect calibration score, and shoot
her website to the top of the search rankings. Calibration gives the forecaster
an incentive to misreport her own credences—and the content of her own
evidence.
Calibration is one example of a scoring rule; a procedure for rating distribu
tions with respect to accuracy. James M. Joyce reports that “the term scoring
rule’ comes from economics, where values of [such rules] are seen as imposing
penalties for making inaccurate probabilistic predictions” (2009, p. 266). Done

right, the imposition of such penalties can be a good way of finding out what
experts really think—what’s known as credence elicitation. If you reward (or
punish) an expert according to the accuracy of her reports, you incentivize her
to gather the best evidence she can, consider it carefully, and then report to
you her genuine conclusions. Seen through this lense of credence elicitation,
calibration fails as a scoring rule. As we’ve just seen, rewarding a forecaster
according to her level of calibration can incentivize her to misreport her true
opinions, and what she takes to be the import of her evidence.
Yet perhaps it’s unfair to criticize calibration on the grounds that it per
versely incentivizes credence reports; norms for assertion can be messy, and
anyway probabilism is a norm on agents’ thoughts, not their words. So let’s
consider calibration as a direct accuracy measure of our forecaster’s credences.
Prior to February 1 it has snowed whenever the forecaster was certain of snow,
but on the days when she assigned 0.9 credence to snow, it has snowed eight
of nine times. Looking out her window and seeing snow, the forecaster assigns
credence 1 to snow.6 Yet if her goal is to be as accurate as possible with her
credences, and if accuracy is truly measured by calibration, then the forecaster
will wish that her credence in snow was 0.9. After all, that would make her
pefectly calibrated!
Assessing the forecaster’s credences by calibration makes those credences
unstable. By the forecaster’s own lights—given the credences she has formed
in light of her evidence—she thinks she’d be better off with different credences.
Such instability is an undesirable feature in a credence distribution, and is
generally thought to be a hallmark of irrationality. David Lewis offers the
following analogy:
It is as if Consumer Bulletin were to advise you that Consumer Reports was a

best buy whereas Consumer Bulletin itself was not acceptable; you could not
possibly trust Consumer Bulletin completely thereafter. (1971, p. 56)
If we use calibration to measure accuracy, the weather forecaster’s credence

distribution becomes unstable. Such instability is a sign of irrationality. So
from a calibration point of view, there’s something rationally wrong with the
forecaster’s credences. But in reality there’s nothing wrong with the forecaster’s
credences—they are a perfectly rational response to the evidence before her
eyes! The problem lies with calibration as a measure of accuracy; calibration
renders unstable credence distributions that are rationally permissible (if not
rationally required!).
10.2 THE GRADATIONAL ACCURACY ARGUMENT 343
There are further ways in which calibration rewards agents for ignoring
their evidence. Notice that any agent assigning credences over a partition
of n propositions can secure a perfect calibration score by assigning each
proposition a credence of ^∖Jn. For instance, if a six-sided die is to be rolled,
an agent can guarantee herself perfect calibration (no matter how the roll
comes out!) by assigning each possible outcome a credence of 1/6. Depending
on how you feel about the Principle of Indifference (Section 5.3), this might
be a reasonable assignment when the agent has no evidence relevant to the
members of the partition. But now suppose the agent gains highly reliable
evidence that the die is biased in favor of coming up 6. Altering her credences
to reflect that bias won’t earn her a better calibration score than the uniform
1/6 distribution, and might very well serve her worse.
One could make various attempts here to save calibration as a plausible mea
sure of accuracy. For instance, calibration scores are less easily manipulable
if we measure them only in the long-run. But this generates questions about
the accuracy of credences in non-repeatable events, and soon we’re assessing
not actual long-run calibration but hypothetical calibration in the limit. Before
long, we’ve made all the desperate moves used to prop up the frequency theory
of “probability” (Section 5.1.1), and run into all the same problems.
The response here should be the same as it was with the frequency theory:
Rather than deploy a notion that emerges only when events are situated in a
larger collective, we find a notion (like propensity) that can be meaningfully
applied to single cases considered one at a time. Looking back at Sam and
Diane, our intuitive judgment that Diane is globally more accurate than Sam
arises from local judgments that she was more accurate than him on each
individual proposition. If you knew only the truth-value of Xl, you could still
have said that Diane was more accurate than Sam on that one proposition. Our
accuracy intuitions apply piece-wise; we assess credences one proposition at a
time, then combine the results into a global accuracy measure.
10.2 The gradational accuracy argument for probabilism
10.2.1 The Brier score
We will now develop what’s known as the “gradational accuracy” approach to

evaluating credences. Our guiding idea will be that inaccuracy is distance from
truth—a credence distribution gains accuracy by moving its values closer to
the truth-values of propositions. Of course, credence values are real numbers,
Figure 10.1 The Brier score
while truth-values are not. But its natural to overcome that obstacle by letting
1 stand for truth and 0 stand for falsehood. Just as we have a distribution cr
expressing the agents credences in propositions, we’ll have another distribu
tion tv reflecting the truth-values of those propositions. Distribution tv assigns
numerical values to the propositions in £ such that tv(X) = 1 if X is true and
tv(X) = 0 if X is false.7
Once we have distribution cr representing the agents credences and distri
bution tv representing the truth, we want a scoring rule that measures how
far apart these distributions are from each other. It’s easiest to visualize the
challenge on a diagram. To simplify matters, consider a credence distribution
over only two propositions, X and Y. Our agent assigns cr(X) = 0.7 and
cr(Y) = 0.6.1 have depicted this credence assignment in Figure 10.1. In this
diagram the horizontal axis represents the proposition X while the vertical
axis represents Y. Any credence assignment to these two propositions can be
represented as an ordered pair; I have placed a dot at the agents cr-distribution
of (0.7,0.6).
What about the values of tv? Let’s suppose that propositions X and Y
are both true. So tv(X) = tv(Y) = 1.1 have marked (1,1)—the location of tv
on the diagram—with another dot. Now our question is how to measure
the inaccuracy of the agent’s credences; how should we gauge how far cr is
from tv?
A natural suggestion is to use distance as the crow flies, indicated by
the arrow in Figure 10.1. A quick calculation tells us that the length of the
arrow is:
(1 - 0.7)2 + (1 - 0.6)2 = (0.3)2 + (0.4)2 = 0.25 (10∙l)

Pythagorean Theorem aficionados will note the lack of a square-root in this

distance expression (the arrow is actually 0.5 units long). For the time being,
were going to use inaccuracy measurements only for ordinal comparisons
(which credence distribution is farther from the truth), so particular numerical
values don’t matter much—and neither does the square-root.
When generalized to a credence distribution over finitely many pro
positions {X1,X2, ... ,Xn}, this distance measure of inaccuracy becomes
I>,(cr, ω) = (tva,(X1) - cr(X1))2 + (tvαl(¾) - cr(¾))2 + ...

+ (tvω(¾)-cr(¾))2 (10.2)
A few notes about this equation: First, what are the ωs doing in there? We
usually want to evaluate the inaccuracy of your credence distribution relative
to conditions in the actual world. But sometimes we’ll wonder how inaccurate
your credences would’ve been if you’d maintained your distribution but lived
in a different possible world. For example, in Figure 10.1 we might wonder
how inaccurate the credence distribution cr would have been had X and Y
both been false. That is, we might want to calculate the distance between cr
and the point (0,0). Equation (10.2) calculates the inaccuracy of credence
distribution cr in an arbitrary possible world ω. tπω(Xi') represents the truth
value of proposition Xi in world co; Ibr(cγ, ω) then measures the inaccuracy
of cr relative to conditions in that world. (So for the credence distribution
(0.7,0.6) and the world (0,0), Equation (10.2) would yield an IBR-value of
0.72 + 0.62 = 0.85.)8
Second, Equation (10.2) tallies up inaccuracy one proposition at a time, then
sums the results. For any credence distribution cr and particular proposition
Xi, evaluating (tv(Xf)—cr(JQ))2 is a way of gauging how far off distribution cr is
on that particular proposition. Equation (10.2) makes that calculation for each
individual proposition Xi, then adds up the results. In general, a scoring rule
that sums the results of separate calculations made on individual propositions
is called separable. Separable scoring rules track our intuition that accuracy
assessments of an entire credence distribution can be built up piece-wise,
considering the accuracy of one credence at a time; this was exactly the feature
we found lacking in calibration’s evaluation of Sam and Diane.9
The scoring rule described by Equation (10.2) is known as the Euclidean
distance, the quadratic loss function, or most commonly the Brier score.10
(This accounts for the “BR” subscript in Ibr.) The Brier score is hardly the
only scoring rule available, but it is natural and widely used. So we will stick
with it for the time being, until we examine other options in Section 10.3. At
that point we’ll find that even among the separable scoring rules, there may
be ordinal non-equivalence—two separable scoring rules may disagree about
which distribution is more accurate in a given world. Nevertheless, all the
separable scoring rules have some features in common. For instance, while
Ibr(cγ, ω) is in some sense a global measure of the inaccuracy of cr in world
co, it doesn’t take into account any wholistic or interactive features among the
individual credences cr assigns. Separable scores can’t, for example, take into
account the sum or difference of cr(Xz∙) and cr(Xy∙) for i ≠ j.11
Finally, Ibr and the other gradational measures we’ll consider calculate the
inaccuracy of credence distributions in particular worlds. So an agent striving
to be as accurate as possible will seek to minimize her score. Some authors
prefer to work with credence distributions’ epistemic utility, a numerical
measure of epistemic value that rational agents maximize. Now there may be
many aspects of a credence distribution that make it epistemically valuable
or disvaluable besides its distance from the truth. But many authors work
under the assumption that accuracy is the sole determiner of a distribution’s
epistemic value, in which case that value can be calculated directly from the
distribution’s inaccuracy. (The simplest way is to let the epistemic utility of
distribution cr in world co equal 1 — Ibr(cγ, ω).) If you find yourself reading
elsewhere about accuracy arguments, be sure to notice whether the author asks
agents to minimize inaccuracy or maximize utility. On either approach, the best
credence is the one closest to the pin (the distribution tv). But with inaccuracy,
as in golf, lowest score wins.
10.2.2 Joyces accuracy argument for probabilism
In our discussion of calibration we said that it’s rationally problematic for an

agent’s credence distribution to be “unstable”—for it to seem to the agent, by
her own lights, that another credence distribution would be preferable to her
own. We ultimately rejected assessing agents’ credences using calibration, but
now we have an alternative accuracy measure: the Brier score. If we could
convince an agent that her credences are less accurate, as measured by the
Brier score, than some other distribution over the same set of propositions,
then it would seem irrational for her to maintain her credence distribution (as
opposed to the other one).
How can we convince an agent that her credences are less accurate than
some alternative? Inaccuracy is always measured relative to a world. Pre
sumably the agent is interested how things stand in the actual world, but
presumably she also has some uncertainty as to which propositions are true or
false in the actual world. If she doesn’t know the tv-values in the actual world,
she won’t be able to calculate her own Brier score in that world, much less the
score of an alternative distribution.
But what if we could show her that there exists a single distribution that is
more accurate than her own in every logically possible world? Then she wouldn’t
need to know which possible world was actual; she could determine on an a
priori basis that however things stand in the actual world, she would be more
accurate if she had that other distribution. In light of information like this, her
present credences would look irrational. This line of thought is enshrined in
the following principle:
Admissibles Not Dominated: If an agent’s credence distribution is ratio

nally permissible, and accuracy is measured with an acceptable
scoring rule, then there does not exist another distribution that is
more accurate than hers in every possible world.
Admissibles Not Dominated is a conditional. Contraposing it, we get that

any credence distribution accuracy-dominated by another distribution on an
acceptable scoring rule is rationally impermissible (or “inadmissible”, in the
accuracy literature’s jargon).
Repurposing a theorem of de Finetti’s (1974), and following on the work of
Rosenkrantz (1981), Joyce (1998) demonstrated the
Gradational Accuracy Theorem: Given a credence distribution cr over a

finite set of propositions {X1,X2> ∙ ∙ ∙>¾ if we use the Brier score
Ibr(cγ, ω) to measure inaccuracy then:
• If cr does not satisfy the probability axioms, then there exists a
probabilistic distribution cr' over the same propositions such
that Ibr(cγ' , ω) < Ibr(cγ, ω) in every logically possible world ω∙,
and
• If cr does satisfy the probability axioms, then there does not
exist any cr' over those propositions such that IBR(cr',w)<
Ibr(cγ, ω) in every logically possible world.
The Gradational Accuracy Theorem has two parts. The first part says that if an
agent has a non-probabilistic credence distribution cr, we will be able to find
a probabilistic distribution cr' defined over the same propositions as cr that
Y
ω3∙.(0, 1) ω1r(l, 1)
cr cr'
ω4ι(0, 0) ω2^1> °) X
Figure 10.2 Violating Non-Negativity
accuracy-dominates cr. No matter what the world is like, distribution cr' will
be less inaccurate than cr. So the agent with distribution cr can be certain that,
come what may, she is leaving a certain amount of accuracy on the table by
assigning cr rather than cr'. There’s a cost in accuracy, independent of what you
think the world is like and therefore discernible a priori, to assigning a non-
probabilistic credence distribution—much as there’s a guaranteed accuracy
cost to assigning logically inconsistent beliefs. On the other hand (and this
is the second part of the theorem), if an agent’s credence distribution is prob
abilistic, then no distribution (probabilistic or otherwise) is more accurate in
every possible world. This seems a strong advantage of probabilistic credence
distributions.12
Proving the second part of the theorem is difficult, but I will show how
to prove the first part. There are three probability axioms—Non-Negativity,
Normality, and Finite Additivity—so we need to show how violating each one
leaves a distribution susceptible to accuracy domination. We’ll take them one
at a time, in order.
Suppose credence distribution cr violates Non-Negativity by assigning some
proposition a negative credence. In Figure 10.2 I’ve imagined that cr assigns
credences to two propositions, X and Y, bearing no special logical relations to
each other, cr violates Non-Negativity by assigning cr(X) < 0. (The value of
cr(T) is irrelevant to the argument, but I’ve supposed it lies between 0 and 1.)
We introduce probabilistic cr' such that cr'(Y) = cr(Y) but cr'(X) = 0; cr' is
the closest point on the Y-axis to distribution cr.
We need to show that cr' is less inaccurate than cr no matter which possible
world is actual. Given our two propositions X and Y, there are four possible
worlds.13 I’ve marked them on the diagram as co1, ω2, ω3, and cυ4, determining
the coordinates of each world by the truth-values it assigns to X and Y. (In ω2,
for instance, X is true and Y is false.) We now need to show that for each of
these worlds, cr' receives a lower Brier score than cr. In other words, we need
to show that cr' is closer to each world as the crow flies than cr is.
Clearly cr' is closer to ω2 and ω1 than cr is, so cr' is less inaccurate than cr
relative to both ω2 and ω1. What about ω3T I’ve indicated the distances from
cr and cr' to ω3 with arrows. Because cr' is the closest point on the T-axis to
cr, the points cr, cr', and ω3 form a right triangle. The arrow from cr to ω3 is
the hypotenuse of that triangle, while the arrow from cr' to co3 is a leg. So the
latter must be shorter, and cr' is less inaccurate by the Brier score relative to
ω3. A parallel argument shows that cr' is less inaccurate relative to ω4. So cr' is
less inaccurate than cr relative to each possible world.
That takes care of Non-Negativity.14 The accuracy argument against vio
lating Normality is depicted in Figure 10.3. Suppose X is a tautology and cr
assigns it some value other than 1. Since X is a tautology, there are no logically
possible worlds in which it is false, so there are only the worlds ω2 and ωl to
consider. We construct cr' such that cr'(Y) = cr( Y) and cr'(X) = 1. cr' is closer
than cr to ωl because the arrow from cr to ω1 is the hypotenuse of a right
triangle of which the arrow from cr' to ωl is one leg. A similar argument shows
that cr' is closer than cr to ω2, demonstrating that cr' is less inaccurate than cr
in every logically possible world.
Explaining how to accuracy-dominate a Finite Additivity violator requires
a three-dimensional argument sufficiently complex that I will leave it for an
endnote.15 But we can show in two dimensions what happens if you violate
one of the rules that follows from Finite Additivity, namely our Negation rule.
Suppose your credence distribution assigns cr-values to two propositions

X and Y such that X is the negation of Y. If you violate Negation, you’ll have
cr(Y) ≠ 1 — cr(X).
Γve depicted only ω2 and ω3 in Figure 10.4 because only those two worlds are
logically possible in this case (since X and Ymust have opposite truth-values).
The diagonal line connecting ω2 and ω3 has the equation Y = 1 —X; it contains
all the credence distributions satisfying Negation. If cr violates Negation, it will
fall somewhere off of this line. Then we can accuracy-dominate cr with the
point closest to cr lying on the diagonal (call that point cr'). Once more, we’ve
created a right triangle with cr, cr', and one of our possible worlds. The arrow
representing the distance from cr to ω3 is the hypotenuse of this triangle, while
the arrow from cr' to ω3 is its leg. So cr' has the shorter distance, and cr' is
less inaccurate in ω3 than cr according to the Brier score. A parallel argument
applies to ω2, so cr' is less inaccurate than cr in each of the two logically possible
worlds.16
Joyce (1998, 2009) leverages the advantage of probabilistic credence distri
butions displayed by the Gradational Accuracy Theorem into an argument for
probabilism:
Gradational Accuracy Argument for Probabilism
(Premise 1) A rationally permissible credence distribution cannot be

accuracy-dominated on any acceptable scoring rule.
(Premise 2) The Brier score is an acceptable scoring rule.
(Theorem) If we use the Brier score, then any non-probabilistic credence
distribution can be accuracy-dominated.
10.3 OBJECTIONS TO THE ACCURACY ARGUMENT 351
(Conclusion) All rationally permissible credence distributions satisfy the

probability axioms.
The first premise of this argument is Admissibles Not Dominated. The theorem
is the Gradational Accuracy Theorem. The conclusion of this argument is
probabilism.
10.3 Objections to the accuracy argument for probabilism
Unlike Representation Theorem and Dutch Book Arguments, the Grada

tional Accuracy Argument for Probabilism has nothing to do with an agent’s
decision-theoretic preferences over practical acts. It clearly pertains to the
theoretical rationality of credences assigned in pursuit of an epistemic goal:
accuracy. (This is why Joyces (1998) paper was titled “A Nonpragmatic Vindi
cation of Probabilism”.) This is a major advantage of the accuracy argument
for probabilism. Of course, one has to be comfortable with the idea that
belief-formation is a goal-directed activity—teleological, so to speak—and
commentators have objected to that idea. (Examples appear in the Further
Reading.)
But I want to focus on a more technical objection that has been with the gra
dational accuracy approach from its inception. Premise 2 of the Gradational
Accuracy Argument states that the Brier score is an acceptable scoring rule.
The Brier score is certainly not the only scoring rule possible; why do we think
it’s acceptable? And what does it even mean for a scoring rule to be acceptable
in this context?
10.3.1 The absolute-value score
In his original (1998) presentation of the accuracy argument, Joyce selected

the Brier score because it exhibits a number of appealing formal properties—
what we might think of as adequacy conditions for an acceptable scoring rule.
We’ve already seen that the Brier score is a separable rule. The Brier score also
displays
Truth-Directedness: If a distribution cr is altered by moving at least one

cr(JQ) value closer to tvω(Xi), and no individual cr-values are
moved farther away from tvω, then I(cr, ω) decreases.
-------- ς-------- 1---------------------- ∏ 1)
(0.48,0.9) × v
crι(0.7,0.6)'*'× ~ -
X
i x
Figure 10.5 Truth-Directedness
The intuitive idea of Truth-Directedness is that if you change your credence

distribution by moving some propositions closer to their truth-values, and
leaving the rest alone, this should decrease inaccuracy This condition is
depicted in Figure 10.5. (Ignore the dashed elements in that diagram for now.)
Assume once more that the agent assigns credences only to the propositions
X and Y, and that both these propositions are true in the actual world. If the
agents credence distribution is (0.7,0.6), every point on or in the gray box
(except for (0.7,0.6) itself) assigns an X-credence or a Y-credence closer to
1 than hers. On a truth-directed scoring rule, all of those distributions are more
accurate than the agents.
The Brier score isn’t the only truth-directed scoring rule, or the only way of
measuring distance on a diagram. Brier measures distance as the crow flies. But
suppose you had to travel from the distribution (0.7,0.6) to the truth (1,1) by
traversing a rectangular street grid, which permitted movement only parallel
to the axes. The shortest distance between those two points measured in this
fashion—what’s sometimes called the “taxicab distance”—is
∣1 - 0.7∣ + ∣1 - 0.6∣ = 0.3 + 0.4 = 0.7 (10.3)
I’ve illustrated this distance in Figure 10.6.

Generalizing the taxicab calculation to a distribution over finitely many
propositions {X1,X2, ∙ ∙ ∙ ∙>%n} yields
Iλbs(cγ> ≈) = ∣tvω(Xι)-cr(X1)∣ + ∣tva,(¾)-cr(X2)∣ + ... + ∣tvω(X,J-cr(¾)∣

(10.4)
We’ll call this the absolute-value scoring rule.
Figure 10.6 The absolute-value score
Both the absolute-value score and the Brier score satisfy Truth-Directedness.
We can see this by attending to the dashed elements in Figure 10.5. The dashed
line passing through (0.7,0.6) shows distributions that have the exact same
inaccuracy as (0.7,0.6) if we measure inaccuracy by the absolute-value score.17
Any point between that dashed line and (1,1) is more accurate than (0.7,0.6)
by the absolute-value score. Notice that all the points in the gray box fall into
that category, so the absolute-value score is truth-directed.
The dashed quarter-circle shows distributions that are just as inaccurate
as (0.7,0.6) if we measure inaccuracy by the Brier score. Points between the
dashed quarter-circle and (1,1) are less inaccurate than (0.7,0.6) according to
the Brier score. Again, the gray box falls into that region, so the Brier score is
truth-directed.
We can see in Figure 10.5 that the Brier score and the absolute-value score
are ordinally non-equivalent measures of inaccuracy. To bring out the contrast,
consider the distribution (0.48,0.9). Notice that Truth-Directedness doesn’t
settle whether this distribution is more or less accurate than (0.7,0.6)—given
that both X and Yhave truth-values of 1, (0.48,0.9) does better than (0.7,0.6)
with respect to Ybut worse with respect to X. We have to decide whether the Y
improvement is dramatic enough to merit the X sacrifice; Truth-Directedness
offers no guidance concerning such tradeoffs. The Brier score and absolute
value score render opposite verdicts on this point. (0.48,0.9) lies inside the
dashed line, so the absolute-value score evaluates this distribution as less
inaccuratp than (0.7,0.6). But (0.48,0.9) lies outside the quarter-circle, so the
Brier score evaluates it as more inaccurate. Here we have a concrete case in
which the absolute and Brier scores disagree in their accuracy rankings of two
distributions.
Such disagreement is especially important when it comes to the Gradational

Accuracy Argument. A Gradational Accuracy Theorem cannot be proven
for the absolute-value score; in fact, replacing the Brier score with the
absolute-value score in the statement of that theorem yields a falsehood.
(We’ll demonstrate this in the next section.) This makes the second premise
of the Gradational Accuracy Argument crucial. The first premise says that
rational credence distributions are not dominated on any acceptable scoring
rule. If all the acceptable scoring rules were like the absolute-value score, then
nonprobabilistic distributions would not be dominated and the argument
could not go through. But if we can establish that the Brier score is acceptable,
then we have an argument for probabilism.
10.3.2 Proper scoring rules
How do we decide whether the Brier score or the absolute-value score (or both,
or neither) is an acceptable measure of inaccuracy? In his (1998), Joyce offered
adequacy conditions beyond Truth-Directedness and separability that favored
the Brier score over the absolute-value score. Maher (2002), however, argued
that these properties were implausible as requirements on rationally acceptable
scoring rules, and defended the absolute-value score. So were left wondering
how to select one over the other.
Historically, the Brier score was favored over the absolute-value score
because Brier belongs to a broad class of scoring rules called the “proper”
scoring rules. To understand this notion of propriety, we first need to
understand expected inaccuracies.
Suppose I want to assess the inaccuracy of my friend Rita’s credence
distribution. We’ll simplify matters by stipulating that Rita assigns only two
credence values, crp(X) = 0.7 and crβ(Y) = 0.6. Stipulate also that I am going
to use the absolute-value score for inaccuracy measurement. We know from
Equation (10.3) that ifX and Yare both true, Rita’s Iabs score is 0.7. The trouble
is, Γm not certain whether X or Y is true; I assign positive credence to each
of the four truth-value assignments over X and Y. The table below shows my
credence distribution (cr) over the four possibilities—which is distinct from
Rita’s:
X Y cr 1aBs(c⅛5 ’)
O)1 T T 0.1 0.7
O)2 T F 0.2 0.9
0)3 F T 0.3 1.1
cu4 F F 0.4 1.6
The last column in this table shows the inaccuracy of Ritas distribution in
each of the four possible worlds according to the absolute-value score. If X
and Y are both true, her inaccuracy is 0.7; if Xis true but Y is false, its 0.9; etc.
The table tells me the inaccuracy of Rita’s distribution in each possible world.
I can’t calculate her actual inaccuracy, because Γm not certain which possible
world is actual. But I can calculate how inaccurate I expect Rita’s distribution
to be. The inaccuracy of a credence distribution is a numerical quantity, and
just like any numerical quantity I may calculate my expectation for its value.
My expectation for the Iabs value of Rita’s distribution crR is:
EIcr(c⅛) = ^ÂBS (c¾,ω1) ∙ cr(ω1) + 1ÂBS (crjR, ω2) ∙ cr(ω2)

+ Iabs(c⅛, ω3) ∙ cr(ω3) + Iabs(c⅛, ω4) ∙ cr(ω4) (10.5)
= 0.7 ∙ 0.1 + 0.9 ∙ 0.2 + 1.1 ∙ 0.3 + 1.6 ∙ 0.4 = 1.22
For each world, I calculate how inaccurate c⅛ would be in that world, then
multiply by my credence cr that that world is actual.18 Finally, I sum the results
across all four worlds. Notice that because Γm more confident in, say, worlds ω3
and ω4 than I am in worlds ωl and ω2, my expected inaccuracy for Rita’s distri
bution falls near the higher end of the values in the fourth column of the table.
In general, if an agent employs the scoring rule I to measure inaccuracy, the
agent’s credence distribution is cr, and the finite set of worlds under consider
ation is {ω1, co2,..., ωn}, the agent’s expected inaccuracy for any distribution
cr' is:
EIcr(cr') = I(cr', ω1) ■ cr(ω1) + I(cr', ω2) ■ cr(ω2) +... + I(cr', ωn) ■ cr(ωn)
(10.6)
This equation generalizes the expected inaccuracy calculation of Equation

(10.5) above. The notation EIcr(cr') indicates that we are calculating the
expected inaccuracy of credence distribution cr', as judged from the point of
view of credence distribution cr.19
Equation (10.6) allows me to calculate my expected inaccuracy for any
credence distribution, probabilistic or otherwise. If I wanted, I could even
calculate my expected inaccuracy for my own credence distribution. That is,
I could calculate EIcr(cr). But this calculation is fraught. When I calculate
my expected inaccuracy for my own current credences and compare it to the
inaccuracy I expect for someone else’s credences, I might find that I expect
that other distribution to be more accurate than my own. We will say that
distribution cr' defeats cr in expectation if
EIcr(cr') < EIcr(cr) (10.7)
Your credence distribution defeats mine in expectation when, from the point
of view of my own credence distribution, I expect yours to be less inaccurate
than mine.
Being defeated in accuracy expectation is not quite as bad as being accuracy-
dominated. Being defeated in expectation is kind of like having a twin sister
who takes all the same classes as you but has a better GPA. (Being accuracy-
dominated is like your twin’s getting a better grade than you in every single
class.) Still, being defeated in expectation is a rational flaw. Joyce writes:
If, relative to a person’s own credences, some alternative system of beliefs

has a lower expected epistemic [inaccuracy], then, by her own estimation,
that system is preferable from the epistemic perspective. This puts her in
an untenable doxastic situation. She has a prima facie epistemic reason,
grounded in her beliefs, to think that she should not be relying on those very
beliefs. This is a probabilistic version of Moore’s paradox. Just as a rational
person cannot fully believe “X but I don’t believe X” so a person cannot
rationally hold a set of credences that require her to estimate that some other
set has higher epistemic utility. [Such a] person is... in this pathological
position: her beliefs undermine themselves. (2009, p. 277)
The idea that rational agents avoid being defeated in expectation is related to
our earlier weather-forecaster discussion of stability and credence elicitation.
Lewis (1971) calls a distribution that assigns itself the highest expected accu
racy immodest. (“When asked which method has the best estimated accuracy,
the immodest method answers: T have’. ”) He then relates immodesty to an
agent’s epistemic goals:
If you wish to maximize accuracy in choosing a [credence-assignment]

method, and you have knowingly given your trust to any but an immodest
method, how can you justify staying with the method you have chosen? If
you really trust your method, and you really want to maximize accuracy, you
should take your method’s advice and maximize accuracy by switching to
some other method that your original method recommends. If that method is
also not immodest, and you trust it, and you still want to maximize accuracy,
you should switch again; and so on, unless you happen to hit upon an
immodest method. Immodesty is a condition of adequacy because it is a
necessary condition for stable trust. (1971, p. 62)
These arguments from Joyce and Lewis support the following principle:
Admissibles Not Defeated: If an agents credence distribution is rationally

permissible, and she measures inaccuracy with an acceptable scor
ing rule, then there will not exist any distribution that she expects
to be more accurate than her own.
Admissibles Not Defeated says that under an acceptable scoring rule, no

credence distribution that is rationally permissible will take itself to be defeated
in expectation by another distribution.20
Admissibles Not Defeated relates two elements: a credence distribution
and a scoring rule. If we’ve already settled on an acceptable scoring rule,
we can use Admissibles Not Defeated to test the rational permissibility of
a credence distribution. But we can also argue in the other direction: If we
know a particular credence distribution is rational, we can use Admissibles
Not Defeated to argue that particular scoring rules are not acceptable.
For example, suppose Γm certain a fair die has just been rolled, but
I know nothing about the outcome. I entertain six propositions, one for
each possible outcome of the roll, and let’s imagine that I assign each of
those propositions a credence of 1/6. That is, my credence distribution cr
assigns cr(l) = cr(2) = cr(3) = cr(4) = cr(5) = cr(6) = 1/6. This seems at least
a rationally permissible distribution in my situation.
But now suppose that, in addition to having this perfectly permissible
credence distribution, I also use the absolute-value scoring rule to assess
accuracy. I entertain six possible worlds—call them α)1 through ct)6, with the
subscripts indicating how the roll comes out in a given world. In world ω1, the
roll comes out one, so tvωι(l) = 1 while the tvωι-value of each of the other
outcomes is zero. Thus we have
Iabs(cγ, ω1) = 11 - 1 /61 + 5 ■ ∣0 - 1/61 = 10/6 = 5/3 (10.8)
A bit of reflection will show that Iabs(cγ, ω2) through Iabs(cγ, ω6) also equal
5/3, for similar reasons. Recalling that I assign credence 1/6 to each of the six
possible worlds, my expected inaccuracy for my own credence distribution is
EIcr(cr) = 6 ∙ (5/3 ∙ 1/6) = 5/3 (10.9)
Next I consider my crazy friend Ned, who has the same evidence as me
but assigns credence 0 to each of the six roll-outcome propositions. That
is, Ned’s distribution crN assigns crw(l) = crw(2) = crw(3) = cηv(4) = crw(5) =
cγn(6) = 0. How inaccurate do I expect Ned to be? Again, in ω1, tvωι(l) = 1
while the tva,1-value of each other outcome is 0. So
Iabs(¾,01) = ∣1 - 0∣ + 5 ∙ ∣0 - 0∣ = 1 (10.10)
Similar calculations show that, as measured by the absolute-value score, in each

possible world Ned’s distribution will have an inaccuracy of 1. When I calculate
my expected inaccuracy for Ned, I get
EIcr(crw) = 6 ∙ (1 ∙ 1/6) = 1 (10.11)
And now we run into a problem: 1 is less than 5/3. If I calculate inaccuracy
using the absolute-value rule, I will expect Ned’s distribution to be less inac
curate than my own; my credence distribution is defeated in expectation by
Ned’s. Yet Ned’s distribution isn’t better than mine in any epistemic sense—
in fact, the Principal Principle would say that my distribution is rationally
required while his is rationally forbidden! Something has gone wrong, and it
isn’t the credences I assigned. Instead, it’s the scoring rule I used to compare
my credences with Ned’s.
We can use this example to construct an argument against the absolute
value score as an acceptable scoring rule. In the example, my credence dis
tribution is rationally permissible. According to Admissibles Not Defeated, a
rationally permissible distribution cannot be defeated in expectation on any
acceptable scoring rule. On the absolute-value rule, my credence distribution
is defeated in expectation (by Ned’s). So the absolute-value scoring rule is not
an acceptable inaccuracy measure. (This argument is similar to an argument
we made against calibration as an accuracy measure, on the grounds that
calibration made perfectly rational forecaster credences look unstable and
therefore irrational.)
The Ned example cannot be used to make a similar argument against the
Brier score. Exercise 10.4 shows that if I had used the Brier score, I would have
expected my own credence distribution to be more accurate than Ned’s. In fact,
the Brier score is an example of a proper scoring rule:
Proper Scoring Rule: A scoring rule is proper just in case any agent with a
probabilistic credence distribution who uses that rule takes herself
to defeat in expectation every other distribution over the same set
of propositions.
The absolute-value scoring rule is not proper. The Brier score is: a probabilistic
agent who uses the Brier score will always expect herself to do better with
respect to accuracy than any other distribution she considers.21 The Brier score
is not the only scoring rule with this feature. For the sake of illustration, here’s
another proper scoring rule:22
Ilog(cγ, ω) = [—log(l - ∣tvω(X1) - cr(X1)∣)] + ...

+ [-log(l - ∣tvω(Xn) - cr(Xπ)∣)]
Historically, the Brier score has been favored over the absolute-value score
for inaccuracy measurement because Brier is a proper scoring rule.23 Of
course, propriety gives us no means of choosing between the Brier score and
other proper scores such as the logarithmic rule of Equation (10.12). But it
turns out we don’t need to. Predd et al. (2009) showed that a Gradational
Accuracy Theorem can be proven for any separable, proper scoring rule (not
just the Brier score). So, for instance, on the logarithmic scoring rule any
non-probabilistic credence distribution will be accuracy-dominated by some
probabilistic distribution over the same propositions, but no probabilistic
distribution will be dominated. The same is not true for the absolute-value
score. In fact, if you look back to the Crazy Ned example, you’ll find that
Crazy Ned’s non-probabilistic distribution accuracy-dominates my probabilis
tic distribution cr. In each of the six possible worlds, Iabs(cγn, ω) = 1 while
IABS(cr,O)) = 5/3. On an improper scoring rule, a non-probabilistic distribu
tion may accuracy-dominate a probabilistic one.
10.3.3 Are improper rules unacceptable?
We now have a clear argumentative path to probabilism. Suppose we establish

that all acceptable scoring rules are proper. Then, regardless of any further
distinctions we might make among the proper rules, it will turn out that all
nonprobabilistic credence distributions can be accuracy-dominated, while no
probabilistic distributions can be. Given Admissibles Not Dominated, we will
be able to establish that credence distributions violating the probability axioms
are irrational. So can we use propriety as an adequacy criterion for scoring
rules?
A proper scoring rule is one on which probabilistic distributions always
expect themselves to be more accurate than the alternatives. But why focus
on what probabilistic distributions expect? Inaccuracy measurement has many
applications, and in many of those applications (including one we’ll see in

Section 10.5) it is already assumed that probabilistic credence distributions
are rational. In such situations we want an accuracy measure that interacts
well with probabilistic distributions, so proper scoring rules are a natural fit,
and it’s traditional to apply the Brier score because of its propriety. But when
an inaccuracy measure is used to argue for probabilism—as in the Gradational
Accuracy Argument—it seems question-begging to privilege probabilistic dis
tributions in selecting that scoring rule. For instance, our Crazy Ned argument
against the absolute-value score started by assuming that my probabilistic
distribution assigning credence 1/6 to each possible die-roll outcome was
rationally permissible. We then criticized the absolute-value score on the
grounds that it made that distribution look unstable and therefore irrational.
Yet this criticism looks circular in the course of a debate about the rational
status of credences satisfying the probability axioms.
In his (2009), Joyce moved from his old reasons for favoring the Brier score
to a new approach that explicitly begins with the rational permissibility of
probabilistic distributions. While I won’t go into the specifics of that argument
here, it takes as a premise that given any numerical distribution satisfying the
probability axioms, there exists some situation in which it would be rationally
permissible for an agent to assign those values as her credences. Admittedly,
this premise—that probabilistic credences are rationally permitted—is weaker
than the ultimate conclusion of Joyce’s accuracy-dominance argument—that
probabilistic credences are rationally required. Still, without any independent
support for the premise, it feels like we’re assuming the rationality of proba
bilistic credences in order to prove the rationality of probabilistic credences. It
sounds like Linearity In, Linearity Out to me.24
Joyce does try to provide independent support for his premise. He argues
that for any probabilistic distribution, we could imagine a situation in which
an agent is rationally certain that those values reflect the objective chances of
the propositions in question. By the Principal Principle, the agent would then
be rationally required to assign the relevant values as her credences.
Yet recall our characters Mr. Prob, Mr. Bold, and Mr. Weak. Mr. Prob
satisfies the probability axioms, while Mr. Bold violates Finite Additivity by
having his credence in each proposition be the square-root of Mr. Prob’s
credence in that proposition. Mr. Bold happily assigns a higher credence to
every uncertain proposition than Mr. Prob does. In arguing for probabilism,
we look to establish that Mr. Bold’s (and Mr. Weak’s) credences are rationally
forbidden. If we could establish that rational credences must match the numer
ical values of known frequencies or objective chances, then in many situations
10∙4 DO WE REALLY NEED FINITE ADDITIVITY? 361
Mr. Bold’s distribution could be ruled out immediately, because frequencies

and chances must each be additive.25 But part of Mr. Bold’s boldness is that
even when he and Mr. Prob are both certain that a particular proposition has
a particular nonextreme chance, he’s willing to assign that proposition a higher
credence than its chance value. Mr. Bold is willing to be more confident of a
given experimental outcome than its numerical chance!
What if, when confronted with a fair die roll like the one in the Crazy
Ned example, Mr. Bold maintains that it is rationally impermissible to assign
a credence of 1/6 to each outcome? It’s not that Mr. Bold disagrees with
us about what the chances are; it’s that he disagrees with us about whether
rationally permissible credences equal the chances.26 Faced with this position,
our argument against the absolute-value score could not get off the ground,
and would not favor the Brier score over absolute-value in constructing a
Gradational Accuracy Argument. Similarly, Joyce’s argument for his premise
would go nowhere, because Mr. Bold clearly rejects the Principal Principle.27
While we might intuitively feel like Mr. Bold’s position is crazy, the accuracy
based arguments against it are question-begging.
10.4 Do we really need Finite Additivity?
Let’s step back and take a broader view of the arguments discussed so far in
this chapter. Some authors don’t think accuracy considerations are central
to assessing doxastic attitudes for rationality. But among those who embrace
an accuracy-based approach, a few principles are uncontroversial. Everyone
accepts Admissibles Not Dominated, and most authors seem okay with Admis-
sibles Not Defeated. Everyone thinks accuracy measures should be truth-
directed, and most are on board with separability. Controversy arises when we
try to put more substantive constraints on the set of acceptable scoring rules.
In order to run a gradational accuracy argument for probabilism, we need to
narrow the acceptable scoring rules to the set of proper scores (or one of the
other restricted sets Joyce considers in his 1998 and 1999). But arguments for
such a restricted set often turn out to be question-begging.
What if we didn’t try to narrow the set so far—what if we worked only with
constraints on scoring rules that are entirely uncontroversial? In Exercise 10.3,
you’ll show that as long as one’s scoring rule is truth-directed, Admissibles Not
Dominated endorses Normality and Non-Negativity as rational constraints
on credence. As usual, Finite Additivity is the most difficult Kolmogorov
axiom to establish. But an excellent (1982) paper by Dennis Lindley shows
how close we can get to full probabilism without strong constraints on our
scoring rules.
Lindley assumes Admissibles Not Dominated, then lays down some very
minimal constraints on acceptable scoring rules. I won’t work through
the details, but besides separability and Truth-Directedness he assumes
(for instance) that an acceptable scoring rule must be smooth—your score
doesn’t suddenly jump when you slightly increase or decrease your credence
in a proposition. Lindley shows that these thin constraints on scoring
rules suffice to narrow down the class of rationally permissible credence
distributions, and narrow it down more than just Normality and Non
Negativity would. In fact, every rationally permissible credence distribution is
either probabilistic (it satisfies all three Kolmogorov axioms) or can be altered
by a simple transformation into a probabilistic distribution. The permissible
credence distributions stand to the probabilistic ones in something like the
relation Mr. Bold and Mr. Weak stand to Mr. Prob. Mr. Prob satisfies Finite
Additivity; Mr. Bold and Mr. Weak don’t; but their credences can be converted
into Mr. Prob’s by a simple mathematical operation (squaring for Mr. Bold;
square-rooting for Mr. Weak).28
How should we interpret this result? One reading would be that, as long
as we rely exclusively on accuracy arguments, we will have to grant that
Mr. Bold and Mr. Weak, despite not satisfying Finite Additivity, have doxastic
attitudes just as rational as Mr. Prob’s. Rational requirements on credences
are stronger than just Normality and Non-Negativity—Lindley’s result isn’t
anything goes, and he describes some distributions that satisfy those two
constraints but are not transformable in the relevant manner into probabilities.
But the requirements we get from Lindley are not as strong as Finite Additivity,
and do not rule out Mr. Weak or Mr. Bold. So perhaps those characters are
perfectly rational, and Finite Additivity is not a rational requirement.
A second reading, however, would be that Mr. Prob, Mr. Bold, and
Mr. Weak aren’t really distinguishable characters; they don’t actually have
differing doxastic attitudes in any significant sense. We have stipulated that
upon hearing a fair coin was flipped, Mr. Prob assigns credence 1/2 to heads,
while Mr. Bold assigns 1/^2 ≈ .707. But do they have importantly different
outlooks on the world? Their distributions are ordinally equivalent—Mr. Prob
is more confident of X than Y just in case Mr. Bold is as well. And both of
them satisfy certain structural constraints, such as Normality, Non-Negativity,
and our credal Entailment rule. In real life these characters would think and
act in many of the same ways; a functionalist might argue that their doxastic
attitudes are identical.
10.4 DO WE REALLY NEED FINITE ADDITIVITY? 363
Perhaps Mr. Bold stands to Mr. Prob in much the same relation that
Fahrenheit measurements of temperature stand to Celsius. Representing tem
peratures as numbers requires us to introduce a measurement regime, which
necessitates some arbitrary choice: what numbers should we assign to waters
freezing point, to its boiling point, etc.? Whichever choices we make, the same
underlying kinetic phenomena are portrayed—they may contain different
numbers, but measurements of 0oC and 32oF describe the same state of the
world. Perhaps, instead of there being two different characters Mr. Prob
and Mr. Bold, the numerical credence distributions we’ve associated with
these characters are just two different representations of the same underlying
attitudes, utilizing two different measurement regimes. The relation between
measurement schemes wouldn’t be quite as straightforward as that between
Celsius and Fahrenheit; something more than an affine transformation is
involved. But from a mathematical point of view, getting from Mr. Prob’s
distribution to Mr. Bold’s is a simple affair. Lindley identifies a whole family of
numerical distributions that are simply transformable into probabilities, and
Mr. Bold’s is among them.
On this reading, Lindley’s result establishes Finite Additivity as a rational
requirement in the only way that could possibly matter. A rational agent’s
credences may be depicted by any one of a number of interrelated numerical
distributions, depending on the measurement conventions of the person doing
the depicting. To say that Finite Additivity is rationally required is to say that
at least one of these distributions satisfies it; it’s to say that a rational agent’s
attitudes are representable as additive, even if non-additive representations
are available as well. Lindley shows that, given minimal conditions on an
acceptable accuracy score, every admissible credence distribution either satis
fies Finite Additivity or can be transformed into a distribution that does. And
there’s nothing more substantive than this to the claim that rationality requires
Finite Additivity.29
To argue against this reading, one would have to argue that there can
be significant, cognitive differences between an individual with Mr. Prob’s
credences and one with Mr. Bold’s. If that were the case, then the difference
between particular probabilistic and non-probabilistic distributions would not
come down to just a choice among measurement schemes. We would be able
to find individuals in the world who revealed through their thought, talk, or
action that they were like Mr. Bold but not Mr. Prob, and we could have a
meaningful conversation about whether their violation of Finite Additivity
revealed them to be irrational.
In Chapter 1, I motivated the move from comparative to quantitative

confidence models by noting that agents with ordinally equivalent opinions
may nevertheless disagree on the relative sizes of confidence gaps. Given a
tautology, a contradiction, and the proposition that a fair coin came up heads,
Mr. Prob and Mr. Bold will rank these three propositions in the same order
with respect to confidence. But if we asked an agent like Mr. Prob, he might
say that he is more confident in heads than in the contradiction by the same
amount that he is more confident in the tautology than in heads. A Bold
type wouldn’t say that. (Mr. Bold has a larger gap between heads and the
contradiction than he has between heads and the tautology.) These sorts of
conversations do happen in the real world; perhaps they establish the doxastic
differences we seek. Yet I worry about basing our case on agents’ self-reports
of their psychological states, which are notoriously unreliable. And I worry
especially about relying upon conversations we’ve observed in a culture like
ours, which teaches people to measure confidence on something like a linear
percentage scale from a very young age.
In Part III of this book, I suggested we assess Bayesian epistemology by
considering its applications; I focused especially on applications to confirma
tion and decision theory. Differences in confidence gaps between ordinally
equivalent credence distributions may be highly significant when it comes to
decision theory. If I am offered a gamble that yields a small profit on P but
a major loss on ~P, my decision will depend not only on whether I find P
more likely than ~P, but also on how much more likely I find it. So practical
rationality may make confidence gap sizes observable in behavior.
Yet we saw in Chapter 8 that the differences between Mr. Prob’s and
Mr. Bold’s credence distributions can be practically neutralized if those agents
apply different valuation functions. If Mr. Prob combines his credences and
utilities to generate preferences by maximizing expected value, and Mr. Bold
combines his credences and identical utilities to generate preferences using
a different function, Mr. Prob and Mr. Bold will wind up with the same
preferences among acts. In that case, the numerical differences—including
confidence-gap differences—between Mr. Prob’s and Mr. Bold’s credences will
make no difference to how they behave. Moreover, Mr. Prob and Mr. Bold
will both satisfy the preference axioms that make decision theory’s account of
practical rationality appealing. So decision theory seems perfectly compatible
with reading Mr. Prob and Mr. Bold as just different representations of the
same acting individual.
The situation seems to me much more open-ended when it comes to
confirmation theory. As with decision theory, confirmation results depend
10.4 DO WE REALLY NEED FINITE ADDITIVITY? 365
not just on confidence rankings but also on quantitative relations among

numerical credence values. In Section 6.4.2 we investigated credence distri
butions relative to which observing a black raven more strongly confirms the
hypothesis that all ravens are black than does observing a non-black, non
raven. The Bayesian solution to the Ravens Paradox presented there describes
two conditions on such distributions (Equations (6.10) and (6.11)). The second
of those conditions is about the sizes of gaps—it asks whether learning a
particular hypothesis would change how much more confident you were in
one proposition than another. Despite their ordinal agreements, characters
like Mr. Prob and Mr. Bold have different ratios between their credences
in particular propositions. So Equation (6.11) might be satisfied by one of
them but not by the other. This means that if Mr. Prob and Mr. Bold apply
traditional Bayesian confirmation measures, they may disagree on whether
the ravens hypothesis is more strongly confirmed by a black raven or by a red
herring, which seems like a genuine difference in attitudes.30 Confirmation
is one of many non-decision-theoretic applications of Bayesian epistemology
(coherence of a belief set, measuring information content, etc.) where it seems
like confidence-gap sizes might make a real difference.
Perhaps in each of those applications we could play a trick similar to the one
we used in decision theory. In decision theory we compensated for Mr. Bolds
non-additive credence distribution by having him use a non-standard valua
tion function; the combination yielded act preferences identical to Mr. Prob’s.
What happens if Mr. Bold also uses a non-traditional confirmation measure?
Perhaps there’s an odd-looking confirmation measure Mr. Bold could apply
which, despite Mr. Bold’s credence differences with Mr. Prob, would leave
the two agents with identical judgments about confirmational matters.31 It’s
unclear, though, how such a non-traditional measure would stand up to the
arguments, intuitive considerations, and adequacy conditions that have been
deployed in the debate over confirmation measures. I know of no literature on
this subject.
Where does that leave Finite Additivity as a rational constraint? As it stands,
I think that applications of Bayesianism to theoretical rationality (how we
infer, how we reason, how we determine what supports what) have a better
chance of drawing real contrasts between Mr. Prob and Mr. Bold than practical
applications do. It’s also worth noting that Chapter 6’s confirmation-theoretic
results rely heavily on credence distributions’ actually satisfying Finite Addi
tivity. So it may turn out that an appealing account of agents’ theoretical
judgments will assess those judgments as rational only if the agent’s attitudes
are genuinely probabilistic. But that is pure speculation on my part.
10.5 An accuracy argument for Conditionalization
Up to this point we’ve considered accuracy-based arguments for only

synchronic Bayesian norms. We’ve found that establishing probabilism on
non-circular grounds is somewhat difficult. But if you’ve already accepted
probabilism, a remarkable accuracy-based argument for updating by
Conditionalization becomes available. The relevant result was proven by
Hilary Greaves and David Wallace (2006).32 We begin by restricting our
attention to proper scoring rules. Doing so is non-circular in this context,
because we imagine that we’ve already accepted probabilism as rationally
required. This allows us to appeal to the fact that proper scores are credence
eliciting for probabilistic credences as a reason to prefer them.
Greaves and Wallace think of Conditionalization as a plan one could adopt
for howto change one’s credences in response to one’s future evidence. Imagine
we have an agent at time ti with probabilistic credence distribution cη, who
is certain she will gain some evidence before t7∙. Imagine also that there’s a
finite partition of propositions {E1,E2>∙ ∙ ∙,-En} in A such that the agent is
certain the evidence gained will be a member of that partition. The agent can
then form a plan for how she intends to update—she says to herself, “If I get
evidence E1, I’ll update my credences to such-and-such”; “If I get evidence E2,
I’ll update my credences to so-and-so”; etc. In other words, an updating plan
is a function from members of the evidence partition to crj∙ distributions she
would assign were she to receive that evidence. Conditionalization is the plan
that sets cr7∙(∙) = cr,∙(∙ ∣ Em) in response to learning Em between ti and ty
Next, Greaves and Wallace show how, given a particular updating plan,
the agent can calculate from her point of view at ti an expectation for how
inaccurate that plan will be.33 Roughly, the idea is to figure out what credence
distribution the plan would generate in each possible world, measure how
inaccurate that distribution would be in that world, multiply by the agent’s
ti confidence in that possible world, then sum the results. More precisely, the
expectation calculation proceeds in six steps:
1. Pick a possible world ω to which the agent assigns nonzero credence at ti.
2. Figure out which member of the partition {E1, E1, ..., En} the agent will
receive as evidence between ti and t7∙ if ω turns out to be the actual world.
(Because possible worlds are maximally specified, there will always be a
unique answer to this question.) We’ll call that piece of evidence E.
3. Take the updating plan being evaluated and figure out what credence
distribution it recommends to the agent if she receives evidence E
10.5 AN accuracy argument for conditionalization 367
between ti and t7∙. This is the credence distribution the agent will assign
at tj if ω is the actual world and she follows the plan in question. We’ll
call that distribution crj∙.
4. Whichever scoring rule we’ve chosen (among the proper scoring rules),
use it to determine the inaccuracy of cr;- if ω is the actual world. (In other
words, calculate I(cr7∙, ω).)
5. Multiply that inaccuracy value by the agent’s ti credence that ω is the
actual world. (In other words, calculate I(crj∙, ω) ∙ cη(ω).)
6. Repeat this process for each world to which the agent assigns positive
credence at ti, then sum the results.
This calculation has the ti agent evaluate an updating plan by determining

what cr7∙ distribution that plan would recommend in each possible world. She
assesses the recommended distibution’s accuracy in that world, weighting the
result by her confidence that the world in question will obtain. Repeating this
process for each possible world and summing the results, she develops an
overall expectation of how accurate her tj credences will be if she implements
the plan.
Greaves and Wallace go on to prove the following theorem:
Accuracy Updating Theorem: For any proper scoring rule, probabilistic

distribution cη, and evidential partition in £, a ti agent who
calculates expected inaccuracies as described above will find Con
ditionalization more accurate than any updating plan that diverges
from it.
The Accuracy Updating Theorem demonstrates that from her vantage point at
ti, an agent with probabilistic credences and a proper scoring rule will expect
to be most accurate at tj if she updates by Conditionalization. Given a principle
something like Admissibles Not Defeated for updating plans, we can use this
result to argue that no updating plan deviating from Conditionalization is
rationally acceptable.
Does this argument show that the agent is rationally required to update
by Conditionalization between ti and i)? If she’s interested in minimizing
expected inaccuracy, then at ti she should certainly plan to update by
conditionalizing—of all the updating plans available to the agent at ti, she
expects Conditionalization to be most accurate. Yet being required to make
a plan is different from being required to implement it. Even if the agent
remembers at tj what she planned at ti, why should the tj agent do what her
ti self thought best? Among other things, the tj agent has more evidence than
her ti self did.
This is the same problem we identified in Chapter 9 for diachronic Dutch
Strategy arguments. The Accuracy Updating Theorem establishes a synchronic
point about which policy a ti agent concerned with accuracy will hope her tj self
applies.34 But absent a substantive premise that agents are rationally required
later on to honor their earlier plans, we cannot move from this synchronic point
to a genuinely diachronic norm like Conditionalization.
10.6 Exercises
Problem 10.1. On each of ten consecutive mornings, a weather forecaster

reports her credence that it will rain that day. Below is a record of the credences
she reported and whether it rained that day:
Day 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
cr(rain) 1/2 1/4 1/3 1/3 1/2 1/4 1/3 1 1/2 1/4
Rain? Y N N N Y Y N Y N N
Unfortunately, the forecaster’s reports turned out not to be perfectly calibrated

over this ten-day span. But now imagine she is given the opportunity to go
back and change two of the credences she reported over those ten days.35
What two changes should she make so that her reports over the span become
perfectly calibrated? (Assume that changing her credence report does not
change whether it rains on a given day.)
Problem 10.2. Throughout this problem, assume the Brier score is used
to measure inaccuracy.
(a) Suppose we have an agent who assigns credences to two propositions,
X and Y, and those credences are between 0 and 1 (inclusive). Draw
a box diagram (like those in Figures 10.2, 10.3, and 10.4) illustrating
the possible distributions she might assign over these two propositions.
Then shade in the parts of the box in which cr(X) ≥ cr(Y).
(b) Now suppose that YI=X. Use your diagram from part (a) to show
that if an agents credence distribution violates the Entailment rule
by assigning cr(Y) > cr(X), there will exist a distribution distinct from
hers that is more accurate than hers in every logically possible world.
(Hint: When Yt=X, only three of the four corners of your box represent
logically possible worlds.)
10.6 EXERCISES 369
(c) In Exercise 9.2 we encountered Roxanne, who assigns the following

credences (among others) at a given time:
cr(A & B) = 0.5 cr(A) = 0.1
Construct an alternate credence distribution over these two proposi

tions that is more accurate than Roxannes in every logically possible
world. (Hint: Let A & B play the role of proposition Y, and A play the
role of X.) To demonstrate that you’ve succeeded, calculate Roxannes
inaccuracy and the alternate distributions inaccuracy in each of the
three available possible worlds.
Problem 10.3. Assuming only that our inaccuracy scoring rule is truth-
directed, argue for each of the following from Admissibles Not Dominated:
(a) Non-Negativity
(b) Normality
Problem 10.4. Return to the Crazy Ned example of Section 10.3.2, in which
you assign 1/6 credence to each of the six possible die roll outcomes while Ned
assigns each a credence of 0. This time we’ll use the Brier score (rather than the
absolute-value score) to measure inaccuracy in this example.
(a) Calculate the inaccuracy of your credence distribution in a world in
which the die comes up one. Then calculate Ned’s inaccuracy in that
world.
(b) Calculate your expected inaccuracy for your own distribution, then
calculate your expected inaccuracy for Neds distribution.
(c) How do your results illustrate the fact that the Brier score is a proper
scoring rule?
Problem 10.5. Suppose that at ti an agent assigns credences to exactly four

propositions, as follows:
proposition cri
P&Q 0.1
P&-Q 0.2
-P&Q 0.3
-P&-Q 0.4
The agent is certain that between ti and tj∙, she will learn whether Q is true or
false.
(a) Imagine the agent has a very bizarre updating plan: No matter what
she learns between ti and tj, she will assign the exact same credences
to the four propositions at tj that she did at ti. Using the six-step process
described in Section 10.5, and the Brier score to measure inaccuracy,
calculate the agents expected inaccuracy for this updating plan from
her point of view at ti. (Hint: You only need to consider four possible
worlds, one for each of the four possible truth-value assignments to the
propositions P and Q.)
(b) Now imagine instead that the agent’s updating plan is to generate her
tj credences by conditionalizing her ti credences on the information
she learns between the two times. Calculate the agents ti expected
inaccuracy for this updating plan (using the Brier score to measure
inaccuracy once more).
(c) How do your results illustrate Greaves and Wallace s Accuracy Updating
Theorem?
Problem 10.6. In this exercise you will prove a limited version of

Greaves and Wallaces Accuracy Updating Theorem. Suppose we have an agent
who assigns credences to exactly four propositions, as follows:
proposition cη <ΞU
P&Q s w
P&—Q t X
-P&Q u y
-P&-Q V z
where cri is probabilistic and regular. Suppose also that the agent is certain at
ti that between then and tj she will learn the truth about whether Q obtains.
Finally, assume the agent uses the Brier score to measure inaccuracy.
(a) If the agent updates by Conditionalization and learns Q between ti and
tj, what will be the values of w, x, y, and z (expressed in terms of s, t, u,
and v)?
(b) We will now systematically consider updating plans that diverge from
Conditionalization, and show that for each such plan, there exists an
alternative plan that the agent expects at ti to have lower inaccuracy.
To begin, suppose that the agent has an updating plan on which she
assigns a nonzero value to either x or z in the event that she learns Q
is true. Show that if we calculate expected inaccuracy using the six-step
process described in Section 10.5, she will expect this plan to have a
higher inaccuracy than the plan that assigns the same w through z values
in the event that she learns ~Q, the same w andy values if she learns Q,
but assigns 0 to both x and z if she learns Q.
(A similar argument can be made to show that the agent should assign
w = y = 0 if she learns ~Q.)
(c) Your work in part (b) allows us to restrict our attention to updating
plans that assign x = z = 0 when Q is learned. Use the Gradational
Accuracy Theorem to argue that among such plans, for any plan that
has the agent assign a non-probabilistic tj∙ distribution after learning Q,
there exists another plan that has her assign a probabilistic distribution
at t7∙ after learning Q and that she expects to have a lower inaccuracy
from her point of view at ti.
(A similar argument can be made for the agent’s learning ~Q.)
(d) Given your results in parts (b) and (c), we may now confine our
attention to updating plans that respond to learning Q by assigning a
probabilistic tj distribution with x = z = 0. Suppose we hold fixed what
such a plan assigns when the agent learns ~Q, and test different possible
assignments to w and y when the agent learns Q. Find the values of w
andy that minimize the agents ti expected inaccuracy for her updating
plan.
(Useful algebra fact: A quadratic equation of the form∕(k) = ak2 +
_b
bk + c with positive a attains its minimum when k = —.)
(e) How do the results of parts (a) and (d) confirm Greaves and Wallace’s
point that updating by Conditionalization minimizes expected inaccu
racy? (Notice that an argument similar to that of part (d) could be made
for a plan that disagrees with Conditionalization on what to do when the
agent learns ~Q.)
Problem 10.7. P Of the three kinds of arguments for probabilism we’ve

considered in this part of the book—Representation Theorem arguments,
Dutch Book arguments, and accuracy-based arguments—do you think any
of them succeeds in establishing requirements of rationality? Which type of
argument do you find most convincing? Explain your answers.
10.7 Further reading
Richard Pettigrew (2013b). Epistemic Utility and Norms for Credences.

Philosophy Compass 8, pp. 897-908
Eminently readable introduction to accuracy-based arguments for Bayesian

norms and particular arguments for probabilism and Conditionalization.
Richard Pettigrew (2016). Accuracy and the Laws of Credence. Oxford:

Oxford University Press
Book-length presentation of the entire accuracy program.
Classic Texts
Bas C. van Fraassen (1983). Calibration: A Frequency Justification for

Personal Probability. In: Physics Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. Ed. by
R. Cohen and L. Laudan. Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 295-319
Abner Shimony (1988). An Adamite Derivation of the Calculus of Proba
bility. In: Probability and Causality. Ed. by J.H. Fetzer. Dordrecht: Reidel,
pp. 151-61
Classic arguments for probabilism on calibration grounds.
Bruno de Finetti (1974). Theory of Probability. Vol. 1. New York: Wiley
Contains de Finetti’s proof of the mathematical result underlying Joyces

Gradational Accuracy Theorem.
James M. Joyce (1998). A Nonpragmatic Vindication of Probabilism. Philos

ophy of Science 65, pp. 575-603
Foundational article that first made the accuracy-dominance argument for

probabilism.
Hilary Greaves and David Wallace (2006). Justifying Conditionalization:

Conditionalization Maximizes Expected Epistemic Utility. Mind 115,
pp. 607-32
Presents the minimizing-expected-inaccuracy argument for updating by

Conditionalization.
Extended Discussion
James M. Joyce (2009). Accuracy and Coherence: Prospects for an Alethic

Epistemology of Partial Belief. In: Degrees of Belief. Ed. by Franz Huber
and Christoph Schmidt-Petri. Vol. 342. Synthese Library. Springer,
pp. 263-97
Joyce further discusses the arguments in his earlier accuracy article and various
conditions yielding privileged classes of accuracy scores.
Dennis V. Lindley (1982). Scoring Rules and the Inevitability of Probability.

International Statistical Review 50, pp. 1-26
Paper discussed in Section 10.4 in which Lindley shows that even with very
minimal conditions on acceptable accuracy scores, every rationally permis
sible credence distribution is either probabilistic or can be converted to a
probabilistic distribution via a simple transformation.
Hannes Leitgeb and Richard Pettigrew (2010a). An Objective Justification

of Bayesianism I: Measuring Inaccuracy. Philosophy of Science 77,201-35
Hannes Leitgeb and Richard Pettigrew (2010b). An Objective Justification of
Bayesianism II: The Consequences of Minimizing Inaccuracy. Philosophy
of Science 77, pp. 236-72
Presents alternative accuracy-based arguments for synchronic and diachronic

Bayesian norms.
Kenny Easwaran (2013). Expected Accuracy Supports Conditionalization—

and Conglomerability and Reflection. Philosophy of Science 80,119-42
Shows how expected inaccuracy minimization can be extended in the infinite

case to support such controversial norms as Reflection and Conglomerability.
Hilary Greaves (2013). Epistemic Decision Theory. Mind 122, pp. 915-52
Jennifer Carr (2017). Epistemic Utility Theory and the Aim of Belief. Philos
ophy and Phenomenological Research 95, pp. 511-34
Selim Berker (2013). Epistemic Teleology and the Separateness of Proposi
tions. Philosophical Review 122, pp. 337-93
These papers criticize the teleological epistemology of accuracy-based argu

ments for rational constraints.
Notes
1. In Chapter 9 I suggested that rational appraisals concern how things look from the
agent’s own point of view. (It’s important that an agent be able to tell for herself that her
credences leave her susceptible to a Dutch Book.) An agent is often unable to assess the
accuracy of her own beliefs, since she lacks access to the truth-values of the relevant
propositions. This makes the a priori aspect of the argument for Belief Consistency
crucial—an agent with inconsistent beliefs can see from her own standpoint that at least
some of those beliefs are false, regardless of what contingent facts she may or may not
have at her disposal.
2. Small technical note: In the definition of calibration, we ignore values of x that the
distribution doesn’t assign to any propositions. Shimin Zhao also pointed out to me
that, while we define calibration for any real x, an agent who assigns credences over a
finite set of propositions can be perfectly calibrated only if all of her credence values are
rational numbers!
3. Like so many notions in Bayesian epistemology, the idea of accuracy as calibration was
hinted at in Ramsey. In the latter half of his (1931), Ramsey asks what it would be for
credences “to be consistent not merely with one another but also with the facts” (p. 93).
He later writes, “Granting that [an agent] is going to think always in the same way about
all yellow toadstools, we can ask what degree of confidence it would be best for him to
have that they are unwholesome. And the answer is that it will in general be best for his
degree of belief that a yellow toadstool is unwholesome to be equal to the proportion
of yellow toadstools which are in fact unwholesome” (p. 97).
4. There’s also been some interesting empirical research on how well-calibrated agents’
credences are in the real world. A robust finding is that everyday people tend to be
overconfident in their opinions—only, say, 70% of the propositions to which they
assign credence 0.9 turn out to be true. (For a literature survey see Lichtenstein,
Fischoff, and Phillips 1982.) On the other hand, Murphy and Winkler (1977) found
weather forecasters’ precipitation predictions to be fairly well calibrated—even before
the introduction of computer, satellite, and radar improvements made since the 1970s!
5. This example is taken from Joyce (1998).
6. If you’re a Regularity devotee (Section 4.2), you may think the forecaster shouldn’t
assign absolute certainty to snow—what she sees out the window could be clever
Hollywood staging! Setting the forecaster’s credence in snow to 1 makes the numbers in
this example simpler, but the same point could be made using an example with regular
credences.
7. Compare the practice in statistics of treating a proposition as a dichotomous random
variable with value 1 if true and 0 if false.
8. Notice that we’re keeping the numerical values of the distribution cr constant as we
measure inaccuracy relative to different possible worlds. Ibr(cγ, co) doesn’t measure the
notes 375
inaccuracy in world co of the credence distribution the agent would have in that world.
Instead, given a particular credence distribution cr of interest to us, we will use Ibr(cγ, cυ)
to measure how inaccurate that particular numerical distribution is relative to each of a
number of distinct possible worlds.
9. In this chapter we will apply scoring rules only to credence distributions over finitely
many propositions. If you’re wondering what happens when infinitely many proposi
tions get involved, see (Kelley ms) for some important results and useful references.
10. Named after George Brier—another meteorologist!—who discussed it in his (1950).
11. Notice also that each Xi contributes equally to the sum IBR(cr, cυ). Thus Ibr treats each
proposition to which the agent assigns a credence in some sense equally. If you thought
it was more important to be accurate about some Xj than others, you might want to
insert constants into the sum weighting the (tv(X∣) — cr(X1∙))2 terms differently. The
main mathematical results of this chapter would go through even with such weightings;
this follows from a lemma called “Stability” at Greaves and Wallace (2006, p. 627).
12. The second part of the Gradational Accuracy Theorem stands to the first part much as
the Converse Dutch Book Theorem stands to the Dutch Book Theorem (Chapter 9).
13. Strictly speaking there are four world-types here, a world being assigned to a type
according to the truth-values it gives X and Y. But since all the worlds of a particular
type will enter into accuracy calculations in the same way, I will simplify discussion by
pretending there is exactly one world in each type.
14. Notice that a similar argument could be made for any cr lying outside the square
defined by ω4, ω2, co3, and co1. So this argument also shows how to accuracy-dominate
a distribution that violates our Maximum rule.
One might wonder why we need an argument that credence-values below 0 or above
1 are irrational—didn’t we stipulate our scale for measuring degrees of belief such
that no value could fall outside that range? On some ways of understanding credence,
arguments for Non-Negativity are indeed superfluous. But one might define credences
purely in terms of their role in generating preferences (as discussed in Chapter 8) or
sanctioning bets (as discussed in Chapter 9). In that case, there would be no immediate
reason why a credence couldn’t take on a negative value.
15. Suppose you assign credences to three propositions X, Y, and Z such that X and Y are
mutually exclusive and Z =11= X V Y. We establish X-, Y-, and Z-axes, then notice that
only three points in this space represent logically possible worlds: (0,0,0), (1,0,1),
and (0,1,1). The distributions in this space satisfying Finite Additivity all lie on the
plane passing through those three points. If your credence distribution cr violates Finite
Additivity, it will not lie on that plane. We can accuracy-dominate it with distribution
cr' that is the closest point to cr lying on the plane. If you pick any one of the three
logically possible worlds (call it co), it will form a right triangle with cr and cr', with the
segment from cr to co as the hypotenuse and the segment from cr' to co as a leg. That
makes cr' closer than cr to co.
16. To give the reader a sense of how the second part of the Gradational Accuracy Theorem
is proven, I will now argue that no point lying inside the box in Figure 10.4 and on
the illustrated diagonal may be accuracy-dominated with respect to worlds co2 and
co3. In other words, I’ll show how satisfying Negation wards off accuracy domination
(assuming one measures inaccuracy by the Brier score).
Start with distribution cr' in Figure 10.4, which lies on the diagonal and therefore
satisfies Negation. Imagine drawing two circles through cr', one centered on ω2 and
the other centered on cυ3. To improve upon the accuracy of cr' in ω2, one would have to
choose a distribution closer to ω2 than cr'—in other words, a distribution lying inside
the circle centered on ca2. To improve upon the accuracy of cr' in a>3, one would have
to choose a distribution lying inside the circle centered on co3. But since cr' lies on the
line connecting c⅛ and ω3, those circles are tangent to each other at cr', so there is no
point lying inside both circles. Thus no distribution is more accurate than cr' in both
co2 and ω3.
17. The dashed line is like a contour line on a topographical map. There, every point on a
given contour line lies at the same altitude. Here, every point on the dashed line has the
same level of inaccuracy.
18. Here Γm employing a convention that αcr(ω1),' is the value cr assigns to the proposition
that X and Y have the truth-values they possess in world ca1. In other words, cr(α>1) is
the cr-value on the first line of the probability table.
19. Readers familiar with decision theory (perhaps from Chapter 7) may notice that the
expected-inaccuracy calculation of Equation (10.6) strongly resembles Savage’s formula
for calculating expected utilities. Here a “state” is a possible world ωi that might be
actual, an “act” is assigning a particular credence distribution cr', and an “outcome” is
the inaccuracy that results if ωi is actual and one assigns cr'. Savage’s expected utility
formula was abandoned by Jeffrey because it yielded implausible results when states
and acts were not independent. Might we have a similar concern about Equation (10.6)?
What if the act of assigning a particular credence distribution is not independent of the
state that a particular one of the ωi obtains? Should we move to a Jeffrey-style expected
inaccuracy calculation, and perhaps from there to some analogue of Causal Decision
Theory? As of this writing, this question is only just beginning to be explored in the
accuracy literature, in articles such as Greaves (2013) and Konek and Levinstein (2019).
20. Notice that Admissibles Not Defeated entails our earlier principle Admissibles Not
Dominated. If distribution cr' accuracy-dominates distribution cr, it will also have a
lower expected inaccuracy than cr from cr’s point of view (because it will have a lower
inaccuracy in every possible world). So being accuracy-dominated is a particularly bad
way of being defeated in expectation. (As in sports, it’s bad enough to get defeated, but
even worse to get dominated.) Admissibles Not Defeated says that permissible credence
distributions are never defeated in expectation; this entails that they are also never
dominated.
21. On a proper scoring rule, a probabilistic agent will always expect her own accuracy to
be better than that of any other distribution. On the absolute-value rule, a probabilistic
agent will sometimes expect other distributions to be better than her own. Some scoring
rules fall in the middle: on such rales, a probabilistic agent will never expect anyone else
to do better than herself, but she may find other distributions whose expected accuracy
is tied with her own. To highlight this case, some authors distinguish “strictly proper”
scoring rules from just “proper” ones. On a strictly proper scoring rule a probabilistic
agent will never find any other distribution that ties hers for accuracy expectation; a
merely proper rule allows such ties. I am using the term “proper” the way these authors
use “strictly proper”. For an assessment of how the distinction between propriety and
notes 377
striet propriety interacts with the results of this chapter and with varying notions of
accuracy dominance (such as “strong” vs. “weak” accuracy domination), see Schervish,
Seidenfeld, and Kadane (2009). For an argument that one’s commitments to propriety
and strict propriety should stand or fall together, see Campbell-Moore and Levinstein
(2021).
22. This rule is intended to be applied only to cr-values between 0 and 1 (inclusive).
23. To better understand the Brier score, we visualize it as the Euclidean distance between
two points in space. Strictly speaking, though, Euclidean distance is the square-root of
the Brier score. As long as we make only ordinal comparisons (whether one distribution
is more accurate than, or just as accurate as, another distribution in a given world), that
square-root doesn’t matter. So all the arguments in previous sections (including the
arguments that non-probabilistic distributions can be dominated) go through either
way. Bι∣t square-roots can make a difference to expectation calculations. It turns out that
while the Brier score is a proper scoring rule, its square-root (the Euclidean distance)
is not.
24. From a Linearity-In, Linearity-Out point of view, Joyce’s (2009) argument does have
one advantage over attempts to favor the Brier score using propriety considerations. If
you’re truly worried about making linearity assumptions in the process of establishing
probabilism, you might be concerned that Admissibles Not Defeated centers around
linear expectations of inaccuracy. Joyce’s (2009) argument runs from his premise to
probabilism using only Admissibles Not Dominated along the way, without invoking
Admissibles Not Defeated at all.
25. See note 4 in Chapter 5.
26. Compare Fine (1973, Sect. IIID).
27. See Hajek (2009a) for a very different kind of objection to Joyce’s argument.
28. It’s worth comparing Lindley’s result to Cox’s Theorem (though the latter does not
invoke considerations of accuracy). Richard Cox (1946, 1961) laid down a set of
minimal constraints on an agent’s credence distribution, such as: the agent assigns
equal credences to logically equivalent propositions; the agent’s credence in ~P is a
function of her credence in P; her credence in P & Q is a function of her credence
in Q and her credence in P given Q; the latter function is twice differentiable; etc. He
then showed that any credence distribution satisfying these constraints is isomorphic
to a probabilistic distribution. For discussion of the mathematics, and of various
philosophical concerns about Cox’s conditions, see Paris (1994), Halpern (1999), Van
Horn (2003), and Colyvan (2004).
29. Γm inclined to read Lindley’s own interpretation of his result along these lines. For
one thing, Lindley titles his paper “Scoring Rules and the Inevitability of Probability”.
For another, after noting on page 8 that Admissibles Not Defeated is a kind of Pareto
optimality rule, he writes that an agent who chooses any of the distributions permitted
by that rule and a minimally acceptable scoring rule is thereby “effectively introducing
probabilities”.
30. The same goes for Bayesian results mentioned in Chapter 6, note 39 showing that a red
herring cannot confirm the ravens hypothesis to anything more than an exceedingly
weak degree. These results depend on particular credal differences and ratios being
“minute” in absolute terms, so they might go through for Mr. Prob but not for Mr. Bold
(or vice versa).
31. Since Mr. Bold’s credences are the square-root of Mr. Prob’s, an obvious move would
be to take whatever confirmation measure Mr. Prob uses and replace all of its credal
expressions with their squares.
32. As we’ll see, the Greaves and Wallace result focuses on minimizing expected inaccuracy.
For Conditionalization arguments based on accuracy-domination, see Briggs and
Pettigrew (2020) and Williams (ms). For an alternative expected-accuracy approach
to updating, see Leitgeb and Pettigrew (2010a,b).
33. It’s important that Greaves and Wallace restrict their attention to what they call
“available” updating plans. Available plans guide an agent’s credal response to her
total evidence (including the evidence she imagines she’ll receive); they do not allow
an agent to set her credences based on further factors not in evidence. For instance,
consider the updating plan according to which an agent magically assigns credence 1
to each proposition just in case it’s true and credence 0 just in case it’s false—even if
her evidence isn’t fine-grained enough to indicate the truth-values of all the relevant
propositions. This would be an excellent plan in terms of minimizing inaccuracy, but
it isn’t a feasible updating strategy for an agent going forward. This updating plan does
not count as “available” in Greaves and Wallace’s sense, and so does not compete with
Conditionalization for the most accurate updating plan.
34. Like Reflection, the resulting norm is a synchronic requirement on an agent’s attitudes
toward propositions about diachronic events.
35. Perhaps via time-machine?
PART V
CHALLENGES AND OBJECTIONS
Part V takes up prominent challenges and objections to Bayesian epistemology.

Chapters 11 and 12 concern phenomena that it feels like the Bayesian
formalism ought to be able to handle, but fails to manage in its traditional
presentation. In Chapter 11, the challenge is to model updates in which an
agent forgets information, or struggles to locate herself in time or space. In
Chapter 12, the problem is to account for the current confirmational signifi
cance of evidence previously acquired, or to allow that rational agents might
be uncertain of logical truths. In each case, we will consider modifications
of the core Bayesian rules that might allow the framework to address these
shortcomings.
Chapters 13 and 14, on the other hand, contemplate replacing traditional
Bayesianism with something else entirely. In Chapter 13, we consider whether
the Problem of the Priors motivates an entirely different statistical approach
to inductive inference, such as frequentism or likelihoodism. In Chapter 14,
we ask whether levels of confidence might best be modeled by some other
mathematical structure than a real-valued distribution over a language of
propositions. (The alternative structures we consider in that chapter still have
a role for the Kolmogorov axioms, and so strike me as part of the extended
Bayesian family.)
In each case, our first order of business will be to make precise exactly what
objection is being raised. We will often find multiple, interlocked challenges
to Bayesianism that require disambiguation. Then we will take up various pro
posals to extend or replace the Bayesian formalism to address these problems.
We will assess how well the alternatives solve problems for Bayesianism, and
suggest new problems that arise in their wake.
These chapters are largely independent of each other, and maybe read in any
order. (Though understanding the Problem of the Priors—Section 13.1—will
probably be helpful for Chapter 14.) While Chapter 13 is a fairly unified whole,
a reader with specific interests should be able to dip into just one section of any
of the other chapters and get something useful out.
Memory Loss and Self-locating
Credences
Section 4.1.1 pointed out a couple curious features of Conditionalization,

Bayesians’ traditional diachronic updating norm. First, when an agent con-
ditionalizes on a proposition that she learns, she becomes certain of that
proposition. This means that any agent who learns a piece of contingent
information and updates by conditionalization violates the Regularity Prin
ciple (Section 4.2). Second, once an agent becomes certain of a proposi
tion, further conditionalizations will keep that certainty intact. If the agent
always changes her credences by Conditionalization, she will never lose any
certainties.
These consequences of Conditionalization prove especially counterintuitive
in two types of cases we have not yet considered in this book. An agent who
gains a piece of information at one time (and perhaps becomes certain of it)
may lose that information later on, through a natural process of forgetting. Yet
this evolution of her credences does not comport with Conditionalization. Or
a fact that was once secure for an agent may slide out from under her: while I
may be rationally certain right now that today is Sunday, this certainty will be
less rational in twenty-four hours.
So we have two types of problematic cases for updating by Conditionaliza
tion: cases involving memory loss, and cases involving self-locating propo
sitions (like “today is Sunday”). This chapter will consider each type of case
in turn. First we’ll consider whether memory loss is a rational phenomenon
capable of generating genuine counterexamples to Conditionalization. Then
we’ll consider how Conditionalization could be amended to take forgetting
into account. Next we’ll turn to cases involving self-location, asking whether
the problem there is created by Conditionalization or by some other fea
ture of our Bayesian system. Then we’ll once more consider alterations to
Conditionalization to fix the problem. Throughout these discussions, we’ll
also assess whether other Bayesian tools (Jeffrey Conditionalization, Dutch
Strategies, accuracy arguments, etc.) can help us address memory loss and
self-location.

382 MEMORY LOSS AND SELF-LOCATING CREDENCES
11.1 Memory loss
11.1.1 The problem
W.J. Talbott writes:
Consider the following example: I can remember what I had for dinner one
week ago, but I have no memory of what I had one month ago or one year
ago. This is not usually taken to reflect on my rationality, for there can be
little doubt that if philosophers held a special election to name the most
epistemically rational human being alive, neither the winner of that election
nor any of the top finishers would, except on certain special occasions,
remember what they had eaten for dinner one year earlier either....
If we assume that I had spaghetti for dinner one year ago (on March 15,1989),
then where t1 is 6:30pm on March 15,1989; t2 is 6:30pm on March 15, 1990;
and S is the proposition that Talbott had spaghetti for dinner on March 15,
1989... if I am assumed to satisfy Temporal Conditionalization at every time
from t1 to t2, it must be the case that I be as certain of S at t2 as I was at t1....
But, in fact (and I knew this at t1), if at t21 am asked how probable it is that
I had spaghetti for dinner on March 15,1989, the best I can do is to calculate
a probability based on the relative frequency of spaghetti dinners in my diet
one year ago. (1991, pp. 138-9)1
At some point on March 15, 1989, the proposition S that he has spaghetti for
dinner that night enters into Talbotts evidence. He is thus certain of S at t1
(while he is eating the dinner). If he updates exclusively by Conditionalization
over the following year, Talbott will remain certain of S at t2 (one year later).
Yet as Talbott points out, it hardly seems a rational requirement that he
remain certain of S on March 15, 1990. In fact, it seems most rational for
1990 Talbott to base his opinions about what he had for March 15, 1989
dinner on the frequency with which he was eating particular dinners around
that time. (Talbott pegs his personal cr2(S) value around 0.1.) So we have a
counterexample to Conditionalization.
When confronted with such counterexamples, Conditionalization defend
ers often respond that forgetting isn’t rational. They often say that the norms
of Bayesian epistemology describe the doxastic behavior of an ideally rational
agent. Conditionalization is supposed to describe how an ideally rational agent
would alter her credences over time. So if an ideally rational agent would
never forget anything, there can be no counterexamples to Conditionalization
11.1 MEMORY LOSS 383
in which the agent forgets. As Talbott articulates this response, “An ideally
rational agent would not suffer impairments of her faculties and judgment,
and an ideally rational agent would not be subject to the fallibility of human
memory” (1991, p. 141).
While talk of ideally rational agents is common in epistemology, it often
confuses crucial issues. We are supposed to generate our notion of an ideally
rational agent by starting with a set of rational requirements, then imagining
an agent who satisfies them all. Yet once the talk of ideal agents begins, we
think we have some independent grasp on what such perfect agents would be
like. The question of whether an ideally rational agent would suffer memory
loss should just be the question of whether rationality forbids forgetting; the
former question cannot be answered independently to adjudicate the latter.
Whether memory loss is a failing in some sense—whether an agent would in
some sense be more perfect were she to permanently retain information—is
irrelevant if the sense in question is not the rational one.
So the position that memory loss is irrational is not so easily defended as
it might seem. Yet even if one could defend that position, it would be insuf
ficient to avoid memory loss-related counterexamples to Conditionalization.
Consider the following ingenious example from Frank Arntzenius:
There are two paths to Shangri La, the Path by the Mountains, and the Path
by the Sea. A fair coin will be tossed by the guardians to determine which
path you will take: if heads you go by the Mountains, if tails you go by the
Sea. If you go by the Mountains, nothing strange will happen: while traveling
you will see the glorious Mountains, and even after you enter Shangri La, you
will forever maintain your memories of that Magnificent Journey. If you go
by the Sea, you will revel in the Beauty of the Misty Ocean. But, just as you
enter Shangri La, your memory of this Beauteous Journey will be erased and
be replaced by a memory of the Journey by the Mountains. (2003, p. 356)
Suppose that at t1 the guardians of Shangri La have just explained this arrange
ment to you, but have not yet flipped their fateful coin. By the Principal
Principle (Section 5.2.1), your credence that the coin comes up heads should
be cr1(H) = 1/2. Suppose that some time later, at t2, you find yourself traveling
the Path by the Sea. At that point you have cr2(H) = 0, because only a tails
result leads you to the Sea. Arriving in Shangri La at t3, you nevertheless
remember traveling the Path by the Mountains (due to the guardians’ trickery).
However you realize you would possess those memories2 whichever path you
traveled, so you take them as no evidence about the outcome of the coin flip.
Presumably, then, it’s rational to assign cr3(H) = 1/2.
So far this example is no different from Talbotts spaghetti—an agent

becomes certain of a proposition at an earlier time, then violates Condition
alization by losing that certainty at a later time due to memory malfunction.
A theorist who holds that any loss of memory is a rational failing will see no
counterexample to Conditionalization here.
But now consider the version of the case in which the coin comes up heads,
and you travel the Path by the Mountains. While traveling that path you
assign cr2(H) = 1, but upon reaching Shangri La the same logic holds as above:
your memories of the Mountains no longer provide any evidence about the
outcome of the coin flip, so you revert to cr3(H) = 1/2. Once more you violate
Conditionalization, but your memory has not been altered or failed in any way.
Arntzenius dramatizes the situation by examining your outlook at t2, as you
travel past the mountains and consider what your future credences will be:
You know that your degree of belief in heads is going to go down from one
to 1/2. You do not have the least inclination to trust those future degrees of
belief.... Nonetheless, you think you will behave in a fully rational manner
when you acquire those future degrees of belief. Moreover, you know that the
development of your memories will be completely normal. It is only because
something strange would have happened to your memories had the coin
landed tails that you are compelled to change your degree of belief to 1/2
when that counterfactual possibility would have occurred. (2003, p. 357)
In the Shangri La story it’s rational to violate Conditionalization not only

when you suffer memory loss, but also when you merely suspect that you may
have forgotten something. Perhaps it’s irrational to forget information. But
is it also irrational to assign nonzero credence to the contingent possibility
that one forgot something at some point in the past? To rule out all these
Conditionalization violations, one must maintain not only that the ideally
rational agent has a perfect memory but also that she is perfectly certain that
her memory is perfect (despite possessing no evidence to that effect).
Shangri La also reveals the futility of another possible response to memory
loss. We’ve already seen that even independent of memory loss concerns, many
epistemologists follow Richard C. Jeffrey in rejecting Conditionalization’s
assumption that evidence arrives as certainty. They advocate rejecting the
Conditionalization regime in two ways: first, we endorse the Regularity Prin
ciple (Section 4.2) that forbids certainty in logically contingent propositions;
and second, we adopt Jeffrey Conditionalization (Section 5.5) as our Bayesian
updating norm. While independently motivated, these maneuvers also seem
to handle the memory loss cases. For example, its perfectly consistent with
Jeffrey Conditionalization for Talbott to assign a very high credence on March
15, 1989 that he has spaghetti for dinner that night, while assigning a much
lower credence to that proposition one year later.
Yet moving to Jeffrey Conditionalization wont solve all of our problems
either. In the Shangri La example, rationality requires you to set cr3(H) = 1/2
upon arriving in Shangri La. We’d like our Bayesian updating rule to generate
that requirement for us. In other words, if you assigned some other credence
to heads at t3, we’d like the rule to reveal a rational mistake.
Jeffrey Conditionalization doesn’t seem able to do that for us. In a Jeffrey
Conditionalization, an agent’s experience affects her by redistributing her
credences over some finite “originating” partition {B1,B2,... ,Bn}. The rule
then tells us how this change over the Bs affects the agent’s other credences.
Between t2 and t3 in Shangri La, what’s the partition over which experience
changes your credences? One obvious candidate is the partition containing
H and ~H. But Jeffrey Conditionalization never tells an agent how to alter
her credences over the originating partition; some other mechanism sets those
credences, and Jeffrey Conditionalization works out the effects of that setting
on other credences. So Jeffrey Conditionalization won’t be able to tell us that
rationality requires cr3(ff) = 1/2; it’s consistent with any cr3(H) value at all.3
11.1.2 A possible solution
Section 4.3 discussed the fact that if an agent updates by Conditionalization

throughout her life, two things will be true of her:
1. Any piece of evidence she possesses at a given time will be retained at all
later times.
2. Her series of credences will be representable by a hypothetical prior.
These two conditions are independent. It’s possible to describe an agent whose
evidence builds like a snowball, but whose credences aren’t representable by
a hypothetical prior. It’s also possible to describe an agent whose credence
assignments over time are representable by a hypothetical prior, but who loses
information over time. (You examined one such an agent in Exercise 4.7.)
Endorsing Conditionalization as a rational norm makes both conditions
necessary for rationality. But we now have reason to abandon the first one.
In cases involving memory loss or the threat thereof, an agent may lose
information without rational defect.4 So what happens to our theory of

updating if we drop the first condition, but keep the second?
To be clear, the suggestion is that we set aside Conditionalization as our
Bayesian diachronic norm, but keep the following condition on rational
updating:
Hypothetical Representability: Given any finite series of credence distribu

tions {cr1, cr2,..., crn} that the agent assigns over time, there exists
at least one regular probability distribution PrH such that for all
1 ≤ i ≤ n,
cη(∙) = P⅛(∙ ∣ Ei)
(where Ei is the conjunction of the agent’s total evidence at ti).
What does Hypothetical Representability demand of an agents credences over

time? First, Hypothetical Representability is strictly weaker than Conditional
ization. Section 4.3 s Hypothetical Priors Theorem told us that any agent who
conditionalizes is representable by a hypothetical prior. But the converse of
that theorem is false: An agent can be representable by a hypothetical prior
even if she sometimes fails to conditionalize. This occurs when the agent
loses information from time to time (as with Jane, the agent in Exercise 4.7).
Nevertheless, if we take an agent like that and focus on an episode in which
she strictly gains evidence (or keeps her evidence constant), Hypothetical
Representability will require her to update by conditionalizing over the course
of that episode. So in cases where Conditionalization is plausible—that is, cases
in which an agent loses no information—Hypothetical Representability yields
the same results as Conditionalization.
What about other cases? One interesting case is strict information loss:
when an agent’s later evidence is a proper subset of her earlier evidence. Here,
Hypothetical Representability recommends reverse-temporal conditionaliza
tion.5 In a normal conditionalization, an agent’s credence in a proposition
at the later time equals her credence in that proposition at the earlier time
conditional on the evidence she gains between the two times. But in a reverse
temporal conditionalization, an agent’s credence at the earlier time equals her
credence at the later time conditional on the evidence she loses between those
two times. In other words, if an agent’s evidence between ti and tj changes only
by losing proposition E, then for any H in £,
cη(H) = cr∕H∣E) (n.i)

Notice that if this is right, then were the agent at some time tk after tj to re-gain
the information she lost between ti and tj, normal conditionalization on E
would set cr⅛ identical to her earlier cη∙. So, for instance, between 1989 and
1990 Talbott forgets what he ate for dinner on March 15, 1989. But if you
supplied him on March 15,1990 with the information he had lost, his spaghetti
credences that night would presumably look just like they did after dinner on
March 15, 1989.
Reverse-temporal conditionalization also occurs in the Shangri La example.
Initially—before the guardians flip their coin—you assign cr1(H)= 1/2. By
t2 you’ve conditionalized on travelling the Path by the Mountains, so you
assign cr2(H) = 1. But upon reaching Shangri La you lose that information,
and now assign cr3(H) = 1/2. If you satisfy Hypothetical Representability, the
relationship between cr1 and cr2 is exactly the same as the relationship between
cr3 and cr2; it’s just that the temporal order has been reversed.6
Hypothetical Representability generates intuitively plausible results for both
of our memory loss cases. It obviously succeeds better than traditional Con
ditionalization, but also succeeds better than Jeffrey Conditionalization, by
actually constraining the agent’s t3 credences in Shangri La. What about more
complicated cases, in which an agent both gains and loses information between
two times? Here’s one way to think about how Hypothetical Representability
applies to those cases. Suppose that between times tj and tk, an agent gains
a body of evidence representable by the conjunction E, but loses evidence
representable by the conjunction D. (More precisely, Ej & E=tf=Ek 8c D;
think of D as the agent’s evidential deficit at the later time.) Hypothetical
Representability will require that for any H in X,
crk(H∖D) = crj(H∖E) (11.2)
To wrap one’s mind around this, it helps to attach names to the agent’s time
slices at the two times. So let’s call the tj edition of the agent “Jen”, and the tk
edition “Ken”. According to Hypothetical Representability, if you gave Jen all
the information that Ken has but she doesn’t, and gave Ken all the information
Jen has but he doesn’t, the two of them would then reach identical conclusions
about any proposition H.7
Hopefully I’ve now made the case that satisfying Hypothetical Repre
sentabilitywill lead an agent to update in an intuitively reasonable fashion. But
are there any deeper, more theoretical arguments available for Hypothetical
Representability as a rational constraint? In Chapters 9 and 10 we saw
Dutch Strategy- and accuracy-based arguments for Conditionalization
(respectively). Could arguments on these grounds be given for Hypothetical

Representability? Well, in one sense they can, because Conditionalization
entails Hypothetical Representability, so any argument for the former is also
an argument for the latter. But really what we want to know is: Once we’ve
allowed cases in which a rational agent loses information over time, can Dutch
Strategies or accuracy arguments support Hypothetical Representability’s
application to such cases?
I don’t know of any extensive investigation of such topics, but the initial
prognosis does not look good. Here’s why: Consider Dutch Strategies first.
In Section 9.3.2 I argued that a Dutch Strategy targets an agent’s plans for
updating in the future. So suppose that as you travel the Path by the Mountains,
you plan to set your credences once you reach Shangri La according to reverse
temporal conditionalization (as Hypothetical Representability requires). You
know that once you’ve done so, you will assign cr3(H) = 1/2, so you will be
willing to accept $0.50 for a betting ticket on which you pay out $1 on heads.
But at t2 you’re certain that the coin came up heads—otherwise you wouldn’t
be traveling the Path by the Mountains—-so you’re certain that that ticket will
generate a net loss for you of $0.50. At t2 there exists a bet that you plan to
accept at t3, but that generates a sure loss relative to all the doxastic possibilities
you entertain at t2. This looks like a Dutch Strategy against planning to be
representable by a hypothetical prior.
A similar point can be made using diachronic accuracy arguments. The
Greaves and Wallace argument we discussed in Section 10.5 assesses the
updating plan an agent entertains at a given time by calculating that plan’s
expected accuracy given what she knows at that time. At t2 in Shangri La you’re
certain the coin comes up heads, so you will assess the accuracy of updating
plans relative only to worlds in which H is true. This means that any plan
assigning a high cr3(H) value will look more accurate than plans assigning
lower values. So being representable by a hypothetical prior—and therefore
assigning cr3(H) = 1/2—will not be the plan with the best expected accuracy.8
What should we conclude from all this? If you’re very committed to Dutch
Strategy and/or diachronic accuracy arguments, you might conclude that we
now have decisive arguments against assigning cr3(H)= 1/2 in the Shangri
La case. In fact, it looks like we have arguments against assigning anything
lower than cr3(H) = 1. (Similar points could be made for Talbott’s spaghetti
example.)9 So you might conclude that decreasing one’s credences in light of
memory loss (or the threat thereof) is indeed some sort of rational failure.
On the other hand, one might apply a modus tollens here rather than a
modus ponens, and conclude that we don’t yet have a good enough general
understanding of Dutch Strategy and diachronic accuracy arguments to apply

them correctly to cases involving information loss. If that’s right, then these
argument-types are (at least for now) incapable of supplying us with guidance
about rational updates in the face of information loss.
So in the next section I’ll try another approach. I’ll offer a different kind of
argument that rationality requires being representable by a hypothetical prior.
11.1.3 Suppositional Consistency
Being representable by a hypothetical prior implies two things about an agent’s

credences over time. First, those credences consistently align with the same
function from bodies of total evidence to sets of attitudes. In Section 4.3,
we described this function as representing the agent’s ultimate epistemic
standards. Given any body of total evidence, an agent’s epistemic standards
tell her what credences to adopt toward any proposition. If an agent satisfies
Hypothetical Representability, she keeps her ultimate epistemic standards
constant over time. The easiest way to see this is that if an agent’s credences
are representable by a hypothetical prior, then at any two times at which her
total evidence is the same, her credences must be the same as well.
Why might rationality require an agent to maintain the same epistemic
standards over time? If you’re an Objective Bayesian in the normative sense
(Section 5.1.2), then you believe in the Uniqueness Thesis, which implies that
only one set of epistemic standards is rationally permissible. Since rationality
requires an agent to apply this unique set of epistemic standards at all times,
in order to be rational she must apply the same set of epistemic standards at
each time (namely, the uniquely rational set).
But what if you’re a Subjective Bayesian in the normative sense, and so think
that multiple distinct epistemic standards are rationally permissible? If an
agent applies one set of standards at a particular time, does rationality require
her to apply the same set of standards later on? This is currently a matter of
much philosophical controversy. Some Subjective Bayesians have supported
the diachronic consistency of epistemic standards using Dutch Strategy argu
ments. But this approach has two flaws: First, while Dutch Strategy arguments
work particularly well for cases in which an agent’s evidence remains constant
across times (and perhaps for cases in which that evidence increases), we just
saw that they go awry for cases of information loss. But second and more
importantly, I argued in Section 9.3.2 that while a Dutch Strategy argument
may establish that it’s rational to plan to update in a particular fashion, it can’t
establish the diachronic principle that an agent is rationally required at a later

time to do what she planned earlier on. For similar reasons, Dutch Strategies
cannot establish that an agent is required to keep her epistemic standards
constant over time.
So the Subjective Bayesian must turn to other forms of argument for
diachronic standard-consistency, or perhaps to appeals to intuition. It does feel
like there’s something rationally off about an agent who reports one doxastic
attitude toward a proposition at a given time, then a different attitude toward
the same proposition a bit later, despite the fact that her evidence hasn’t
changed. But I won’t wade any farther into that dialectic here.10
Instead, I want to focus on a second implication of Hypothetical Rep
resentability. Applying a constant set of epistemic standards over time is
necessary but not sufficient for representability by a hypothetical prior. Hypo
thetical Representability requires those standards to display a particular type
of mathematical structure. To see why, notice that to say that a set of epistemic
standards is a function from bodies of total evidence to credence distributions
is just to say that it generates the same credal outputs whenever it’s given the
exact same evidential inputs. Put into practice, this means that at any two
times when the agent has the same total evidence, she must assign the same
credence values. But this doesn’t say anything about the function’s outputs
when different bodies of total evidence are supplied. Merely requiring fidelity
to some function from evidence to credences doesn’t say anything about how
the agent’s responses to different evidence sets should be related. Yet Hypo
thetical Representability puts substantive cross-evidential constraints in place.
To understand those constaints, let’s introduce a bit of new notation. Given
a function representing an agent’s epistemic standards, let c⅛ represent the
credence distribution that function outputs for an input of total evidence E.
So, for instance, crx( Y) will be the credence value prescribed for proposition Y
when the agent has total evidence X. Also, for the sake of easy readability, define
crx(Y∣ Z) as a shorthand for the ratio crx(Y & Z)∕crx(Z). Using this notation,
Hypothetical Representability requires an agent’s epistemic standards to satisfy
the following constraint:11
Suppositional Consistency: Given any propositions A, B, and C in £,
cγa(B I C) = cra&c(B)
Intuitively, Suppositional Consistency says that moving a proposition back

and forth between what an agent supposes and what her evidence includes
should make no difference to the credences she assigns. If an agents epistemic

standards satisfy Suppositional Consistency, then the credence she assigns to
proposition B when her total evidence is A & C will equal the credence she
assigns to B when her total evidence is A and she further supposes that C.
This idea came up when we first motivated updating by Conditionalization.
A fair six-sided die was rolled, and I asked for your credence that it came up six
conditional on the supposition that it came up even. When I then told you that
the roll actually did come up even, your new unconditional credence in six was
the same as your old conditional credence. Initially you evaluated the prospects
for a six outcome relative to the supposition of even; later you evaluated those
prospects relative to the fact of even. But either way, you were evaluating the
prospects of a six relative to the same set of conditions. It’s just that in one
case you took those conditions to actually obtain, while in the other case you
considered what it would be like if they obtained.
Suppositional Consistency generalizes this idea across your epistemic stan
dards, applying it to cases in which you gain evidence, lose evidence, or both. If
you’re suppositionally consistent over time, then whenever the conjunction of
your evidence and your suppositions comes to the same thing, you’ll assign the
same credence to a given proposition. (Notice that this is stronger than just the
principle that if your total evidence doesn’t change, your credences shouldn’t
either.)
Suppositional Consistency captures the cross-evidential constraints
enforced by Hypothetical Representability. If rationality requires agents
to keep their ultimate epistemic standards constant, and those epistemic
standards are also required to be suppositionally consistent, then Hypothetical
Representability is a requirement of rationality. And this, in turn, requires
agents to conditionalize when no information is lost, and reverse-temρorally
conditionalize when no information is gained.
To summarize: The traditional Bayesian Conditionalization norm makes
rational agents representable by a hypothetical prior, but also forbids them to
lose information. Yet it’s possible to satify Hypothetical Representability over a
period of time even if evidence is sometimes lost during that period. To do so,
an agent must keep the same epistemic standards throughout, and those epis
temic standards must satisfy Suppositional Consistency. Personally, I think it’s
exceedingly plausible that all rational epistemic standards are suppositionally
consistent, treating supposed and real evidence symmetrically.12 (Perhaps this
presumption is buoyed by the application of Dutch Strategies and accuracy
arguments to the no-information-loss case.) If we can then establish either
Objective Bayesianism, or the Subjective Bayesian position that rationality
requires constant epistemic standards over time, we will establish Hypothetical

Representability as well. But the jury is still out on all of these questions.13
11.2 Self-locating credences
The contemporary discussion of self-locating credences was jump-started

when Adam Elga introduced philosophers14 to the Sleeping Beauty Problem:
Some researchers are going to put you to sleep. During the two days that your
sleep will last, they will briefly wake you up either once or twice, depending
on the toss of a fair coin (Heads: once; Tails: twice). After each waking, they
will put you back to sleep with a drug that makes you forget that waking.
When you are first awakened, to what degree ought you believe that the
outcome of the coin toss is Heads?
First answer: 1/2, of course! Initially you were certain that the coin was fair,
and so initially your credence in the coin’s landing Heads was 1/2. Upon
being awakened, you receive no new information (you knew all along that
you would be awakened). So your credence in the coin’s landing Heads ought
to remain 1/2.
Second answer: 1/3, of course! Imagine the experiment repeated many times.
Then in the long run, about 1/3 of the wakings would be Heads-wakings—
wakings that happen on trials in which the coin lands Heads. So on any
particular waking, you should have credence 1/3 that that waking is a Heads
waking, and hence have credence 1/3 in the coin’s landing Heads on that trial.
This consideration remains in force in the present circumstance, in which the
experiment is performed just once. (2000,143-4)
Elga’s two answers to the problem reveal an unexpected tension: In Section

5.2.1 we suggested that a rational agent aligns her credence that a particular
event-type will produce a particular outcome-type with the long-run fre
quency with which that outcome-type occurs. We also suggested that a rational
agent aligns her credence with the objective chance of a particular outcome
(as codified by the Principal Principle). These two suggestions seemed to be in
harmony, since we expect a repeated event to produce long-run frequencies in
line with its associated chances. Yet Elga’s first answer to the Sleeping Beauty
Problem applies chance information to generate a heads credence of 1/2, while
his second answer applies long-run frequencies to recommend 1/3. Two types
of information that should line up don’t—so which should we listen to?
11.2 SELF-LOCATING CREDENCES 393
This problem seems like it should be easy to solve with the standard Bayesian
machinery. Lets follow the literature in calling the agent in the story “Beauty”
and let’s suppose that Beauty is first put to sleep on Sunday night, after which
the coin is flipped. Before Beauty goes to sleep on Sunday, but after the
experiment is explained to her and she knows the coin flip will be fair, it’s
uncontroversial how her credences should look. (For instance, her credence
that the coin will come up heads should be 1/2.) So why not just take that
Sunday-night credence distribution, conditionalize it on whatever she learns
between Sunday night and when she’s awakened, and settle once and for all
her rational credence in heads upon awakening?
Well, what does Beauty learn when she awakens? Let’s suppose that her first
awakening happens Monday morning, and if there is a second awakening it
occurs on Tuesday. Then when Beauty awakens, she becomes certain that it’s
either Monday or Tuesday. This is an example of self-locating information, a
category that includes information about what time it is (“It’s five o’clock”),
where the agent is located (“I’m in Margaritaville”), and who he is (“I’m
Jimmy Buffett”). Self-locating information creates all sorts of problems for
Conditionalization.
11.2.1 The problem
To represent an agent’s credences concerning her identity or present spatio

temporal location, we’re going to revise our understanding of propositions.
To this point we’ve associated propositions with sets of possible worlds. We’ve
assumed that for any proposition, there are some possible worlds in which the
proposition is true, and others in which it is false.
But some propositions don’t divide possible worlds quite that cleanly. For
example, consider the proposition that it’s now 1 p.m. That proposition is false
at the moment at which Γm currently writing, but was true approximately 40
minutes ago. So should we count that proposition as true or false in my world
(the actual world)?
Traditional possible worlds don’t provide enough information to settle the
truth-values of propositions like its now 1 p.m. It’s as if I asked you to help me
practice my scene in a play, handed you the entire script, then waited patiently
for you to start feeding me cues. The script describes everything in the play,
but it doesn’t give you all the information you need—you need to know which
scene we’re on, and which character Γm playing. Similarly, a possible world is
maximally specified in the sense that for any possible world and any particular
event, that event either does or does not occur in that world. But even if you
had a complete list of all the events that would ever occur in the actual world,
that wouldn’t be enough for you to know who you are in that world, where you
are, or what time it is. It wouldn’t be enough to tell you whether it’s now 1 p.m.
The most common response to this problem, following in the tradition
of David Lewis (1979), is to augment traditional possible worlds by adding
centers to them. Given a traditional possible world, a center picks out a
particular individual at a particular time and place within that world. An
ordered pair of a world and a center in it is then called a centered possible
world. (The traditional possible worlds without centers are called uncentered
worlds.)
With this structure in place, we may now consider centered propositions,
which are associated with sets of centered possible worlds. The propositions we
dealt with in previous chapters—now called uncentered propositions—are
a proper subset of the centered propositions. Uncentered propositions don’t
discriminate among the centers associated with a given uncentered world; if
two centered worlds are indexed to the same uncentered world, and one of
them belongs to the set associated with a particular uncentered proposition,
then the other one does too. Centered propositions, on the other hand, may
discriminate among centered possible worlds indexed to the same uncentered
world. The proposition that it’s now 1 p.m. is a centered proposition but not an
uncentered one; it’s true at some centers in the actual world but not others. The
proposition that Shaquille O’Neal and Michelangelo share the same birthday
(March 6th) is an uncentered proposition; its truth doesn’t vary depending on
who or where you are within the world. An uncentered proposition tells you
something about which world you’re in, but doesn’t tell you anything about
where you are in that world. A centered proposition can provide self-locating
information.15
Everything we said about (uncentered) propositions in Chapters 2 and 3
transfers easily to centered propositions. Centered propositions enter into
logical relations, defined in terms of centered possible worlds. (Two centered
propositions are consistent if they are both true in at least one centered world;
two centered propositions are equivalent if they are associated with the same
set of centered possible worlds; etc.) We can understand a rational credence
distribution as a probability distribution over a language of centered proposi
tions. The Kolmogorov axioms and Ratio Formula operate just as before. So,
for instance, Finite Additivity requires my credence in the disjunction that it’s
either 1 p.m. or 2 p.m. to be the sum of my credence that it’s 1 p.m. and my
credence that it’s 2 p.m. (since those disjuncts are mutually exclusive).
The trouble comes when we get to updating. Suppose that at some point
in my life I gain a piece of self-locating evidence, and update on it by Con
ditionalization. Conditionalization generates certainties, so I become certain
of a centered proposition. But Conditionalization also retains certainties, so
if I keep conditionalizing, I will remain certain of that centered proposition.
Yet this may not be rational. Suppose that 40 minutes ago I was staring at a
perfectly reliable clock, and so became certain that it was 1 p.m. Despite having
had that experience (back then), it is presently perfectly rational for me to be
less than certain that it’s now 1 p.m. Rational updating in centered propositions
does not always go by Conditionalization.
Perhaps we should switch to a regime that combines Regularity with Jeffrey
Conditionalization (Section 5.5)? Such an updating approach never sends
contingent propositions to certainty, so doesn’t have to worry about their
sticking there; centered propositions about the time would be free to float up
and down in confidence across successive updates. Yet Namjoong Kim (2009)
argues that Jeffrey Conditionalization doesn’t interact well with self-location
either.
In a Jeffrey update, experience directly influences an agent’s unconditional
credences over a particular partition of propositions. Unconditional credences
in other propositions in the agent’s language are then set using conditional
credences whose conditions are propositions within the originating partition.
So suppose I look out my window, and experience directly influences my cre
dences over the partition containing the centered propositions its raining now
and its not raining now. I want to set my unconditional credence in the propo
sition that it rains on Sunday (for some particular Sunday that I’ve got in mind).
Jeffrey Conditionalization would have me set that unconditional credence
using such conditional credences as cr(it rains on Sunday ∣ it’s raining now).
Yet Jeffrey Conditionalization is appropriate only if those conditional cre
dences remain constant over time. (This was the Rigidity property we saw in
Section 5.5.) And there seem to be moments when it would be quite rational
for me to change my value for that conditional credence—for instance, as the
calendar flips over from the Sunday in question to Monday morning.
Ultimately Conditionalization and Jeffrey Conditionalization suffer from
the same affliction. An agent’s evidence relates her to the world; it helps
her discern the truth-values of various propositions. Conditionalization and
Jeffrey Conditionalization assume that as time goes on, changes occur on only
one side of that relation: An agent’s evidence may change, but the truth-values
of the target propositions remain fixed. Yet centered propositions present
the agent with moving targets; as she gains (or loses) information, their
truth-values may change as well. Traditional updating rules aren’t up to this

more complicated task.16
At this point it’s tempting to object that I’ve misdiagnosed the problem—
the flaw isn’t in the updating rules; it’s in the approach to content. There’s
an intuitive sense in which, when I ask myself at 1 p.m. “Is it now 1 p.m.?”,
Γm asking something different than when I ask 40 minutes later “Is it now
1 p.m.?” The two questions are asked about different moments; Γm asking for
information about two different nows. The Lewisian approach to content holds
that when I assign a credence of 1 at 1 p.m. to the proposition that it’s now
1 p.m., and when I assign a lower credence 40 minutes later that it’s now 1 p.m.,
those two credences are assigned to the same centered proposition. (So I’ve
gone from certainty to less-than-certainty in one and the same proposition, in
violation of Conditionalization.) Perhaps we should adopt a theory of content
that reads those two credences as attitudes toward distinct propositions; this
would remove the counterexamples to Conditionalization.
There are many theories of self-locating content in the philosophy of lan
guage literature. Some of them break with Lewis and maintain that if I wonder
at two different times whether it’s 1 p.m., the propositions I entertain at
those distinct times have distinct contents. It’s possible to build a Bayesian
updating scheme on top of these non-Lewisian approaches to self-locating
content. Yet I can report that none of the approaches anyone has tried leaves
Conditionalization unscathed. Even with an alternate approach to content,
Conditionalization needs to be either modified or supplemented (or both)
to yield a plausible updating scheme.17 So the problem for Bayesian updating
raised by self-location can’t be solved entirely by altering our theory of content.
In the next two sections I’ll survey a couple of changes to Conditionalization
that have been proposed to help it deal with self-location. In doing so I’ll
continue to work with a Lewisian approach to content, not because I personally
think it’s the best,18 but because it’s the most common and easily manageable,
and because most of the important contrasts between proposals can still be
seen in that context.
11.2.2 The HTM approach
The first formal, systematic Bayesian approach to updating self-locating

credences was proposed in the artifical intelligence literature by Joseph Y.
Halpern (2004, 2005), who offered it as an extension of his joint work with
Mark Tuttle. Christopher J.G. Meacham (2008) later offered an extensionally
equivalent formalism couched in a possible-worlds framework more familiar

to philosophers. I will describe Meachams version here, but honor its origins
by calling it the HTM approach.
The HTM approach starts with the thought that for the many decades during
which Bayesians focused exclusively on uncentered propositions, Condition
alization worked pretty well for them. So lets keep Conditionalization for
uncentered propositions, then add a mechanism for handling the rest. Put
formally, the HTM approach offers the following two-step updating process:
1. Suppose that between times ti and tj, an agent gains evidence E. Her first
updating step is to redistribute her credence over uncentered worlds by
conditionalizing. To do so, she takes all the uncentered worlds she enter
tained at ti, assigns credence 0 to those ruled out by E, then renormalizes
her credences over the rest. (That is, she multiplies the credences assigned
to all the remaining uncentered worlds by the same constant, so that the
sum of those credences is 1.)
2. The agent now has to distribute her credences over the centered worlds
associated with each of the remaining uncentered worlds. To do so, she
works through the uncentered worlds one at a time. Taking a particular
uncentered world (call it u), she considers all the centers associated with
that world she entertained as live possibilities at ti. She assigns credence 0
to any centered world incompatible with E. Then she takes the credence
assigned to u in Step 1 above, and distributes it among the remaining
centered worlds associated with that uncentered world.19
A couple of comments about this updating process: The first step ensures that
for any uncentered proposition U, the agent will assign crj∙(U) = cri(U ∣ E). So
the HTM approach updates uncentered propositions by Conditionalization,
exactly as intended.20 Meanwhile, you may have noticed that the second step
is underspecified—while it says that the credence associated with a given
uncentered world u should be distributed over a particular set of centered
worlds associated with u, it doesn’t say exactly how that distribution should go.
Halpern suggests that Indifference Principle reasoning might make it natural
to distribute us credence equally over the centers associated with u; Meacham
suggests we maintain ratios between credences in us centers from before
the update occurred. Which proposal we go with will be immaterial in the
discussion that follows.
To see an example of the HTM approach in action, consider the following
case: At f1, you have no idea what time it is. You’re wearing a watch that you’re
60% confident is running reliably. The rest of your credence is divided equally
between the possibility that the watch is entirely stopped, and the possibility
that its running but is off by exactly an hour (perhaps due to daylight savings
time). You then glance at your watch, notice that its running (the second hand
is moving), and that it currently reads 1 p.m. If you apply the HTM approach,
your credences will evolve as follows:
crι Step 1 Step 2

12 p.m. 0
Stopped 0.20 0 1 p.m. 0
2 p.m. 0
12 p.m. 0
Reliable 0.60 0.75 1 p.m. 0.75
2 p.m. 0
Running, 12 p.m. 0-0.25
but off 0.20 0.25 1 p.m. 0
an hour 2 p.m. 0-0.25
You begin at t1 with credences of 0.20, 0.60, and 0.20 respectively in the
uncentered possibilities that your watch is stopped, reliable, and running but
off by an hour. After t1 you receive evidence E that the watch is running and
reads 1 p.m. In Step 1 of the HTM process, you rule out as incompatible with
E the uncentered world in which the watch is stopped. So your credence in
that world goes to 0, along with all the centered worlds associated with that
world. The other two uncentered possibilities are consistent with E, so you
renormalize your credences over those, multiplying each by a normalization
factor of 5/4 so that they sum to 1.
Now we proceed to Step 2, and consider various centers associated with
each uncentered world. In the world where your watch is reliable, E rules
out every time possibility except 1 p.m., so the full 0.75 credence assigned to
that uncentered world goes to the associated 1 p.m. centered world. In the
uncentered world where your watch is running but off by an hour, E rules
out the 1 p.m. center. But it leaves open both the 12 p.m. and 2 p.m. centers,
because your evidence doesn’t reveal whether the watch is running fast or slow.
So the 0.25 credence in that uncentered world must be distributed between
those two centers by some strategy that Step 2 leaves unspecified. I’ve therefore
indicated above that your credences in the 12 p.m. and 2 p.m. centers must be
between 0 and 0.25, but I haven’t assigned them specific values. (We’ll come
back to this underspecification in Section 11.2.3 below.)
Once we have the values in the table, we can use them to calculate further
credences. For example, what is your credence after learning E that it’s cur
rently before 2 p.m.? That will be 0.75 (from the centered possibility that your
watch is reliable and it’s 1 p.m.) plus whatever credence is assigned to the
centered possibility that your watch is off by an hour and it’s 12 p.m.
Now that we know how the HTM approach works, how can we tell if
it’s a rational procedure for updating self-locating credences? You’ll show in
Exercise 11.6 that applying the HTM approach to the Sleeping Beauty Problem
yields a 1/2 credence in heads upon awakening. Is that really what rationality
requires of Beauty?
As in our discussion of updating rules for memory loss, it’s tempting to
support this new updating approach with a Dutch Strategy or an accuracy
based argument. But once more, such arguments let us down in the present
context. Hitchcock (2004) describes two different Dutch Strategies that can
be constructed against Beauty, one that’s guaranteed to take her money if she
assigns any credence other than 1/2 upon awakening, and another that takes
her money if she assigns anything other than 1/3. The difference between these
strategies comes in how many bets the bookie is required to place. In the first
strategy, the bookie places a particular bet with Beauty on Monday but not
on Tuesday. In the second strategy, the bookie places a bet with Beauty every
time she awakens during the experiment—once if heads, twice if tails. The first
strategy seems objectionable because it requires the bookie to know something
Beauty doesn’t. (To decide whether to place the bet on a given day, he has to
know whether that day is Monday or Tuesday, but that’s exactly what Beauty
doesn't know on either of those days.) Yet the second strategy seems objection
able because the number of bets placed varies with the truth-value of the very
proposition on which the bet is being placed (that the coin came up heads).
While a debate has ensued in the literature, no consensus has emerged
as to which of these Dutch Strategies (if either) is dispositive. Meanwhile,
on the accuracy front, Kierland and Monton (2005) identify two different
approaches to tallying up accuracy, and note that on one approach thirding
minimizes expected inaccuracy, while on the other approach halting fares best.
To complicate matters further, Briggs (2010) argues that which Dutch Strategy
and which accuracy argument you accept for Sleeping Beauty should depend
on whether you endorse Causal or Evidential Decision Theory (Section 7.3)!
So I don’t think Dutch Strategy or accuracy-based arguments are going to
adjudicate the Sleeping Beauty Problem any time soon. Is there another way
we could assess the HTM approach? Here it’s worth noting that the HTM
approach to updating has the following consequence:
Relevance-Limiting Thesis: If an update doesn’t eliminate any uncentered

possible worlds, then it does not change the agents credence distri
bution over uncentered propositions.
The intuitive idea of the Relevance-Limiting Thesis is that purely centered

evidence—evidence that tells an agent only about who she is or where she’s
located in the actual world, without telling her anything about what the actual
world is like—is irrelevant to uncentered propositions. A batch of self-locating
evidence may redistribute an agent’s credences across centers, but if it doesn’t
rule out any uncentered worlds as actual, then it shouldn’t change the agent’s
uncentered credences.
While the Relevance-Limiting Thesis may be intuitively plausible, it is sub
ject to counterexample. All of the counterexamples are fairly artificial, because
it’s difficult to find a real-life situation in which an agent gains information
without any uncentered implications. So here’s one such artificial example:
Ten people are arranged in a circle in a cylindrical room. One of them is

you. You have no qualitative way of distinguishing yourself from the others
in the room—you are all dressed alike, you all look identical, and you have
no memories of anything that happened before this moment. (You don’t even
know your own name!) Your only way of picking yourself out uniquely among
the members of the room is with indexical expressions (“me”, “the person
currently having this thought”, etc.).
A fair coin is flipped to determine the contents of a bag. If the coin comes
up heads, the bag will contain nine black balls and one white ball. If the coin
comes up tails, the bag will contain one black ball and nine white balls. You
do not receive any direct information about the outcome of the coin flip, but
once the bag is filled it is passed around the room. Each person draws out one
ball and passes the bag until the bag is entirely empty. You cannot see the ball
anyone else has drawn, but your ball is black.21
The science-fiction setup of the example is designed to prevent your new

evidence when you pick the black ball from eliminating any uncentered
possible worlds. If you were certain, say, that you were Shakira, then you
could eliminate any uncentered worlds in which Shakira picks a white ball.
But given your inability to self-identify non-indexically, the new information
you gain is best expressed by the centered proposition “I pick a blackball”. This
information doesn’t eliminate either of the uncentered worlds you entertain;
it’s compatible with both the heads-world and the tails-world that your ball
would be black. So according to the Relevance-Limiting Thesis, picking a black

ball should not change your credence in heads versus tails. Yet intuitively,
observing a black ball should dramatically increase your confidence in heads.
Consider the relevant Bayes factor: your chance of picking a black ball given
heads is nine times your chance of picking a black ball given tails. So the
mystery bag scenario is a counterexample to the Relevance-Limiting Thesis,
and to the HTM approach.22
11.2.3 Going forward
Since Halpern and Meacham took their first stab at a Bayesian self-locating
updating scheme, over a dozen alternative approaches have been proposed
in the literature. I’ll discuss one of them here, then refer you to the Further
Reading to learn about more.
Where and how does the HTM approach go wrong? In many cases in
which an agent has self-locating uncertainty, that uncertainty is mirrored by
uncertainty about some uncentered proposition. Return to our example of
the potentially unreliable watch. There we weren’t sure how much of your t2
credence associated with the uncentered possibility “off by an hour” should
be distributed to the temporal location of 12 p.m. and how much of it should
be distributed to 2 p.m. But notice that since the watch reads 1 p.m. at that
point, you’re certain of two biconditionals at t2∙. it’s noon just in case the watch
is fast by an hour, and it’s 2 p.m. just in case the watch is slow by an hour.
So your t2 credence in noon should equal your t2 credence in the uncentered
proposition that the watch is fast, and your credence in 2 p.m. should equal
your credence that it’s slow. (Recalling from Exercise 2.7 that if you’re certain
of a biconditional between two propositions, you should be equally confident
in each.)
When an agent can match centered propositions with uncentered proposi
tions in this fashion, any centered information she gains will come with uncen
tered information as well. In that case, we can update as the HTM approach
requires: manage the core substance of the update by conditionalizing on
uncentered information, then distribute credence from uncentered to centered
propositions using the biconditionals. But this strategy runs into trouble when
an agent learns a crucial piece of centered information for which she has no
uncentered equivalent. In the mystery bag example, the centered “I pick a
black ball” is relevant to whether the coin came up heads, but no uncentered
proposition is available with which it can be put into a biconditional. So the
first step of HTM updating misses the significance of “I pick a black ball”
entirely, and the HTM approach founders on this example.
A simple fix is to restrict the applicability of the HTM approach. We apply
HTM only when the following condition is met: At each time under consider
ation, for each centered proposition, the agent has an uncentered proposition
which she is certain forms a true biconditional with the centered one. In the
mystery bag example, this condition fails for the centered proposition “I pick
a black ball.” So we avoid the HTM approach’s incorrect verdicts for mystery
bag by restricting it from being applied to that example at all.
Of course, this raises the question of how we’re going to get updating
verdicts for the mystery bag case at all. A similar question could be asked about
the Sleeping Beauty Problem. When Beauty awakens on Monday morning,
she doesn’t know what day it is, and information about the current date could
be of crucial significance to her credences about the coin. (Since she’s awake,
if it’s currently Tuesday then the coin came up tails!) But Beauty lacks any
uncentered proposition that she’s certain has the same truth-value as “Today is
Tuesday.” So once more, the restricted HTM approach doesn’t yield any direct
guidance for Beauty’s credences upon awakening.
While the details are too complex to go into here, workarounds are available
that indirectly apply the HTM approach to these examples. The trick is to
focus on a narrow set of times for which the centered propositions don’t
provide any difficulties, or to add a feature to the example that gives the agent
uncentered propositions for biconditionals without distorting the credences
of interest. Exercise 11.6 below gives a suggestion how the latter might be
accomplished; full details are available in (Titelbaum 2013a, Ch. 9). (In case
you’re wondering, the restricted HTM approach yields a 1/3 answer to the
Sleeping Beauty Problem.)
It’s also worth thinking about how to integrate the two halves of this chapter:
Can we get a single Bayesian updating scheme that applies to memory-loss
cases, cases with self-locating information, and even cases that combine the
two? After all, it looks like the forgetting drug is a pretty key feature of
the Sleeping Beauty Problem.23 And in Arntzenius’s Shangri La example, the
agent needs to manage credences in such centered propositions as “I can
recall traveling the Path by the Mountains” and “I’m now in Shangri La.” (See
Exercise 11.7.)
There hasn’t been much formal work in the literature on Bayesian
approaches to memory loss, so there’s been even less on integrating memory
loss with self-location. Nevertheless, both Meacham (2008) and Sarah Moss
(2012) mention in passing how their self-locating updating schemes could be
11∙3 EXERCISES 403
extended to handle forgetting cases, with Meacham proposing a condition

much like Hypothetical Representability. A single updating system that
combines Hypothetical Representability and something like the restricted
version of HTM Γve been discussing is carefully constructed, explored, and
applied in (Titelbaum 2013a).
11.3 Exercises
well defined.
Problem 11.1. A six-sided die (not necessarily fair!) has been rolled. At tl
its part of your evidence that the roll came up odd. At that time you assign
credence 1/6 that it came up one and credence 1/3 that it came up three.
Between t1 and t2 you learn that the roll came up prime. But between t2 and t3
you forget that the roll came up odd; at t3 you assign credence 1/2 that it came
up even (while retaining the evidence that it came up prime). If you satisfy
Hypothetical Representability, what is your t3 credence that the roll came up
three?
Problem 11.2. Suppose we have two times tj and ⅞, with Ej representing

the conjunction of the agent’s total evidence at ty∙ and Ek playing a similar role
with respect to ⅛. Prove that the statements below all follow from Hypothetical
Representability:
(a) For any propositions H, D, and E in £ such that Ej & E =11= Ek & D,
crfc(H∣D) = cr∕H∣E).
(b) If the agent loses no evidence from tj to tk, then she updates by Condi
tionalization between those two times.
(c) If the agent gains no evidence from tj to tk, then she updates by reverse
temporal conditionalization between those two times. (Compare Equa
tion (11.1).)
Problem 11.3. Prove that an agent updates at all times by Conditionaliza

tion if and only if the following two conditions are both met:
1. Any piece of evidence she possesses at a given time is retained at all later
times.
2. Hypothetical Representability.
Problem 11.4.^ Explain why any agent who updates using the HTM
approach will satisfy the Relevance-Limiting Thesis.
Problem 11.5.4^
(a) Make a probability table for the mystery bag example using “Coin lands
heads” and “I pick a black ball” as your atomic propositions. Suppose
that t1 is the time after the coin has been flipped but before you’ve picked
a ball out of the bag. Fill in t1 credences that would be rational if you
set your credences equal to the objective chances. Then fill in the t2
credences that would be rational if you simply conditionalized on the
proposition “I pick a black ball.” If you updated that way, what would
be your t2 credence in heads?
(b) Now suppose you start with the same t1 credences but update by the
HTM approach. Then what are your t2 credences? What is your t2
credence in heads? Explain.
Problem 11.6.
(a) Show that on the HTM approach, when Beauty awakens on Monday
morning in the Sleeping Beauty Problem not knowing what day it is,
her credence in heads should be 1/2.
(b) Now suppose the researchers add one small detail to the protocol of
their Sleeping Beauty experiment. After Beauty goes to sleep on Sunday
night, they will not only flip their fateful coin, but also roll a fair die. If
the die roll comes up odd, they will paint the walls of Beauty’s room red
on Monday and blue on Tuesday. If the die roll comes up even, they will
paint the walls of Beauty’s room blue on Monday and red on Tuesday.
The procedures for waking her up and putting her back to sleep are the
same; on any day when Beauty is awake, she will be awake long enough
to notice the color on the walls.24
On Sunday night, Beauty is informed about all the details of the
experiment, including the painting plan. She goes to sleep, then finds
herself awake sometime later, certain that it’s either Monday or Tuesday,
not certain which day it is, but also certain that the walls of her room are
red. According to the HTM approach, what should Beauty’s credence in
heads be at that point?
11.3 EXERCISES 405
(c) Compare your answers to parts (a) and (b). Does it seem to you that
the HTM approach is getting things right here? Should the painting
procedure make any difference to Beauty’s credence in heads upon
awakening?
(d) For each of the following centered propositions, provide an uncentered
proposition such that when Beauty awakens in the red room, she is
certain that the centered proposition and the uncentered proposition
have the same truth-value:
(i) Today is Monday.
(ii) I am currently in a red room.
(iii) Today is Monday or Tuesday.
Problem 11.7.,^ You are now going to build a Bayesian model of the
Shangri La problem that incorporates both its self-locating and its memory
loss components.
(a) Start by building a probability table on the three atomic propositions
“The coin comes up heads,” “I can recall the Path by the Mountains,”
and “I am now in Shangri La.” Next, make three columns for cr1, cr2,
and cr3. Finally, use the details of the story on p. 383 to fill out what
you think is the rational credence distribution for each of those three
times. Assume that in the version of the story you’re representing, the
agent travels the Path by the Mountains, and while on that path (at t2)
is certain that she is traveling it and can recall doing so.
(b) For each of the following three updating schemes, explain why it can’t
produce the pattern of credences in your probability table: updating
by Conditionalization; the HTM approach; and the restricted HTM
approach described on page 402.
Problem 11.8. Wandering through the State Fair, you encounter a very
strange carnival game. The rules are posted, and each customer reads them
before she plays:
At the start of today we filled our pond with 100 fish, each fish red or blue. We
flipped a fair coin to determine whether the pond would contain seventy-five
red and twenty-five blue fish, or vice versa.
Every customer who decides to play our game will first be told how many
people played today before they did. Then the customer will fish one fish at
random out of the pond and keep it. (Their fish will be replaced in the pond
by a fish of the same color.)
The lucky seventh player of the day will get a very special treat. Once they fish
out their fish, we will find all the customers from earlier in the day who drew
the opposite color fish—if there are any—and select one of those customers
at random to introduce to our lucky seventh player. (Each customer with the
opposite-colored fish will have the same chance of being selected.) We hope
this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship!
You decide to play the game, and are told that you are the lucky seventh player
of the day! You then proceed to the pond and fish out a fish at random, finding
that it’s blue. The organizers go away for a while, and come back with a woman
named Linda, who’s got a red fish. The two of you chat amiably for a while, and
do indeed begin to strike up a friendship....
(a) Let’s start by focusing on your credences. After you read the rules for
the game, but before you fish out your fish, how confident should you
be that the pond contains predominantly blue fish?
(b) Once you fish out your fish, and update by Conditionalizing on the fact
that it’s blue, how confident should you be that the pond is predomi
nantly blue?
(c) When you’re introduced to Linda, you learn that at least one of the
six people who fished before you got a red fish. If the pond is indeed
predominantly blue, what’s the chance that at least one of the first six
people gets a red fish? (Hint: Try first calculating the chance that all six
of them get blue fish.)
(d) So, taking your confidence from part (b) and conditionalizing on the
fact that at least one of the six people before you received a red fish,
how confident should you be after meeting Linda that the pond is
predominantly blue?
(e) Now let’s focus on Lindas credences. After she reads the rules, but before
she fishes out her fish, how confident should she be that the pond is
predominantly blue?
(f) After Linda randomly fishes out a fish that turns out to be red, how
confident should she be that the pond is predominantly blue?
(g) Sometime later, Linda is selected as the person to be introduced to
the lucky seventh player. She is introduced to you, and learns that the
seventh fish drawn was blue. Conditionalizing on this information, how
confident should she now be that the pond is predominantly blue?
(h) Did the credences you calculated in parts (d) and (g) turn out to be
different? If so, why? Did you or Linda start the game with importantly
different priors? Is there some difference in your total evidence at the
end of the game that would justify a difference in your credences? Or

did we leave some piece of relevant evidence out in our calculations?
Whichever answer you give, state as precisely as you can what you think
is going on.25
Andy Egan and Michael G. Titelbaum (2022). Self-Locating Belief. Forth

coming in The Stanford Encyclopedia ofPhilosophy.
Background information on available philosophical theories of self-locating

content.
Michael G. Titelbaum (2016). Self-Locating Credences. In: The Oxford

Handbook of Probability and Philosophy. Ed. by Alan Hajek and Christo
pher R. Hitchcock. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 666-80
Surveys existing schemes for updating self-locating beliefs, grouped by broad

strategic approach.
Michael G. Titelbaum (2013b). Ten Reasons to Care about the Sleeping

Beauty Problem. Philosophy Compass 8, pp. 1003-17
Survey of literature on the Sleeping Beauty Problem, including its connections

to such diverse areas as decision theory, philosophy of language, and the
philosophy of quantum mechanics.
Classic Texts
W. J. Talbott (1991). Two Principles of Bayesian Epistemology. Philosophical

Studies 62, pp. 135-50
Classic discussion of the rationality of memory loss within a Bayesian frame

work.
Adam Elga (2000). Self-locating Belief and the Sleeping Beauty Problem.
Analysis 60, pp. 143-7
David Lewis (2001). Sleeping Beauty: Reply to Elga. Analysis 61, 171-6
Exchange that drew philosophers’ attention to the Sleeping Beauty Problem.
Frank Arntzenius (2003). Some Problems for Conditionalization and

Reflection. The Journal of Philosophy 100, pp. 356-70
Examines a number of problem cases for Conditionalization and Reflec

tion involving self-location and/or memory loss. Introduces the Shangri La
example.
Extended Discussion
Isaac Levi (1980). The Enterprise of Knowledge. Boston: The MIT Press
While Levi’s terminology is fairly different from ours, Chapter 4 works through
all of the mathematics behind our discussion of memory loss and hypothetical
priors. Also discusses various historically important Bayesians’ positions on
hypothetical priors.
Michael G. Titelbaum (2013a). Quitting Certainties: A Bayesian Framework

Modeling Degrees of Belief Oxford: Oxford University Press
Covers the topics in this chapter at a much greater level of philosophical and
technical depth. Chapters 6 and 7 discuss memory loss and Suppositional
Consistency. Chapters 8 through 11 propose an updating rule for situations
involving context-sensitive information, compare that rule to rival approaches,
and apply it to a variety of situations (including Everettian interpretations of
quantum mechanics).
Notes
1. I have changed Talbotts notation for moments in time to square with our usage
in this book. Also, Talbott is concerned with the spaghetti example not only as a
counterexample to Conditionalization (what he calls “Temporal Conditionalization”)
but also to van Fraassen’s (1984) Reflection Principle. As we saw in Section 5.2.2,
Conditionalization and Reflection are intimately related; with respect to this chapter’s
concerns, they stand or fall together.
NOTES 409
2. Some authors like to use the words “remember” and “memories” factively. Replacing
my talk of “memories” with “quasi-memories” or some such would make no difference
to what’s rationally required in the example.
3. You might think it’s not Jeffrey Conditionalization’s job to set a specific cr3(H) value. As
an updating norm, Jeffrey Conditionalization is concerned with diachronic consistency.
Yet cr3(H) = 1/2 seems required not by diachronic considerations, but instead by your
t3 evidence about the fairness of the coin (and lack of trustworthy evidence about its
outcome). So perhaps Jeffrey Conditionalization can be liberal about cr3(H), while the
Principal Principle restricts that value to 1/2.
But now consider a version of Shangri La in which you don’t know anything at t1
about the coin’s bias, or lack thereof. The evidence you possess at tl doesn’t mandate any
particular cr1 (H) value on its own; you set your cr1 (H) value according to your personal
epistemic standards. (Perhaps that value isn’t even 1/2.) I submit that at t3, you should
assign the same credence to heads that you did at t1. This value cannot be required by
the Principal Principle, nor by any other purely synchronic evidential norm, since we
stipulated that such norms were insufficient to fix your credence in heads at t1. Rather, it
is required by diachronic considerations, in particular considerations of keeping your
epistemic standards consistent over time. The next section presents an updating rule
that’s responsive to such considerations, even in cases involving memory loss.
4. Schervish, Seidenfeld, and Kadane respond to Arntzenius by noting that it’s “already
assumed as familiar in problems of stochastic prediction... that the information the
agent has at t2 includes all the information that she or he had at time t1. This is expressed
mathematically by requiring that the collection of information sets at all times through
the future form what is called a filtration’ (2004, p. 316). Their point is that even before
Shangri La was introduced, statisticians were well aware that Conditionalization applies
only when no information is lost over time.
5. Compare the discussion at Levi (1987, p.198).
6. We can see how this follows from Hypothetical Representability by noting that (with
respect to the propositions of interest in this problem) E1 is identical to E3. So
conditionalizing a hypothetical prior on E3 will yield exactly the same distribution as
conditionalizing that prior on E1, making cr3 identical to cr1.
7. Equation (11.2) thus represents an intertemporal version of Elga’s interpersonal “guru
flection” principle (Elga 2007).
I should also note that Equation (11.2) assumes that Ej and ¾ are logically consistent.
(If they weren’t, some of the relevant conditional credence expressions would have
credence-0 conditions.) Throughout our discussion of memory loss, I will assume that
the agent’s total evidence sets at any two times are consistent with each other. (So, for
example, an agent can’t lose a piece of information at one time, then learn its negation at
another.) This won’t be a problem if we assume that evidence is factive, because truths
are logically consistent with each other. At least, it won’t be a problem until Section
11.2, when we consider self-location and centered propositions...
8. In Chapter 10, note 33,1 pointed out that Greaves and Wallace restrict their attention
to “available” updating plans. One might argue that relative to an intuitive notion of
availability (not necessarily Greaves and Wallace’s notion) the memory loss (or threat
thereof) that you experience at t3 in Shangri La keeps plans that assign cr3(H) >1/2
from being available to you at that time. If so, being representable by a hypothetical
prior might be the available plan providing the best expected accuracy relative to
your attitudes at t2∙ But now it looks like most (all?) of the argument for assigning
cr3(H) = 1/2 is based on considerations of availability, with accuracy argumentation
no longer doing the heavy lifting.
9. Compare also the Dutch Strategy we constructed against an agent who loses a certainty
in Exercise 9.3.
10. For an investigation into the intuitions, a survey of some of the philosophical discussion,
and a modest attempt to justify those intuitions, see Titelbaum (2015a).
11. Keep in mind that our discussion in this chapter is confined to diachronic rationality
constraints. We assume throughout that credence distributions dictated by rationally
permissible epistemic standards satisfy traditional synchronic Bayesian norms, in
particular the probability axioms and the Ratio Formula.
12. For what it’s worth, all the “logical probability” distributions Carnap explored (Section
6.2) satisfied Suppositional Consistency. Isaac Levi also extensively examined Supposi
tional Consistency (which he called “confirmational conditionalization”) in a series of
publications beginning with Levi (1974).
13. I should mention one further problem down the Subjective Bayesian path. Suppose we
have a Subjective Bayesian who holds that losing evidence because of memory loss (or
the threat thereof) is no sign of irrationality, yet requires a rational agent to maintain
her epistemic standards over time. What happens if an agent forgets her epistemic
standards? It seems inconsistent to forgive an agent’s forgetting her evidence but not
her standards. Yet once an agent has forgotten her earlier epistemic standards, how can
we require her to maintain them going forward? Or are epistemic standards so deeply
embedded in our identity as epistemic agents that we cannot possibly forget them—or
cannot forget them while remaining the same agent?
14. The Sleeping Beauty Problem is an adaptation of the absent-minded driver paradox
from Piccione and Rubinstein (1997). Elga attributes the “Sleeping Beauty” name to
Robert Stalnaker, who Elga says “first learned of examples of this kind in unpublished
work by Arnold Zuboff ”.
15. Some authors call centered propositions de se propositions, and uncentered proposi
tions de dicto. There’s also a bit of variation in the definitions: I’ve followed one group
of authors in defining centered propositions as a superset of the uncentered; other
authors define centered propositions to be mutually exclusive with uncentered. (For
them, a proposition counts as centered only if it somewhere discriminates between two
centers within the same possible world.) This terminological issue has little ultimate
significance.
16. In his influential (1979) paper on self-locating content, Lewis wrote, “It is interesting
to ask what happens to decision theory if we take all attitudes as de se. Answer: very
little. We replace the space of worlds by the space of centered worlds, or by the space
of all inhabitants of worlds. All else is just as before” (p. 534). Some commentators
have taken this to mean that Lewis thought Conditionalization would work just fine
with self-locating contents. But Schwarz (2010) notes that: (1) Lewis mentions decision
theory rather than updating in that quote, and it’s not clear that updating rules are part of
decision theory; and (2) Lewis makes clear in a footnote to his (1996) that he’s aware of
NOTES 411
the self-location problem for both Conditionalization and Jeffrey Conditionalization:

“Before I turned out the light, I saw that it was just minutes before midnight. In
the course of a long and sleepless night, I undergo a redistribution of credence from
the proposition that it is now before midnight to the proposition that it is now after
midnight. It is far from obvious that this revision goes by probability kinematics [Jeffrey
Conditionalization], let alone by conditionalizing” (p. 309, n. 6). So whatever Lewis
thought in the late 1970s, he was clearly suspicious of conditionalizing over self
locating contents well before the Sleeping Beauty Problem brought the issue to most
philosophers’ attention in the 2000s.
17. The best-known attempt to solve Conditionalization’s problems with self-location
solely by altering the underlying theory of content appeared in Stalnaker (2008).
Stalnaker began by building an alternative to Lewis’s theory of content, then used
it to construct a model of the Sleeping Beauty Problem. With those pieces in place
he wrote, “The strategy for determining exactly what Sleeping Beauty’s degrees of
belief should be, when she wakes up, is to start by determining how her degrees of
belief should be apportioned on Sunday.... Then her degrees of belief on Monday
(and/or Tuesday) will be determined simply by conditionalizing on the information
that she receives on waking up.’ (pp. 63-4, emphasis in original). Yet Brian Weatherson
convincingly argued in his (2011) that Stalnaker’s semantics would require Beauty to
assign Monday credences to propositions she couldn’t even entertain on Sunday. Since
Conditionalization can generate credences for a proposition at a later time only if the
agent assigned that proposition a credence at an earlier time, the credences Stalnaker
needed couldn’t be generated by Conditionalization alone. Stalnaker ultimately (2011)
conceded that even with his non-Lewisian approach to content, Conditionalization
would require supplementation to properly model the Sleeping Beauty Problem.
18. One of my concerns is that categorizing propositions according to whether they are
self-locating or not—dividing centered propositions up into those that are uncentered
and those that aren’t—may draw the line in the wrong place for epistemological
work. If the underlying problem for the traditional Bayesian machinery is that some
propositions change their truth-values over time, we need to separate propositions
into those whose truth-values are changeable and those whose truth-values aren’t. The
former group, which I would follow MacFarlane (2005) in labeling “context-sensitive”
propositions, includes self-locating propositions, but may also include propositions
involving knowledge, epistemic modals, predicates of taste, etc. Moreover, the relevant
issue may not be which propositions are actually capable of changing their truth-values
across contexts, but which propositions it’s rational for a given agent to suspect might
change truth-values. Thus the proper category to focus on maybe epistemically context-
sensitive propositions. For more on this designation, Titelbaum (2013a, pp. 177ff.).
19. This presentation of the HTM approach simplifies matters by assuming the agent
entertains only finitely many centered worlds.
20. Here’s a way to see that the HTM approach updates uncentered propositions by Condi
tionalization: Step 1 treats uncentered worlds like the state-descriptions in a probability
table, updating them via exactly the process we described for updating probability tables
on page 93. That updating process conditionalizes any proposition that can be stated as
a disjunction of the state-descriptions involved. Since every uncentered proposition is
a disjunction of uncentered worlds, Step 1 has the effect of applying Conditionalization

to all uncentered propositions. Step 2 merely distributes uncentered credence among
centered possibilities; it doesn’t redistribute credences across uncentered worlds. So
Step 2 keeps the conditionalization of uncentered propositions intact.
21. This example, and much of the surrounding discussion, is adapted from Titelbaum
(2013a, §10.1). The first such counterexample to the Relevance-Limiting Thesis Γm
aware of appears in Bradley (2011, §9); Bradley attributes the example to Matt Kotzen.
The Relevance-Limiting Thesis first appeared in Titelbaum (2008).
22. We’ll consider another problem for the HTM approach in Exercise 11.6. Meacham
eventually (2010a) cited that problem as one reason he abandoned the HTM approach
in favor of another self-locating updating scheme.
23. Though Kierland and Monton (2005) propose a problem structurally analogous to
Sleeping Beauty that substitutes duplication for memory loss: No matter how the flip
comes out, Beauty awakens only once, on Monday morning. But if the coin comes up
tails, the researchers create a duplicate of Beauty who shares all of her memories. So
when Beauty awakens on Monday morning, she is certain what day it is but uncertain
just who she is. Again, the question is how confident Beauty should be that the coin
came up heads; but this Doppelganger Beauty problem features neither memory erasure
nor the threat thereof.
24. This specific variant of the Sleeping Beauty Problem was first proposed in Titelbaum
(2008). Similar ideas appear in examples due to Kierland and Monton (2005), Neal
(2006), Rosenthal (2009), and Meacham (2010a).
25. Thanks to Teddy Seidenfeld for extensive discussion of the solution to this problem.
12
Old Evidence and Logical Omniscience
In Chapter 11, we noted two features of everyday life (memory loss and self
location) that traditional Bayesian updating doesn’t seem well designed to
model. Still, recent authors have offered extensions of or minor modifications
to Conditionalization that seem to address these concerns while staying faith
ful to the basic spirit of the Bayesian approach.
This chapter takes up two problems—the Problem of Old Evidence and the
Problem of Logical Omniscience—on which the Bayesian literature has been
focused for longer. The problems are connected because some authors have
proposed that a solution to the Problem of Logical Omniscience would offer
a path to solving the Problem of Old Evidence. These problems also seem to
strike closer to the heart of Bayesianism and its five core normative rules.
The Problem of Old Evidence arises because once a proposition goes to
credence 1, it is no longer positively relevant to anything, and so cannot count
as confirming anything. This initially looks like yet another troublesome side
effect of the way Conditionalization treats evidence. But ultimately it’s a deep
problem about the Bayesian conception of confirmation, a problem that may
require us to rethink that conception and what it’s good for.
The Problem of Logical Omniscience also initially presents as a side effect,
this time of basing the Bayesian norms on probability mathematics. Kol
mogorov’s Normality axiom assigns probability 1 to all logical truths, which
generates the Bayesian requirement that rational agents be certain of logic at
all times. It feels like we should be able to tweak the axioms and loosen this
requirement, so as to reflect more reasonable requirements on agents’ logical
abilities. Yet every simple tweak undermines the Bayesian formalism’s ability to
fully carry out the applications we considered in Chapters 6 and 7. Thus, while
many authors are still trying to formalize logical non-omniscience, others have
begun to reconsider whether an omniscience requirement is such a bad idea
after all.

414 OLD EVIDENCE AND LOGICAL OMNISCIENCE
12.1 Old evidence
As we discussed in Chapter 6, the Bayesian account of induction (and of scien

tific inference more generally) revolves around the notion of “confirmation”.
A piece of evidence supports a hypothesis when it confirms that hypothesis; we
may also say that the evidence provides some justification for the hypothesis,
or supplies reason for it. Many Bayesians have found the following principle
about confirmation appealing:
Confirmation and Learning: Evidence E confirms hypothesis H for a ratio

nal agent if and only if learning E would increase the agents
confidence in H.
Chapter 6 also discussed the key Bayesian insight that confirmation can be
analyzed in terms of probability, using the following principle:
Confirmation and Probability: Evidence E confirms hypothesis H relative

to probability distribution Pr if and only if Pr(H ∣ E) > Pr(H).
In slogan form, confirmation is positive probabilistic relevance.

How are these two principles related? At first blush they seem to be about
different things: Confirmation and Learning discusses confirmation relative to
an agent, while Confirmation and Probability concerns confirmation relative
to a probability distribution. But by this point you know enough Bayesian
lore to connect them. Suppose we understand confirmation for an agent as
confirmation relative to that agent’s credence distribution cr. And suppose
rationality requires agents to update by Conditionalization. Then for any
rational agent, learning E increases her confidence in H just in case cr(H ∣ E) >
cr(H). So if we’re assessing confirmation relative to the credence distribution
cr of a rational agent, Confirmation and Learning and Confirmation and Prob
ability give us interchangeable methods of identifying confirmatory evidence.
12.1.1 The problem
In his chapter “Why I Am Not a Bayesian”, Clark Glymour introduced what

has since become a famous problem for Bayesian confirmation theory:
Scientists commonly argue for their theories from evidence known long
before the theories were introduced.... The argument that Einstein gave
12.1 OLD EVIDENCE 415
in 1915 for his gravitational field equations was that they explained the
anomalous advance of the perihelion of Mercury, established more than half
a century earlier. Other physicists found the argument enormously forceful,
and it is a fair conjecture that without it the British would not have mounted
the famous eclipse expedition of 1919. Old evidence can in fact confirm new
theory, but according to Bayesian kinematics, it cannot. (1980, pp. 306-7)
In this example, let the hypothesis Hbe Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity
(GTR), represented by the field equations Glymour mentions. Let the evidence
E be the fact that Mercury’s orbit displays an anomalous perihelion advance of
43 seconds of arc per century.1 While this E was difficult to square with the
classical Newtonian theory of gravitation, Einstein proved in 1915 that E was
predicted by GTR. Howson and Urbach write, “this prediction arguably did
more to establish that theory and displace the classical theory of gravitation
than either of its other two dramatic contemporary predictions, namely the
bending of light close to the sun and the gravitational red-shift” (2006, p. 298).
Why is this a problem? Let’s start with Confirmation and Learning. As
Earman notes, E was common knowledge in the physics community well
before 1915: “the nature of Mercury’s perihelion had been the subject of inten
sive study by Le Verrier, Newcomb, and other astronomers” (1992, p. 119).
Intuitively, an agent who already knows something can’t subsequently learn
it. So when we set out to explain how E confirmed H for Einstein in 1915, it
looks like we can’t say that learning E would’ve increased his confidence in H
at that time. In other words, the left-hand side of Confirmation and Learning’s
biconditional seems true for Einstein in 1915, but the right-hand side looks
false. (Later we’ll see a counterfactual strategy that tries to make the right-hand
side true.)
Now consider Glymour’s challenge to Confirmation and Probability. Since
Einstein knew E prior to 1915, we should count it as part of his background
corpus K in 1915. In Bayesian confirmation theory, a proposition X counts
as part of an agent’s K at a given time just in case cr(X) = 1 (Section 6.2.1).
So for Einstein’s 1915 credence distribution we have cr(E) = 1. But in that
case E can’t have been relevant to anything for Einstein at that time; the
probability axioms and Ratio Formula imply that if cr(E) = 1, then for any
H∈ £, cr(H ∣ E) = cr(H). (See Exercise 12.1.) So relative to Einstein’s credence
distribution in November of 1915—when he first showed that GTR explains
Mercury’s perihelion advance—that piece of evidence E wasn’t positively
relevant to anything. If we accept Confirmation and Probability, then the
perihelion of Mercury couldn’t confirm anything for Einstein in 1915, much
less his General Theory of Relativity. And the same goes for any other physicist
antecedently aware of the astronomical facts.
Glymour used this case to illustrate the Problem of Old Evidence for
Bayesian epistemology.2 According to Glymour, the problem is that when we
try to explain how the perihelion of Mercury could be evidence for GTR, we
find that “none of the Bayesian mechanisms apply, and if we are strictly limited
to them, we have the absurdity that old evidence cannot confirm new theory.”
(1980, p. 307).
Since Glymour posed this challenge, a number of Bayesians (Christensen
1999; Eells 1985; Garber 1983; Zynda 1995) have tried to disambiguate exactly
what the problem is supposed to be. As we’ll see below, there are actually a
number of challenges to Bayesian epistemology in the vicinity, but we’ll start
with a rough cut into two. Though the distinction isn’t original to Christensen,
I like his labels for the two problems: the diachronic problem of old evidence
and the synchronic problem of old evidence.
The diachronic problem starts from the fact that over the course of 1915,
Einstein went through a transition when it came to his attitudes towards GTR.
At the end of the year he was highly confident of GTR; at the beginning of that
year he hadn’t been. What prompted this transition in Einstein’s attitudes, and
made the transition rational? Einstein may have cited E (Mercury’s anomalous
perihelion advance) in his arguments for GTR, but the transition cant have
been prompted by his learning E—because he already knew E well prior to
1915! The diachronic problem is to explain the rational transition in Einstein’s
attitudes in a manner compatible with Bayesian theory.
The synchronic problem arises after the transition in Einstein’s attitudes has
already occurred. Suppose that sometime just after 1915, once Einstein was
already highly confident of GTR, we went to him and asked what justified his
high confidence in the theory. He might (quite reasonably) cite the anomalous
perihelion advance of Mercury. In other words, he might say that the propo
sition we’ve been calling E confirms the proposition we’ve been calling H. Yet
this can’t mean that cr(H ∣ E) > cr(H) for Einstein’s credence distribution,
because at the time we’re asking, he already has cr(E) = 1. The synchronic
problem is to give a Bayesian explanation of the sense in which E supports
Einstein’s standing confidence in H, even though E is already part of Einstein’s
evidence.
As we discuss these two problems, we will follow Glymour in largely focus
ing on the Einstein example, and assuming that Einstein’s attitudes developed
in a rational fashion. Perhaps if one examined the historical record closely
enough, one could discover various ways in which Einstein actually proceeded
irrationally in his development of GTR. But that would be beside the point.
The example (and various further details of it we will develop along the way)
is meant to stand in for a general set of reasonable scientific practices that
one might want Bayesianism to explain. However things actually went with
Einstein, there will remain contexts in which it’s rational for scientists to cite
evidence that’s been known for a long time in explaining transitions in their
attitudes, or in defending the attitudes they currently possess.
12.1.2 Solutions to the diachronic problem
Let’s start with a couple of proposals addressing the diachronic problem of old
evidence. Both of these proposals grant that it was rational for Einstein at the
end of 1915 to have a high credence in GTR that he didn’t have before. But
they deny that the change was due to Einstein’s learning about the perihelion
of Mercury—after all, he’d known about the perihelion for quite some time.
These proposals focus on different potential causes of his attitude change.
New theories. One way to assign a new, high credence to a proposition is not
to have assigned it any credence before. Perhaps the crucial transition that
happened in 1915 was that Einstein created a theory, GTR, that he hadn’t
conceived of before. Seeing that this new theory explained a fact of which he
was already well aware—the anomalous perihelion of Mercury—he assigned
it an appropriately high credence.
This may not be a historically accurate recapitulation of what actually
happened to Einstein during 1915. (Perhaps this proposal is a more realistic
account of what happened to other physicists who first learned of GTR during
1915.) But it raises an important challenge for Bayesian epistemology: How do
we account for shifts in an agent’s credence distribution when she comes to
recognize new possibilities not previously articulated in her doxastic space?
Throughout this book we’ve represented the doxastic possibilities an agent
entertains using a finite set of possible worlds, each described by a state
description composed from a finite list of atomic propositions. When an agent
updates by Conditionalization, her numerical credence distribution over that
set of possible worlds may change, but the underlying language across which
the distribution is assigned remains fixed.
So what happens when an agent comes to entertain a new proposition that
she hadn’t considered before? Perhaps she learns of a new theory; perhaps
she gains a new concept; perhaps she becomes acquainted with something
to which she couldn’t refer before. This isn’t the kind of learning modeled
by Conditionalization, in which the agent’s new set of doxastic possibilities
is a proper subset of those she previously entertained. And it isn’t forgetting
(Chapter 11), in which the agent entertains once more doxastic possibilities
she had previously ruled out. When a new proposition is added to an agent’s
language, her doxastic space becomes more fine-grained. At least one possible
world she had previously entertained is now split into two: one in which the
new proposition is true, and another in which the new proposition is false.
How should the agent’s credences evolve in such a situation? Perhaps the
credence assigned to the old (coarse-grained) world should simply be divided
between the two new (finer-grained) worlds. But the response to new theories
may be more complex than that. For example, consider a nineteenth-century
astronomer who entertains only two possible explanations for the anomalous
orbit of Mercury: Newtonian physics is false, or Newtonian physics is true
but some previously undetected planet is warping Mercury’s orbit.3 If we
introduced this astronomer to Einstein’s theory, that would partition the
astronomer’s “Newtonian physics is false” possibility into two new possible
worlds (one in which GTR is true, the other in which Newtonian physics is
false but GTR is as well). Plausibly, the two new worlds wouldn’t just divvy
up the credence previously assigned to “Newton was wrong”; recognizing the
new possibility might also drain some of the astronomer’s confidence away
from the undetected planet hypothesis.
Clearly the question of how an agent should alter her credences upon
recognizing new possibilities is subtle and rich. But just as clearly, the answer
can’t just straightforwardly be “through traditional Conditionalization”. The
problem of new theories is an important challenge for Bayesian updating
schemes.4
Logical learning. By the end of 1915, Einstein had a newfound confidence in

GTR. This wasn’t because he learned of Mercury’s perihelion advance during
that year; he’d known about it long before. One could debate whether 1915 was
the first year in which Einstein truly had a grasp of GTR, and thus was capable
of assigning a credence to it. But that would require scouring the historical
record, and making some difficult judgments about exactly how well an agent
must grasp a theory or proposition in order to assign it a doxastic attitude.
Yet there’s something important that clearly did happen during late 1915,
and which obviously increased Einstein’s confidence in GTR. Einstein worked
out the connection between GTR and the perihelion of Mercury; he demon
strated that GTR predicts the perihelion effect to a high degree of precision
with few adjustable parameters. Plausibly, it was learning about this con
nection between GTR and the perihelion—not learning about the perihelion
itself—that led Einstein to increase his confidence in GTR in late 1915.
But if that’s right, the Bayesian now has a different problem. From our
current vantage point of scientific sophistication, we can see that various
background facts known by Einstein and other physicists prior to 1915 entail
that GTR predicts the perihelion advance of Mercury. It’s just that no one
recognized this entailment before Einstein. So the fact Einstein learned in late
1915—and that increased his confidence in GTR—was a logical truth. This
creates a problem, because traditional Bayesianism can’t model the learning
of logical truths. An agent who satisfies the probability axioms will assign
credence 1 to every logical truth in her language at all times. So there’s no way
a probabilistic agent can go from a credence less than 1 to certainty in such a
proposition. This is the problem of logical learning; we will consider it and the
related Problem of Logical Omniscience in Section 12.2.
12.1.3 Solutions to the synchronic problem
Perhaps Einstein first considered GTR during 1915; perhaps he considered it

before, but became more confident in the theory once he saw its connection
to Mercury’s perihelion. At best, these proposals will explain the diachronic
transition that brought Einstein to a substantial confidence in GTR by the end
of 1915. But they won’t address the synchronic problem of old evidence: how
can a Bayesian account for the fact that after his transition to a high confidence
in GTR, Einstein (and others) cited the perihelion advance of Mercury as a
key piece of evidence confirming the theory?
Historical backtracking. On a probabilistic approach to confirmation, we want

to say that E confirms H for an agent when she assigns cr(H ∣ E) > cr(H). But
given the probability calculus, this inequality fails when cr(E) = 1. (If Einstein
is already certain of Mercury’s anomalous perihelion advance, that fact can’t be
positively relevant to anything on his credence distribution.) A straightforward
solution is to find some other credence distribution associated with the agent
that doesn’t assign 1 to E already, and use it to gauge E’s confirmation of H.
It’s natural to seek such a distribution in the agent’s past. After all, if we take
an agent who’s certain of some E, and ask her, “In what sense does E support H
for you?”, she might answer, “E was one of the things that made me confident
of H in the first place.” This explains a support fact in her present using a
confidence increase from her past. Perhaps its sufficient for E to confirm H
right now that there was some time in the past when the agent learned E and
increased her confidence in H as a result.
While this proposal may cover some of the desired cases, there are plenty
of old evidence examples for which it just won’t suffice. First, it won’t work
for cases in which the agent came to consider H only once she was certain of
E. In Einstein’s case, he knew about the perihelion of Mercury long before he
formulated GTR. As we’ve seen, an extension of traditional Bayesian updating
is needed to cover the introduction of GTR into Einstein’s conceptual space.
But setting that point aside, it’s clear there wasn’t any time when Einstein
learned of Mercury’s perihelion and this new fact increased his confidence in
GTR.
Second, even in cases in which the agent has been aware of H all along,
the proposal requires other facts to have been learned in a very specific order.
Suppose that from the agent’s current point of view, E confirms H only relative
to some other fact in her background corpus K. If the agent learned K after
she learned E, there may have been no moment at which learning E increased
the agent’s confidence in H. For example, suppose I am playing cards and learn
the proposition E that my opponent has a 7 in her hand. By itself, this doesn’t
confirm the proposition H that she possesses a card that’s higher than all of
mine. But then I subsequently view my own hand, and learn proposition K
that my highest card is a 5. With all this information available, I might say that
E confirms H for me. But there was never a time when learning E made me
more confident of H.
Third, we need to address overdetermination cases. Sometimes an agent has
multiple pieces of evidence that independently confirm the same hypothesis;
we don’t want one piece of evidence’s supporting (or even entailing) H to
obscure the other’s confirmatory role. Suppose that after getting all the card
information above, I then learn E', that my opponent also has a 9 in her hand.
I might say that Ef confirms H for me just as much as E does. Yet learning E,
didn’t increase my confidence in H, because by the time I learned Ef I already
had cr(Ji) = 1.
Counterfactual backtracking. Given these problems (and others) for the his
torical backtracking approach, some authors have suggested we look for a
credence distribution on which E is positively relevant to H not in the agent’s
past, but in a close possible world. Recall the problem that Glymour’s Einstein
example created for the Confirmation and Learning principle. If an agent
already knows E, then there’s no way the agent can learn E, so it’s difficult to
read the right-hand side of that principles biconditional as true. We can avoid
this problem by reading the right-hand side as a counterfactual: were it possible
for the agent to learn E, doing so would increase her confidence in H. In other
words, we test for confirmation by asking, “If the agent didn’t already know E,
would learning it make her more confident in H?”
Howson and Urbach are prominent proponents of this counterfactual
approach; as they see it, “to regard any evidence, once known, as confirming
one has to go counterfactual” (2006, p. 299). How do we put the approach into
practice? First, we need a subjunctive reading of Confirmation and Probability,
something like: E confirms H just in case were the agent to assign cr(E) < 1,
she would also assign cr(H ∣ E) > cr(H). Then we need to take the credence
distribution that assigns cr(E) = 1 in the actual world, and determine what it
would look like were that certainty removed. Howson and Urbach write, “the
old-evidence problem’ really is not a problem, merely an implicit reminder
that if E is in K then it should first be deleted, as far as that can be done, before
assessing its evidential weight” (2006, p. 299). Deleting E from the agent’s
background corpus K does not mean just taking E out and leaving the rest of
K intact. We’ll want to remove other propositions from K along with E, such
as propositions logically equivalent to E or sets of propositions that jointly
entail E. ûckily, this problem of “contracting” a consistent corpus to excise
a particular proposition has been addressed by a formal theory commonly
known as AGM. (Alchourrδn, Gardenfors, and Makinson 1985) Howson and
Urbach apply a probabilistic descendant of AGM to work out a counterfactual
credence distribution for the perihelion case (2006, pp. 300-l).5
Yet it’s not clear that this type of counterfactual will always generate the
confirmatory judgments we want. Patrick Maher (1996, p. 156) offers the
example of an author who knows his work is popular (call this proposition P),
and who judges that its popularity confirms that it’s important (call this I).
Maher suggests that if the author didn’t know his work was popular, he
might think popularity was no evidence of importance. So when we go to
the counterfactual world where the author doesn’t already know P, we find
that his credence distribution doesn’t render P positively relevant to I. The
counterfactual version of Confirmation and Probability fails in this case.
In a related vein, Earman notes:
It is relevant that in 1907 Einstein wrote, “I am busy on a relativistic theory of

the gravitational law with which I hope to account for the still unexplained
secular change of the perihelion motion of Mercury. So far I have not
managed to succeed.” (Seelig 1956, p. 76) Thus it is not beyond the pale of
plausibility that if Einstein hadn’t known about the perihelion phenomenon,

he wouldn’t have formulated GTR. And if someone else had formulated the
theory, Einstein might not have understood it well enough to assign it any
degree of belief at all. (1992, p. 123)
This is a particular example of a quite general scientific phenomenon, in which

theories are formulated specifically to explain (or at least to accommodate)
certain pieces of data. In such cases, the scientist’s attitudes toward H may
look quite unrecognizable when we go to worlds in which E isn’t known. As
often transpires when we suggest a counterfactual account of an actual-world
condition,6 the possible world realizing the antecedent of the subjunctive
conditional may not yield exactly what we hoped for or expected.
Relativizing beyond credence. Confirmation and Probability relativizes E,s

confirmation of H to some probability distribution Pr. We have been trying
to read that Pr as the credence distribution of some agent, either actual or
counterfactual. Perhaps the Problem of Old Evidence requires us to back off
from that commitment.
Objective Bayesians (in the normative sense) want facts about confirmation
to be independent of how any individual subject sees the world. On their
position, the question of whether the perihelion of Mercury confirms General
Relativity isn’t relative to any particular/agent’s credence distribution, or
personal history. They will want that question answered relative to a proba
bility distribution representing the unique rational epistemic standard—what
Carnap (Section 6.2.2) called distribution m.
But we can’t determine whether E confirms H simply by asking whether
m(H ∣ E) > m(H). The unique rational standard is represented by a regular
distribution emptied of all empirical evidence. If we want to recover post-
1915 Einstein’s judgment that Mercury’s perihelion confirmed GTR, we need
to recognize that judgment’s dependence on a vast corpus of physical back
ground knowledge (about the masses of stars and planets, their locations and
velocities, etc.). We should identify the appropriate corpus K, then ask whether
m(H\E&K)> m(H∖K).
Maher develops an objectivist view on which “E confirms EΓ, states “that
E confirms H relative to background evidence [K], but [K] is usually taken
to be fixed to sufficient accuracy by the context and so is normally not
explicitly indicated.” (1996, p. 166) This proposal keeps rational epistemic
standards fixed, but relativizes confirmation to some background context—

whether it be the context against which Einstein was developing physics with
his compatriots, the context in which we discuss whether Mercury’s perihelion
confirmed GTR, etc. Crucially, K need not be Einsteins actual knowledge base
at any given time, and it will not include E itself.
But once we’ve introduced the move of relativizing confirmation to a
background corpus distinct from any particular agents body of total evidence,
there’s no reason Subjective Bayesians can’t make this move as well. If we can
make good sense of what I called an agent’s “ultimate epistemic standards”
in Section 4.3—her general tendencies for assessing evidence independent
of the body of evidence she happens to possess—then we can replace the
objectivist unique rational prior with a distribution P⅛ representing the
agent’s idiosyncratic standards. E would confirm H relative to a particular
agent and a particular context just in case P⅛(H ∣ E & K) > P⅛(H ∣ K), where
P⅛ is the hypothetical prior representing that agent’s standards and K is the
contextually salient background corpus.7
Or we could let context do more work than just providing a background
corpus. For example, suppose a group of scientists is studying some thermo
dynamic effect in a sample of gas. Given the settings of various parameters
(pressure, volume, etc.), statistical thermodynamics specifies a probability
distribution over all the possible ways the molecules in that sample might be
arranged. Even if individuals in the group have different personal credences
about the sample’s current status, they might agree to rely on this contextually
salient distribution in determining the evidential significance of experimental
results. That distribution would furnish a Pr against which confirmation of
theories by evidence could be gauged.
The general idea is that even for a Subjective Bayesian, the probabilities
used to establish confirmation relations need not come from any particular
individual’s credence distribution. Context may make salient a distribution
appropriate for the job. Yet it’s unclear how far we can take this approach.
Even if we grant that context may specify—or at least constrain—probabilities
against which confirmation can be measured, will these values include not just
likelihoods but also priors? Perhaps a small group of scientists working on a
common project will share enough assumptions about the relevant priors to
allow for useful assessments of confirmation. But when we turn to Einstein’s
case, what contextual distribution assigned a meaningful prior probability to
the General Theory of Relativity, such that we can assess whether facts about
Mercury’s perihelion would boost that probability?
12.1.4 More radical solutions
Regularity and Jeffrey Conditionalization. Up to this point, our discussion of

old evidence has assumed that a rational agent moves through life by collecting
evidence in the form of propositions, then conditionalizing on that evidence
to raise it to certainty. Our basic problem has been that once this occurs for
some E, the agents certainty in E prevents it from being positively relevant to
any particular H.
But we’ve already questioned this model of updating and evidence collection
a number of times. In the historical case, Earman notes that “the literature
of [Einsteins] period contained everything from 41 to 45 [seconds] of arc
per century as the value of the anomalous advance of Mercurys perihelion,
and even the weaker proposition that the true value lies somewhere in this
range was challenged by some astronomers and physicists” (1992, p. 121).
Einstein probably wasn’t certain of the proposition E that Mercury’s perihelion
has a 43 arc-second anomalous advance, and probably shouldn’t have been.
In Section 4.2 we discussed the Regularity Principle, which bans sending
contingent propositions to certainty. This principle is often paired with Jeffrey
Conditionalization (Section 5.5) as an updating rule, which allows experience
to impinge on an agent’s opinions not by sending any proposition to certainty,
but by changing her unconditional credence distribution across a partition.
The Regularity/Jeffrey Conditionalization regime looks promising as a solu
tion to the Problem of Old Evidence. On this regime, the Confirmation and
Probability test for confirmation will always be probative relative to a rational
agent’s credence distribution, since that distribution will not accumulate cer
tainties over time. (Or at least, the test will be probative for contingent proposi
tions. We might still have questions—both synchronic and diachronic—about
how logical truths confirm other propositions, since Normality will require
rational agents to assign logical truths credence 1,)8
Yet there are deep questions about how to understand confirmation if Con
ditionalization is set aside. Suppose Confirmation and Learning expresses your
fundamental intuition about evidential support: E is evidence for H just in case
learning E makes one more confident in H. On a Jeffrey Conditionalization
approach, it’s no longer clear what it means to “learn” E (since experience
no longer raises contingent propositions’ credences to 1). One might try to
weaken Confirmation and Learning to something like:
Confirmation and Increase: Evidence E confirms hypothesis H for a ratio

nal agent if and only if any experience that increased her confidence
in E would also increase her confidence in H.
But this principle doesn’t match Confirmation and Probability. It’s possible to
create a situation in which every Jeffrey Conditionalization across a particular
partition that increases confidence in E increases confidence in H, yet E is
negatively relevant to H. There are also situations in which Pr(H ∣ E) > Pr(H),
yet a Jeffrey Conditionalization that increases confidence in E decreases con
fidence in H. (See Exercise 12.2 for examples of each.) So the condition for
confirmation specified in Confirmation and Increase is neither necessary nor
sufficient for satisfying Confirmation and Probability’s relevance condition for
confirmation.
Thus on a Jeffrey Conditionalization approach, we may have to choose
between equating confirmation with positive probabilistic relevance and tying
it to an intuitive principle about learning. Here one might argue for the positive
relevance approach by noting that Confirmation and Probability is well moti
vated by considerations independent of learning; as we showed in Chapter 6,
probabilistic relevance satisfies many adequacy conditions for a proper expli
cation of confirmation. So if we embrace Regularity, model rational updates
using Jeffrey Conditionalization, and use Confirmation and Probability as our
test for confirmation relative to an agent’s credences, it looks like we’ll get a
plausible theory of confirmation that avoids old evidence concerns.
Or at least, we’ll get a plausible theory so long as we stick to qualitative
confirmation judgments. Things get trickier when we quantitatively measure
degrees of confirmation. The fundamental concern behind the Problem of Old
Evidence was that changing one’s attitude toward E shouldn’t change how
one views E,s support for H. Christensen (1999), therefore, suggests that on a
proper solution to the Problem of Old Evidence, updates that change an agent’s
unconditional credence in E shouldn’t change how strongly E confirms H for
her. He demonstrates that if we measure the confirmation of H by E using the
measure we called s in Section 6.4.1, then E,s confirmation of H will remain
unchanged through any Jeffrey Conditionalization that directly changes the
agent’s unconditional distribution across the E∕~E partition. (Exercise 12.3.)
Yet as we noted in Section 6.4.1, s fails to display other properties that
seem to be adequacy conditions for a proper measure of evidential support.
And Christensen himself offers intuitive counterexamples to measure s (1999,
p. 456ff.) So it’s unclear whether Regularity and Jeffrey Conditionalization
can together provide a subjectivist account of confirmation that handles old
evidence and is plausible both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Limitations of the theory. It may be time now to ask some hard questions
about the purposes of Bayesian confirmation theory, and about that theory’s
limitations.
Lets say that an agent, a piece of evidence E, and a hypothesis H together

pass the “learning test” just in case learning E would increase that agents
confidence in H. Confirmation and Learning says that passing the learning
test is both necessary and sufficient for E to confirm H for the agent. The
right-to-left component of this principle—according to which passing the
learning test suffices for confirmation—serves an important Bayesian purpose.
We want to know when it’s rational for an agent to increase her confidence in
a hypothesis upon gaining some evidence. Confirmation and Learning tells
us that a confidence increase is rational only when the evidence confirms
that hypothesis, which in turn (given Confirmation and Probability) occurs
only when the evidence is positively probabilistically relevant. This gives the
working scientist a criterion for when an experimental result ought to make
her more confident of a particular theory.
But this purpose would be served just as well by a weakened version of the
principle:
Confirmation and Learning (weakened): Evidence E confirms hypothesis

H for a rational agent if learning E would increase the agent’s
confidence in H.
Here I’ve replaced the “if and only if” in the original principle with a mere
“if”. In other words, passing the learning test is now a sufficient but not a
necessary condition for confirmation. Why should we insist on a necessary
and sufficient condition for confirmation? Only if we’re hoping that the
Confirmation and Learning principle will serve a further purpose pursued
by many early Bayesians: providing a philosophical analysis of the scientific
notion of confirmation.
In response to the question, “How can we tell when evidence confirms
a hypothesis for an agent?”, Bayesians had an excellent initial thought. If
learning that evidence would increase the agent’s (rational) confidence in the
hypothesis, that’s a good sign of a confirmatory relationship. Yet Confirmation
and Learning—in its strong, biconditional form—takes this helpful indicator
and elevates it to a necessary and sufficient condition for confirmation. Perhaps
this is an overreach; perhaps there are other ways evidence can confirm a
hypothesis, other tests that reveal confirmation when the learning test fails to
do so.
To acknowledge that possibility, let’s work with the weakened version of the
principle for a while. Among other things, the weakened principle allows us to
distinguish true counterexamples to Bayesian confirmation theory from cases
that merely reveal the limitations of that approach. A counterexample shows

that a theory renders false verdicts; a limitation occurs when youd like the
theory to render a verdict but it won’t. For Bayesian confirmation theory, a
counterexample would be a case in which learning E would indeed increase
a rational agents confidence in H, yet E doesn’t confirm H for that agent. If
such a case existed, even the weakened Confirmation and Learning principle
would be false. But the cases in our old evidence discussion work the other
way around: intuitively, E confirms H for an agent, yet it’s not possible for her
to rationally increase her confidence in H by learning E. Such cases reveal the
limits of what Confirmation and Learning can tell us about confirmation—
the principle is going to help us detect some cases of confirmation, but
not others.
Can we say more about which cases might be missed? It helps to draw a
distinction between confirmation as a process and confirmation as a standing
relation. Suppose I tell you I just confirmed a suspicion I’ve had for quite some
time. That kind of confirmation is a process, occurring over a span of time
in response to particular stimuli. (The “confirmation” of judicial nominees
is a temporally extended process as well.) The diachronic problem of old
evidence seems most concerned with this notion of confirmation: what was
it over the course of 1915 that confirmed GTR for Einstein? And the learning
test (perhaps augmented by one of the solutions to the diachronic problem
discussed in Section 12.1.2 above) seems best paired with this notion of con
firmation. Positive probabilistic relevance relative to a rational agent’s credence
distribution reveals which bits of evidence would confirm a hypothesis for the
agent in the process sense.
But many old evidence cases consider confirmation as a standing relation;
they take an agent’s confidence in a hypothesis at a particular moment and ask
what the agent takes to support the hypothesis at that time—what the agent
thinks justifies her current confidence. This standing justificatory relation is a
perfectly good sense of the term “confirmation”, and is what the synchronic
problem of old evidence concerns. Yet it may not be the notion that Bayesian
confirmation theory was designed to detect. Honestly, we should’ve already
been worried when we noticed that positive probabilistic relevance is symmet
ric. Many epistemologists take justification to be an asymmetric relation. (The
proposition that it’s raining right now is justified for me by the proposition that
I can see raindrops falling outside my window—not vice versa.) If so, it can’t be
fully captured by positive relevance.9 Williamson (2000, p. 187) also points out
that whenever a probabilistic agent assigns 0 < cr(E) < 1, she will also assign
Pr(E ∣ E) = 1; so every uncertain proposition is positively relevant to itself. Yet
standing confirmation isn’t generally reflexive; a rational agent takes very few
propositions to be evidence for themselves.
Now the fact that learning one proposition would increase the agents
confidence in a second proposition—or the fact that learning the first increased
her confidence in the second at some point in the past—might be a good
indicator of the presence of some standing justificatory relation. But even if
one of the strategies from Section 12.1.2 takes care of Bayesian confirmation
theory’s diachronic problem, the synchronic problem of old evidence reveals
the learning test’s limitations as an indicator of standing confirmation.
Proponents of a new theory often burnish its credentials by showing off all of
the problems they think it can solve, accompanied by maximalist claims that it
will succeed in every case. Once the theory is accepted, we develop a more
mature understanding of its capabilities and limitations. Perhaps Bayesian
confirmation theory simply isn’t the best approach for detecting and analyzing
standing support relations. Or perhaps it has a place as one component of a
broader, unified approach that analyzes confirmation as both a relation and a
process.10
12.2 Logical omniscience
Savage (1967) asks us to consider the plight of “a person required to risk money
on a remote digit of πn (p. 308). For example, suppose I offer to sell Andre the
following ticket:

to $1 if the trillionth digit of π is
a 2, and nothing otherwise.
If he’s rational, what is Andre’s fair price for that ticket—how much would
he be willing to pay to possess it? From our discussions of decision theory
(Chapter 7) and Dutch Books (Chapter 9), we conclude that if Andre’s rational,
his price for this ticket will equal his credence in the proposition that the
trillionth digit of π is a 2.
But I happen to know (thanks to Talbott 2005) that the trillionth digit of
π is a 2. And since mathematical truths are true in every possible world,
the Normality axiom requires rational agents to have a credence of 1 in that
proposition. So if Andre’s rational, he should be willing to pay any amount up
to $1 for the ticket above.
12.2 LOGICAL OMNISCIENCE 429
Does that seem reasonable? Perhaps Andre doesn’t know what I know about
the trillionth digit of π. In that case, is it really rational for him to pay, say, $0.90
for the ticket? (And on the flip side, would it be irrational for him to purchase
a ticket that paid off on any digit other than 2?) Perhaps, while Andre doesn’t
know the true identity of the trillionth digit, he does know about conjectures
that each of the digits 0 through 9 occurs equally often within the decimal
expansion of π. In that case, it might seem rational for him to set a fair betting
price of $0.10.
But the Normality axiom doesn’t care what Andre knows or doesn’t know.
It requires him to be certain of all tautologies, no matter his evidence. This
requirement—known as the logical omniscience requirement—has struck
many authors as unreasonable, especially because there’s no Bayesian require
ment that a rational agent be certain of all truths. As Daniel Garber memorably
put it:
Asymmetry in the treatment of logical and empirical knowledge is, on the

face of it, absurd. It should be no more irrational to fail to know the least
prime number greater than one million than it is to fail to know the number
of volumes in the Library of Congress. (1983, p. 105)
Does rationality really require certainty in all logical truths? Can we build a
Bayesian formalism that loosens this requirement? We will first disambiguate
this general concern into distinct, specific problems, then consider how one
might respond to each.11
12.2.1 Clutter avoidance and partial distributions
One problem with Normality as we’ve presented it is that in any propositional

language £ closed under the traditional connectives, there will be infinitely
many tautologies. Normality demands that the rational agent assign each and
every one of those tautologies a credence of 1; thus it requires the rational agent
to possess infinitely many attitudes. But that maybe impossible for finite beings
such as ourselves. And even if possible, ferretting out all of the tautologies
and assigning them certainty may be a waste of our cognitive capacity, energy,
and attention. Gilbert Harman (1986, p. 12) famously defended the following
principle:
Clutter Avoidance: One should not clutter one’s mind with trivialities.
But if cognitive clutter is the problem, Normality isn’t the sole culprit. As
we’ve stated it, Non-Negativity requires assigning a non-negative credence
to every proposition in Finite Additivity requires particular values for
each disjunction; and the Ratio Formula requires a value for each conditional
credence with a nonzero condition. Harman also complained about updating
by Conditionalization:
One can use conditionalization to get a new probability for P only if one
has already assigned a prior probability not only to E but to P 8c E. If one
is to be prepared for various possible conditionalizations, then for every
proposition P one wants to update, one must already have assigned probabil
ities to various conjunctions of P together with one or more of the possible
evidence propositions and/or their denials.... To be prepared for coming to
accept or reject any of ten evidence propositions, one would have to record
probabilities of over a thousand such conjunctions for each proposition one
is interested in updating. To be prepared for twenty evidence propositions,
one must record a million probabilities. For thirty evidence propositions, a
billion probabilities are needed, and so forth. (1986, p. 26)
To me, Harman’s Clutter Avoidance complaint indicates that we haven’t been

careful enough in formulating our Bayesian principles. The damage can be
repaired in three steps.
First, we should acknowledge that nothing in the traditional arguments for
Bayesianism requires that credences be distributed over a full propositional
language. One cannot be Dutch Booked, or accuracy-dominated, by virtue of
failing to adopt an attitude toward a particular proposition. (If I don’t assign
a credence to a proposition, then I will have no fair betting price for tickets
involving that proposition, and I simply won’t buy or sell any bets a bookie
offers me on it.) Dutch Book and accuracy arguments show only that if one
does assign credences over particular sorts of propositions, and those cre
dences fail to meet certain conditions, then one’s distribution will have various
undesirable features. Thus these arguments do nothing to favor a complete
distribution—a distribution that assigns real numbers to every proposition
in a language £ closed under connectives—over a partial distribution—a
distribution that assigns reals to only some of the propositions in such a
language. Meanwhile, if one thinks that the best arguments for Bayesianism
come from its applications, then while a partial credence distribution may yield
fewer applications to particular cases (fewer confirmational judgments, fewer
determinate decisions, etc.), it will not break either Bayesian confirmation or

decision theory.
Second, we should understand our Bayesian rules as evaluative norms of
rational consistency, not as prescriptive recipes for reasoning. It’s easy to
read Finite Additivity as demanding that your credence in a disjunction be
calculated from your credences in its mutually exclusive disjuncts, and to
read Conditionalization as saying that you must determine your unconditional
credences at a given time from conditional credences you assigned earlier on.
But the rules don’t have to be read that way. Finite Additivity might simply
say that if you find an agent who assigns credences to P, Q, and P V Q (with
P and Q mutually exclusive), then that agent’s distribution is rationally flawed
if the third credence isn’t the sum of the first two. Similarly, we might find
an agent who assigns a credence to P at t7∙, but assigned no credence at ti to
that P conditional on the E she learned between those two times—perhaps
P is a proposition she never considered until tj. Harman is right that “one
can use conditionalization to get a new probability for P only if one has
already assigned a prior probability not only to P but to P&E” But perhaps
we shouldn’t think of Conditionalization as a tool to be used for crafting
new credences from old; instead, we can think of it as a check on diachronic
attitudinal consistency. If an agent assigns both cri(P ∣ E) and cq∙(P), then those
two credences should be equal. But Conditionalization confers no rational
demerits if the agent simply fails to assign one of those values.12
Third, however, putting these two points into practice requires a bit of
technical tweaking. Here’s why: We want to say that it’s rational, for instance,
for an agent to assign credences only to the contingent propositions P and
~P, and to nothing else. But we also want to rationally criticize that agent
if she assigns cr(P) = cr(~P) = 0.7. Strictly speaking, an agent who assigns
only those two unconditional credences hasn’t violated the Bayesian rules for
partial distributions we’ve just been considering. She satisfies Non-Negativity;
every proposition to which she assigns an unconditional credence receives
a non-negative value. She trivially satisfies Normality, because she doesn’t
adopt an attitude toward any tautology, and we are now reading that rule
as saying only, “If you assign a credence to a tautology, its value must be 1”.
Similarly, she trivially satisfies Finite Additivity, by not adopting attitudes
toward any disjunctions. Yet intuitively, this agent’s distribution conflicts with
the probability axioms!
Bayesians who allow rational partial credence distributions have tradition
ally addressed this problem as follows: We require that an agent’s partial
credence distribution be extendable to a complete distribution that satisfies

the probability axioms. That is, it must be possible to construct a complete
probabilistic distribution that assigns the same value as the agent does to
every proposition about which she has an opinion. This is clearly impossible
for the partial distribution assigning cr(P) = cr(~P) = 0.7. Suppose we had a
complete distribution that included those values. By virtue of its completeness,
it would also assign some real number to P V ~P. If it assigned this tautology
a credence of 1, the distribution would violate Finite Additivity, because the
value assigned to the disjunction P V ~P wouldn’t be the sum of the values
assigned to its mutually exclusive disjuncts. But if the distribution satisfied
Finite Additivity by assigning that tautologous disjunction a value of 1.4, then
it would violate Normality. Thus the partial distribution isn’t extendable to a
complete probabilistic distribution, which reveals its irrationality.
A similar move addresses Harman’s clutter complaint about Conditional
ization. We simply require that an agent’s ti and t∙ credence distributions be
extendable to complete distributions that satisfy the probability axioms (and
Ratio Formula) and relate to each other as Conditionalization requires. If the
agent assigns a cry∙(P) value but no crz∙(P ∣ E~) value, that’s fine, as long as there is
some way of completing her cri distribution to yield cri(P ∣ E) = cr7∙(P) without
violating any of our other Bayesian rules.
12.2.2 Logical confirmation and logical learning
Yet even once we move to partial credence distributions, Normality still

gives us problems. For one thing, an agent will often view one logical (or
mathematical)13 truth as supported by another. Suppose I am certain of the
proposition S that 692 is an even number, certain of the proposition D that
every integer ending in an even digit is even, and certain of the former because
Γm certain of the latter. It would be nice for our theory of confirmation to
capture the sort of support that D lends to S. But a positive relevance account
will indicate no confirmation here, because cr(S ∣ D) = 1 = cr(S). The only way
to get relevance confirmation of S by D would be if S’s prior were less than 1.
But if I assign cr(S) < 1,1 will violate Normality (even the version of Normality
that allows for partial distributions).
Perhaps we’ve already indicated the correct response to this problem. In
Section 12.1.4 I suggested that the Bayesian probabilistic relevance account
of confirmation may capture confirmation only as a process, not as a standing
relation. If my certainty in S is justified by my certainty in D, that’s a standing
relation among my doxastic attitudes. Bayesian confirmation theory may

simply not be up to tracking such relations.
Fine then—let’s think about the process of logical confirmation. Perhaps
before you read this chapter, you had never considered whether the trillionth
digit of π was a 2. When I asked you to consider the betting ticket on
page 428, you then assigned a credence to that proposition. Γm guessing it
was a nonextreme credence—perhaps 0.1. About a paragraph later, I relayed
Talbotts report that the trillionth digit of π is indeed a 2. Presumably this
testimony increased your confidence in the proposition (perhaps all the way
up to 1).
That confidence increase seems a very rational response to the evidence
with which you were presented. Yet a Bayesian model of rationality cannot
recognize it as such. If our Bayesian model allows for partial distributions,
it will be all right with your initially adopting no attitude towards the π
proposition. But the moment you adopt any degree of belief in that proposition
with a value less than 1—the moment you assign any fair price to the π betting
ticket other than $1—your credences violate the Normality axiom.
This is an issue for at least two reasons. First, it seems like you do a rationally
good thing when you increase your confidence in the π proposition upon
learning of Talbotts testimony. But a Bayesian epistemology based on prob-
abilism will negatively evaluate your credal sequence for violating Normality.
Second, let’s compare you with someone who decreased her confidence in the
π proposition upon learning of Talbott’s testimony. Unless she possesses some
evidence you don’t (say, that Talbott is a pernicious liar about logical truths),
her reponse to what she’s learned is irrational while yours is not. Yet since
the Bayesian system evaluates you each negatively the moment you assign
anything other than certainty to that proposition, there’s no way for it to
discriminate between the two of you on rational grounds.
It seems that to get an adequate model of rational logical learning, we
need a Bayesianism that allows for deductive non-omniscience—not just the
failure to adopt any attitude toward a logical truth, but the ability to rationally
assign less-than-certainty to such truths. We’ll now investigate whether such a
Bayesianism might be available.
12.2.3 Allowing logical uncertainty
To sum up the discussion thus far: We can modify Normality to allow for par
tial credence distributions. Instead of requiring an agent to assign certainty to
all logical truths, it can simply ban assigning less-than-certainty to any logical
truths. But that ban still stands in the way of our modeling logical learning
(and logical confirmation, should we wish to do so). Moreover, the ban seems
unreasonable on its face—intuitively, when a logical or mathematical truth is
highly complex and/or distant from an agents cognitive reach, we shouldn’t
fault her for failing to be certain of it. This seems to me the central problem
of logical omniscience: We want a Bayesian theory that permits agents to
rationally assign credences less than 1 to logical truths.
How might we do that? One approach begins by re-expressing Kolmogorov’s
axioms in a slightly different way:
Non-Negativity: For any proposition P in £, cr(P) '½ 0.

Normality: For proposition T in if 1= T then cr(T) = 1.
Finite Additivity: For any propositions P and Q in £, if 1= ~(P & Q) then
cr(P V Q) = cr(P) + cr(Q).
In Section 2.1.1, we defined “1= X” to mean that X is true in every possible

world. We also said that P and Q are mutually exclusive just in case there’s
no possible world in which both of them are true. Well, if no possible world
makes P& Q true, then every possible world makes ~(P& Q) true. So given our
definition of “k”, all I’ve done here is rewrite the standard Kolmogorov axioms
from Section 2.2 using different notation.
But what if we gave “1=” a different interpretation? For example, we might
stipulate that “1= X” means X is a truth-functional truth. (A truth-functional
truth is a proposition true by virtue of its truth-functional form—by the
arrangement of truth-functional connectives within it. ~(P & ~P) is a truth
functional truth, while ~[(Vx)Fx & ~Fu] is not. The latter’s status as a logical
truth depends not just on the truth-functional connectives but also on the
quantifier within it.) We could then define Truth-Functional Bayesianism
as a theory that requires rational credence distributions to be extendable to
distributions satisfying the axioms above, with “l=” interpreted to indicate only
truth-functional truths.
Truth-Functional Bayesianism isn’t very plausible as a normative theory, for
reasons I’ll get to in a moment. But it’s a useful toy theory for thinking about
versions of Bayesianism that don’t require logical omniscience. Given how
Truth-Functional Bayesianism re-interprets “l=”, we now have 1= ~(P & ~P),
but ≠~[(Vx)F% & ~Fα]. So the Normality axiom will fault an agent who
assigns less-than-certainty to ~(P & ~P), but not an agent who is uncertain
of ~[(Vx)Fx & ~Fa]. (And it certainly won’t fault an agent who isn’t certain of
the trillionth digit of π∖) Moreover, Finite Additivity will still treat P and ~P as
mutually exclusive, so it will require their credences to add up to 1. But since
≠ ~[(Vx)Fx & ~Fα], Finite Additivity will not require cr((Vx)Fx V ~Fa) =
cr((Vx)Fx) + cr(~Fα).14
Truth-Functional Bayesianism is implausible because it draws the line
between what an agents rationally required to be certain of and what she’s
not required to be certain of in a fairly artificial place—at the boundary
between truth-functional and other forms of logic. This is problematic for two
reasons. First, we might find Truth-Functional Bayesianism too demanding.
There are some lengthy, intricate truths of truth-functional logic that it might
be unreasonable to demand agents recognize as such. Yet Truth-Functional
Bayesianism will fault an agent who is less than certain of even such recherche
truth-functional truths. Second, Truth-Functional Bayesianism may not be
demanding enough. Some logical relations—such as the mutual exclusivity
of (Vx)Fx and ~Fa—while not truth-functional, nevertheless seem simple
and obvious enough to rationally fault an agent who doesn’t recognize them.
Truth-Functional Bayesianism is capable of modeling an agent who recognizes
non-truth-functional logical relations; the theory allows an agent to assign
cr(~[(Vx)Fx & ~Fα]) = 1. But it doesn’t require this certainty, and therefore
won’t fault a distribution that assigns that proposition a credence less than I.15
Borrowing some helpful terminology from Skipper and Bjerring (2022),
we want a Bayesianism that requires agents to be logically competent without
requiring that they be logically omniscient. Truth-Functional Bayesianism
misses the mark by ham-handedly offering the boundary between truth
functional and other logics as the dividing line between what an agent is and
isn’t required to know. But we could reinterpret “t=” in another, subtler way,
so that our Bayesianism faults agents who miss obvious logical truths without
requiring them to catch all logical truths. A number of philosophers have
tried various interpretations—for example, Skipper and Bjerring draw the line
by conceiving obviousness in terms of how many proof steps it would take
to derive a particular logical conclusion. (For examples of other approaches,
see Cherniak 1986 and Gaifman 2004.) To my mind, none of these formal
approaches quite succeeds in drawing the line in a plausible way. But there’s
also a deeper problem that inevitably affects any such approach.
It’s easy to think of logical omniscience as simply a problem about
agents’ attitudes toward logical truths. But Normality wasn’t included among
Kolmogorov’s axioms to make trouble; it’s used to derive a number of
crucial Bayesian results, from Bayes’s Theorem to the theory’s applications
in confirmation and decision theory.16 Moreover, logical omniscience isn’t
idiosyncratic to Bayesianism: requirements of logical omniscience can be

derived in other formal epistemologies, such as AGM and ranking theory;
they can also be derived from such simple intuitive principles as Belief Closure
or Comparative Entailment (Chapter 1). Logical omniscience requirements
arise in all these systems because logical omniscience is deeply tied to the other
things such epistemologies try to achieve. The fruitful applications that make
these approaches appealing have logical omniscience as a side effect.
To see what I mean, consider what happens when Truth-Functional
Bayesianism reinterprets “l=” so that ≠~[(Vx)Fx<‰ ~Fa]. Because the reinter
pretation affects Normality, Truth-Functional Bayesianism permits a rational
agent to be less than certain of ~[(Vx)Fxfc~'Fα]. But this result—along
with the reinterpretations effects on Finite Additivity—has knock-on
consequences. For instance, Truth-Functional Bayesianism will permit a
rational agent to be more confident of (∖fx)Fx than she is of Fa. Usually
this is forbidden because the former logically entails the latter. But since
that entailment isn’t truth-functional, it isn’t recognized by Truth-Functional
Bayesianism. When it comes time to make decisions, Truth-Functional
Bayesianism will allow an agent to Dutch Book herself by paying $0.70 for a
ticket that pays $ 1 if (Xfx)Fx, while also selling for $0.60 a ticket that pays out $ 1
if Fa. And perhaps worst of all, when it comes to confirmation theory, Truth-
Functional Bayesianism will not require evidence that ~Fa to disconfirm the
hypothesis that (Vx)Fx (see Exercise 12.4).
These examples feel particularly egregious because the entailment of Fa by
(∀x)Fx is so obvious. But the general point stands, even if we go with one of
the theories mentioned above that strikes the balance between competence
and omniscience more plausibly. Logical truths are explicit manifestations of
logical relations; when you allow an agent to be ignorant of some logical truth,
you also allow her reasoning to run roughshod over those relations. When we
weaken the traditional Bayesian axioms to allow some degree of logical non
omniscience, we lose some of the applications to decision and induction that
made Bayesianism appealing in the first place.
12.2.4 Logical omniscience reconsidered
In his (1986), Harman maintained that “there is no clearly significant way

in which logic is specially relevant to reasoning” (p. 20). But when an agent
draws a conclusion through a logically invalid inference, isn’t that a mistake of

reasoning—a kind of rational error? Opposing Harman, Christensen writes,
“There is a clear intuitive basis in our ordinary conception of rationality for
distinguishing logical lapses from ordinary cases of factual ignorance.... Much
of the point, after all, of thinking about rationality is to understand the idea of
reasoning well” (2004, p. 155).
One way to recognize this connection between logic and good reasoning—
and the resulting asymmetry between logical and empirical truths—is to
defend logical omniscience as a requirement on ideally rational agents. Ideally
rational agents (whom we already mentioned in Section 11.1.1) never make
any mistakes in their reasoning. Given the connections we’ve just consid
ered, this also means they are never less than certain of logical truths. On
this approach, the Kolmogorov axioms (including Normality!) hold for the
credences of ideally rational agents. But no actual agents are ideally rational,
so less demanding standards apply to us, especially when it comes to logical
omniscience.
This notion that the probability axioms apply to ideal agents rather than
actual agents has been very popular in the Bayesian literature. It’s been dis
cussed a great deal, and I’ve criticized it at length elsewhere.17 Briefly, as a
philosophical move it strikes me as a cop-out. Ultimately we are interested
in rational requirements on ordinary agents’ attitudes, and what it is for a real
person to go right or go wrong with respect to rationality. For agents like us,
failures to recognize logical truths go hand in hand with failures to make good
inferences. And such inference failures are genuine rational mistakes. So we
should recognize them as such.
For a point of comparison, think back to the Conjunction Fallacy (Section
2.2.4) and the Base Rate Fallacy (Section 4.1.2). When confronted with the
story of Linda the bank teller, or some data about the frequency of a disease
and the reliability of a test for it, ordinary agents often make poor probabilistic
inferences. Now suppose it emerged that those agents had false beliefs about
probability theory, or were ignorant of the relevant axioms and theorems.
Would this change your mind about whether the inferences in question were
rational? Would it somehow make those inferences correct? Ignorance of the
rules of correct reasoning doesn’t let poor reasoning off the hook, even for
agents who are non-ideal. Similarly, ignorance of logic doesn’t make the poor
logical or probabilistic reasoning that results any less irrational.
Thus authors such as (Smithies 2015) and (Titelbaum 2015b) have recently
suggested that rationality may forbid less-than-certainty in logical truths even
for ordinary agents. How does this position overcome our intuitions that
agents who fail to grasp complex logical truths aren’t being irrational? One
crucial response is that recognizing a rational flaw in an agents doxastic
state doesn’t require us to cast aspersions on the agent—much less call her
“irrational”, de Finetti put the point as follows:
To speak of coherent or incoherent (consistent or inconsistent) individuals

has been interpreted as a criticism of people who do not accept a specific
behavior rule.... It is better to speak of coherence (consistency) of probability
evaluations rather than of individuals, not only to avoid this charge, but
because the notion belongs strictly to the evaluations and only indirectly
to the individuals. Of course, an individual may make mistakes sometimes,
often without meriting contempt. (1937/1964, p. 103)
When a credence distribution violates Normality, the flaw is in that distribu

tion. Depending on how it arose, we need not criticize or blame the agent who
possesses the distribution. I think this alleviates some of the intuitive pushback
against logical omniscience requirements, while recognizing that there is a
genuine problem embedded in the way this agent sees the world. It also
squares with how we hope the agent will assess her own former views, once the
difficulty is pointed out and corrected. As Jeffrey wrote, “The point is merely
that whether he knows it or not, his beliefs suffer from a logical failing....
Presumably the fellow, being rational, will not want decision theory to be so
permissive as to neglect to classify the situation we have been envisaging as a
fault, on the ground that it was not his fault” (1970, p. 165).
So perhaps logical omniscience requirements are appropriate components
of a theory of rationality. Even if that’s so, we still might want a tool for mod
eling and assessing episodes of logical learning. Well, here’s a brief suggestion
for how that might be done: Suppose we grant that any credence distribution
that assigns less-than-certainty to a logical truth is thereby rationally flawed.
We might nevertheless think some rational errors are worse than others. In
fact, various authors have developed formalisms for measuring just how far
a given nonprobabilistic distribution is from rational ideality.18 We might
think, then, that logical learning involves moving from a less rational state to
a more rational one. An agent who learns a logical truth isn’t doing something
rationally good in the sense that both her prior and posterior distributions
satisfy all rational requirements. Instead, she’s doing something rationally
good by getting herself (measurably) closer to a rational ideal.
12.3 EXERCISES 439
12.3 Exercises
well-defined.
Problem 12.1. Prove that if cr(E) = 1, then for any H ∈ £, cr(H ∣ E) = cr(H).
Problem 12.2. Consider the following probabilistic credence distribution:
B E H CΓ1
T T T 0.015
T T F 0.135
T F T 0.045
T F F 0.005
F T T 0.36
F T F 0.04
F F T 0.04
F F F 0.36
(a) Show that on this distribution, B is positively relevant to E, E is positively

relevant to H, but B is negatively relevant to H.19
(b) Suppose that between t1 and t2, this agent has an experience whose
credal effects originate in the B∣~B partition. In particular, it sets
cr2(-B) = 0.4. Use Jeffrey Conditionalization to create a probability table
for the agents full cr2 distribution. (Hint: You may want to re-read page
159 for instructions on how to do this.)
(c) Show that while the agents confidence in E increased between tl and t2,
her confidence in H decreased.
(d) In this example, the condition for confirmation specified by the Con
firmation and Probability principle is satisfied, while the condition
for confirmation given by Confirmation and Increase is not. (E is
positively relevant to H, yet not every Jeffrey Conditionalization that
increases confidence in E also increases confidence in H.) Show that the
converse is also possible: Create a distribution on which every Jeffrey
Conditionalization on the B∕~B partition that increases confidence

in E also increases confidence in H, yet on which E is negatively
relevant to H.
Problem 12.3.
(a) Show that given a regular prior, any Jeffrey Conditionalization update
that originates in the E∕~E partition will keep the value of s(H, E)
constant. (Hint: Recall that Jeffrey updates always maintain Rigidity.)
(b) Do any of the other confirmation measures (d, r, I, z) defined in Section
6.4.1 display this property? Explain/prove your answer.
Problem 12.4. In this exercise we will assume Truth-Functional Bayesian

ism, and show why on that theory ~Fa may fail to disconfirm (Vx)Fx.
(a) Construct a probability table using the following partition:
{(Vx)Fx & Fa, (ffx')Fx & ~Fa, ~(∖∕χ')Fx & Fa, ~(Vx)Fx & ~Fa}
For the time being don’t fill in any numerical values in the right-most
column.
(b) Now fill out the numerical values in the right-most column so that it’s
not the case that cr((Vx)Fx ∣ ~Fa') < cr((Vx)Fx). Keep in mind that
while your numerical values still must be non-negative and sum to 1,
in Truth-Functional Bayesianism the proposition (Vx)Fx & ~Fa may
receive a nonzero value.
Problem 12.5.0f Does it seem to you that when an agent assigns less than cer
tainty to a logical truth, this attitude is rationally mistaken? Provide arguments
for your position.
John Earman (1992). Bayes or Bust? A Critical Examination of Bayesian

Confirmation Theory. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press
Chapter 5 distinguishes versions of the Problem of Old Evidence, then criti

cally assesses solutions available, including formal models of logical learning.
Classic Texts
Clark Glymour (1980). Theory and Evidence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni
versity Press
Contains “Why I Am Not a Bayesian”, the essay that brought the Problem of
Old Evidence to Bayesians’ attention, as well as the canonical Einstein GTR
example.
Leonard J. Savage (1967). Difficulties in the Theory of Personal Probability.

Philosophy of Science 34, pp. 305-10
Ian Hacking (1967). Slightly More Realistic Personal Probability. Philosophy
of Science 34, pp. 311-25
Classic exchange in which Savage raises the Problem of Logical Omni

science (among others), and Hacking responds with a first attempt at a
solution.
Daniel Garber (1983). Old Evidence and Logical Omniscience in Bayesian

Confirmation Theory. In: Testing Scientific Theories. Ed. by John Earman.
Vol. 10. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, pp. 99-132
Ellery Eells (1985). Problems of Old Evidence. Pacific Philosophical Quar
terly 66, pp. 283-302
Two attempts to address the Problem of Old Evidence by offering formal

models allowing for logical non-omniscience.
Extended Discussion
Julia Staffel (2019). Unsettled Thoughts: Reasoning and Uncertainty in Epis

temology. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Book-length examination of assessing the degree to which agents depart from

fulfilling Bayesian norms.
Notes
1. For the non-astronomers in the crowd: Roughly speaking, classical Newtonian gravita
tional theory predicts that each planet will orbit in an ellipse, with the sun at one focus
of that ellipse. Yet Mercurys orbit is not a perfect ellipse: its perihelion (the point at
which it’s closest to the sun) gradually rotates around the sun at a rate of 574 seconds
of arc per century (where a second of arc is 1/3,600 of a degree). The classical theory
can explain much of this precession—531 arc-seconds of it—by taking into account the
gravitational influences on Mercury of the other planets. But the remaining 43 seconds
of arc in the advance in Mercurys perihelion is anomalous, and could not be plausibly
explained by any mechanism available in Newton’s framework.
2. Olav Vassend points out to me that frequentists and likelihoodists (Chapter 13) also
suffer from a version of the Problem of Old Evidence. If Pr(E) = 1 then Pr(E ∣ H) = 1
for any H ∈ 23, so E will have the same likelihood on every available hypothesis.
3. In the mid-nineteenth century, Urbain le Verrier proposed the existence of a small
planet, which he called Vulcan, lying between Mercury and the Sun that would explain
the former’s orbital pattern. This wasn’t such a stretch as it might now seem, since le
Verrier had already helped astronomers discover Neptune by analyzing anomalies in
the orbit of Uranus.
4. D.H. Mellor notes that this challenge to Conditionalization dates back at least as far as
C.S. Peirce: “Peirce raises other problems [for conditionalization].... Our conceptual
limitations... limit the outputs as well as the inputs of conditionalization: without a
concept of money, for example, we could neither see nor infer anything about the prices
of goods. So however we get new concepts, such as new concepts of God induced by
seeing an apparently miraculous event, it cannot be by conditionalization” (Mellor 2013,
p. 549, emphasis in original).
5. As I mentioned in Chapter 4, note 18, authors such as Bartha and Hitchcock (1999,
p. S349) sometimes refer to the distribution an agent would have assigned under coun-
terfactual conditions as her “hypothetical prior”. This is not the way I use “hypothetical
prior” in this book. On my usage, a hypothetical prior is a probability distribution repre
senting an agent’s abstract evidential assessment tendencies, not a credence distribution
she assigns in this world or any other.
6. See the philosophical literature on “finks” and “masks”, and Shope (1978) on this general
problem for counterfactual accounts.
7. Proposals in this vicinity are discussed by Skyrms (1983), Eells and Fitelson (2000), and
Meacham (2016, §3.7).
8. See Section 12.2.2 for an example and further discussion.
9. Compare Christensen (1999, pp. 437-8).
10. I’ve often wondered, for instance, if agents’ standing support relations could be usefully
modeled by Bayes Nets (Section 3.2.4), which use probabilistic correlations in more
sophisticated ways to establish asymmetric, irreflexive relations.
11. As usual, this issue with Bayesianism was anticipated by Ramsey: “There are mathemat
ical propositions whose truth or falsity cannot as yet be decided. Yet it may humanly
speaking be right to entertain a certain degree of belief in them on inductive or other
grounds: a logic which proposes to justify such a degree of belief must be prepared
notes 443
actually to go against formal logic; for to a formal truth formal logic can only assign a
belief of degree 1” (1931, p. 93).
12. In the terminology of Broome (1999), we might say that this paragraph recommends
thinking of Bayesian rules as wide-scope rather than narrow-scope norms. We need to
be a bit careful, though, because it’s difficult to see how one could think of either Nor
mality or Non-Negativity—considered in isolation—as a wide-scope norm. I prefer to
think of Kolmogorov’s axioms as working together to create the notion of a probabilistic
distribution, and then the relevant norm as saying that rational distributions must be
probabilistic. (After all, the notion of a probabilistic distribution may be axiomatized in
many different extensionally equivalent ways.) It’s the norm of probabilism that should
be interpreted as wide-scope—once suitably adjusted according to the third point I’ll
make below. (For more on all this, see Titelbaum (2013a, §4.2).)
13. Throughout this book I have treated mathematical truths as a subspecies of logical
truths. Or, to put it another way, I have assumed that mathematical truths are true in
all logically possible worlds. While it often goes unmentioned, this is a typical working
assumption among Bayesians, and underlies many of their most routine calculations.
For example, when calculating a rational agent’s credences involving the outcome of a
die roll, I assume that her credence in even conditional on six is 1. Strictly speaking,
this works only if she is certain that six is an even number, a simple mathematical truth
we treat as covered by Normality’s requirement of certainty in logical truths.
Whether all mathematical truths are indeed logical truths is a matter of philosophical
controversy. (See Tennant 2017.) One might also wonder whether other types of
non-empirical truths—such as conceptual truths—should be covered by Normality,
depending on how one views their relationship to logical truths. While these are
interesting questions, I will continue to set them aside for our purposes.
14. In Section 2.1 we associated each proposition with a set of possible worlds, and said
that P 1= Q just in case there is no possible world in which P is true but Q is not. When
we reinterpret “l=”, how do we understand that relation in terms of possible worlds?
In Section 2.2.3 we reinterpreted “l=” slightly by relativizing the probability axioms
to an agent’s set of doxastically possible worlds, which we thought of as a proper subset
of the logically possible worlds. Hintikka (1975) proposed accommodating logical
nonomniscience by relativizing “l=” to a superset of the logically possible worlds. An
agent uncertain of ~[(Vx)Fx & ~Fα] could be modeled as entertaining a possible
world in which both (Vx)Fx and ~Fa are true. This would be what Hintikka called an
“impossible possible world”. Logically nonomniscient agents entertain both logically
possible and logically impossible worlds among their doxastic possibilities; P 1= Q for
such an agent just in case that agent entertains no worlds in which P is true and Q is
false.
The impossible possible worlds approach remains controversial. Max Cresswell has
been urging for decades that it’s difficult to understand just what an impossible world
could be. What is a world like in which every object bears property F but object a
doesn’t? As Gaifman (2004, p. 98) puts it, “It is possible to have false arithmetical beliefs,
since we may fail to comprehend a sufficiently long sequence of deductive steps; but the
false belief cannot be realized in some possible world, for such a possible world would
be conceptually incoherent.”
15. Truth-Functional Bayesianism is a simplification of a system proposed by Garber

(1983). Eells (1985, p. 241) argues that Garbers system is too demanding in the sense
described by this paragraph. Hacking (1967) suggested reinterpreting “l=” to apply to
only those logical truths that the agent recognizes as such. Eells (p. 217) criticizes that
proposal for not being demanding enough.
16. If you’ve been completing this book’s exercises as you go along, ask yourself how many
times you’ve invoked Normality in proving some result, or have invoked a result that
depends on Normality in proving some further result.
17. See Titelbaum (2013a, pp. 72-5).
18. See Staffel (2019) for a thoroughly worked-out proposal, as well as references to such
precursors as Lyle Zynda and Schervish, Seidenfeld, and Kadane.
19. Another example in which positive probabilistic relevance isn’t transitive!
13
The Problem of the Priors and
Alternatives to Bayesianism
A typical high-school statistics course offers a package of familiar techniques:

significance tests, regressions, etc. While the high-school student may think
these have been around forever (along with the teacher offering the instruc
tion), most of the mathematics presented is less than a century old. More
over, a student who pursues more advanced statistics at the university level
may encounter a recent vogue for “likelihoodist” and “Bayesian” statistical
methods. Why, then, this fixity of “frequentist” methods at the lower levels
of instruction, and (until very recently) in the publishing practices of almost
all scientific journals?
As always with these questions, part of the answer has to do with historical
contingencies. But it’s also important that for a long time (and in many quarters
still), frequentism was thought to be the only statistical regime by which the
quantitative assessment of hypotheses by data could be put on a firm, objective
footing. Bayesianism, in particular, was thought to depend on subjective prior
commitments (such as an agents hypothetical priors—Section 4.3) that could
not be defended in a scientifically responsible way. This was the Problem of the
Priors, and it seemed for a long time to justify the dominance of frequentist
statistics.1
This chapter begins with the Problem of the Priors, usually cited as the most
important objection to Bayesian epistemology and its theory of confirmation.
We consider where the problem originates in the Bayesian formalism, how
best to understand it, and whether it can be overcome by mathematical results
about the “washing out” of priors. Special attention is paid to how exactly we’re
meant to understand the problem’s demand for objectivity.
Then we consider frequentist and likelihoodist statistical paradigms that
claim to offer accounts of evidential support free of subjective influences.
After offering brief introductions to some mathematical tools these paradigms
employ, I describe some of the problems that have been pointed out for each by
partisans of rival camps. My central question is whether these approaches can
yield the kinds of confirmation judgments Bayesians are after without sneaking
in subjective influences themselves.
Fundamentals of Bayesian Epistemology 2: Arguments, Challenges, Alternatives. Michael G, Titelbaum,
446 ALTERNATIVES TO BAYESIANISM
13.1 The Problem of the Priors
Suppose you’re a scientist, and you’ve just run an experiment to test a hypoth
esis. Let H represent the hypothesis, and E represent the outcome of the
experiment. According to Bayesian orthodoxy, your new degree of belief in
H at time t2 (just after you’ve observed E) should be generated from your old,
t1 degrees of belief by Conditionalization. So we have
cr2(H) = cr1(H∣ E) (13.1)
Bayes’s Theorem, which can be derived from the probability axioms and Ratio
Formula, then gives us
∕m× ,ττl j7× cr1(E ∣ H) ∙ cr1(Jf)

cr2(H) = cr1(H ∣ E) =------- —------- (13.2)
What determines the values on the far right of this equation? Perhaps H
deductively entails that when an experiment like yours is run, the result will
be E (or ~E, as the case maybe). In that case your likelihood cr1(E ∣ H) should
be set at 1 (or 0, respectively). Yet the implications of H need not be that
strong; well-defined scientific hypotheses often assign intermediate chances
to experimental outcomes. In that case, something like the Principal Principle
(Section 5.2.1) will require your likelihood to equal the chance that H assigns
to E.
So the likelihood cr1(E ∣ H) may be set by the content of the hypothesis H.
But what drives your values for cr1(H) and cr1(E)T These unconditional initial
credences are your priors in H and E. cr1(E) can actually be eliminated from
the equation, by applying the Law of Total Probability to yield
c-2(H) = cr1(⅞ ∣ E) = cri(£ l fn . cγ^h) (13.3)
We now need only the prior cr1(H) and the likelihoods cr1(E∣H) and
cr1(E∣ ~H). (Your prior for the catchall hypothesis ~H is just 1 — cr1(H).)
But eliminating cr1(E) from the expression and adding the likelihood of the
catchall—cr1(E ∣ ~EΓ)—may not be much of an improvement. If, for instance,
our hypothesis is the General Theory of Relativity (GTR), it’s not clear what
would follow about experimental results from the negation of GTR. So it’s
difficult to determine how confident we should be in a particular experimental
outcome E on the supposition of ~H.
13∙1 THE PROBLEM OF THE PRIORS 447
In some special cases, we have an idea what to think if H is false because

its one member of a finite partition of hypotheses {H1,H2, ... , Hn}. Bayes’s
Theorem can then be rewritten once more for a given hypothesis Hi to yield
cr2(Hz) = cr1(HjE) =
______________________cr1(E∣⅞)>cr1(⅜)______________________
cr1(E ∣ H1) ∙ cr1(H1) + cr1(E ∣ H2) ∙ cr1(¾) + ... + cr1(E ∣ Hn) ∙ cr1(Hn)
(13∙4)
In this case, your posterior credence cr2(Hi) after observing the outcome
of an experiment can be determined entirely from the likelihoods of the
hypotheses—which are hopefully clear from their contents—and those
hypotheses’ priors.2
Whatever mathematical manipulations we make, an agent’s priors will still
play a role in determining her credences after conditionalizing. And that role
maybe significant. In Section 4.1.2, on the Base Rate Fallacy, we considered
a highly reliable medical test for a particular disease. A positive result from
this test multiplies your odds that the patient has the disease by 9. If you start
off 50/50 whether the patient has the disease (odds of 1:1), the test will leave
you 90% confident of illness. But if your prior is only 1 in 1,000 confident of
disease, then your posterior will be under 1%.
This ineliminable influence generates the Problem of the Priors for
Bayesian epistemology: Where are an agent’s priors supposed to come from?
Obviously an agent’s priors are just the credences she has in various hypotheses
before the experiment is run. But the challenge is to justify those credences,
and the role they play in Bayesian inference.3
Of course, an agent’s opinions about various hypotheses before she runs
an experiment are influenced by other experiments she has run in the past.
Presumably those opinions were formed by earlier conditionalizations on
earlier experimental outcomes. But the problem recurs when we ask what pro
vided the priors for those earlier conditionalizations. Ultimately the Bayesian
recognizes two influences on an agent’s credences at any given time: the agent’s
total evidence accumulated up to that time, and her epistemic standards. The
agent’s epistemic standards capture how she assigns attitudes on the basis of
various bodies of total evidence; by definition, they are independent of the
evidence itself.
As we saw in Chapter 4, the Bayesian formalism provides a convenient
mathematical representation of each of these influences. An agent’s total
evidence at a given time is a set of propositions to which she assigns credence 1.
Her epistemic standards are represented by a hypothetical prior distribution,

which can be conditionalized on her total evidence at a given time to yield
her credences at that time. So the question “Whence the priors?” ultimately
becomes a question about the origins of hypothetical priors, representing
epistemic standards.
An Objective Bayesian (in the normative sense, as defined in Section 5.1.2)
responds to the Problem of the Priors by maintaining that only one set of
hypothetical priors is rational. All rational agents apply the same epistemic
standards, in light of which their evidence uniquely dictates what to believe.
The Objective Bayesian then has to work out the details of her view: she has to
specify something like a Principle of Indifference (Section 5.3) or Carnapian
logical probability approach (Section 6.2) that yields plausible results. If that
can be accomplished, the Problem of the Priors is met.
For the Subjective Bayesian, however, the problem looms larger. On this
view, more than one set of epistemic standards is rationally permissible.
Two rational agents may observe the same outcome of an experiment, and
assign wildly different credences to the same hypothesis as a result. They
may even disagree about whether the outcome confirmed or disconfirmed
that hypothesis.4 In many cases, this difference of opinion will be traceable
to relevant differences in the agents’ total evidence before they arrived at the
experiment. But according to the Subjective Bayesian, there will also be cases in
which the difference results entirely from differences in the agents’ epistemic
standards. Each agent will be rational in her conclusions, and there will be no
difference in either the evidence from this experiment or evidence from pre
vious experiments that accounts for the difference between those conclusions.
This is a problem for our epistemology and philosophy of science—isn’t it?
13.1.1 Understanding the problem
Let’s see if we can be a bit more clear about why the Problem of the Priors is
supposed to be a problem for Subjective Bayesians. The flat-footed Subjective
Bayesian position is just that an agent should base her updates on whatever
prior opinions she has about the hypotheses in question (as long as those satisfy
requirements of rationality such as the probability axioms), plus whatever new
evidence she’s updating upon. Why is this position considered insufficient, and
what’s the worry about letting prior opinions affect inductive inference?
Characterizing the Problem of the Priors, Howson and Urbach write:
The prior distribution from which a Bayesian analysis proceeds reflects a

persons beliefs before the experimental results are known. Those beliefs are
subjective, in the sense that they are shaped in part by elusive, idiosyncratic
influences, so they are likely to vary from person to person. The subjectivity
of the premises might suggest that the conclusion of a Bayesian induction is
similarly idiosyncratic, subjective and variable, which would conflict with a
striking feature of science, namely, its substantially objective character.
(2006, p. 237)
Here Howson and Urbach mention a couple of strands that are nearly ubiqi-
tous in Problem of the Priors discussions. First, the concern is almost always
about the role of priors in scientific reasoning. Second, that concern contrasts
the subjectivity of priors with a desired objectivity of science. As Reiss and
Sprenger (2017) put it, “Objectivity is often considered as an ideal for scientific
inquiry, as a good reason for valuing scientific knowledge, and as the basis of
the authority of science in society.” Yet we’ve already seen that “subjective” and
“objective” admit of diverse philosophical interpretations (Section 5.1). What
does it mean in this context for priors to be subjective, and why would it be
bad for science to be subjective in that sense?
A third strand in the Howson and Urbach quote is that (Subjective)
Bayesianism allows “elusive, idiosyncratic influences” on scientific practice.
Elliott Sober pursues this line in his critique of Bayesianism:
It is important to recognize how important it is for prior probabilities to be

grounded in evidence. We often calculate probabilities to resolve our own
uncertainty or to persuade others with whom we disagree. It is not good
assigning prior probabilities simply by asking that they reflect how certain
we feel that this or that proposition is true. Rather, we need to be able to cite
reasons for our degrees of belief. Frequency data are not the only source of
such reasons, but they are one very important source. The other source is an
empirically well-grounded theory. When a geneticist says that Pr(offspring
has genotype Aa ∣ mom and dad both have the genotype Aa) = 1/2, this is not
just an autobiographical comment. Rather, it is a consequence of Mendelism,
and the probability assignment has whatever authority the Mendelian theory
has. That authority comes from empirical data. (2008, p. 26)
For Sober it’s crucial that scientific conclusions be based on empirical data.
But Bayesians allow priors to influence scientific conclusions, and the choice
among priors is not entirely determined by empirical evidence. (Bayesian
priors combine both evidence and epistemic standards, and the latter are
independent of evidence by definition.)
It’s important not to take this critique of Subjective Bayesianism too far.
Critics of Bayesianism often depict subjective priors as mere opinions (Sobers
“how certain we feel that this or that proposition is true”). But priors—even
hypothetical priors—need not be groundless, expressions of nothing beyond
the agent’s whim. They also need not be a vehicle for political or moral values
to interfere with science, threatening the value-neutrality some scientists
have sought to secure for their discipline. An agent’s prior in a hypothesis
may reflect commonly accepted practices of theorizing in her culture, or her
discipline; it may reflect a considered trade-off among such purely epistemic
values as simplicity and strength. It’s just that the priors aren’t entirely driven
by her evidence--, instead, they shape how she responds to that evidence.
Why reject extra-evidential influences on scientific reasoning? One concern
is that such influences will not be shared among practitioners, and so will
lead to undesirable variation in opinion. Characterizing his opponents’ views,5
Savage writes:
It is often argued by holders of necessary and objectivistic views alike that

that ill-defined activity known as science or scientific method consists largely,
if not exclusively, in finding out what is probably true, by criteria on which
all reasonable men agree. The theory of probability relevant to science, they
therefore argue, ought to be a codification of universally acceptable criteria.
Holders of necessary views say that, just as there is no room for dispute as
to whether one propopsition is logically implied by others, there can be no
dispute as to the extent to which one proposition is partially implied by others
that are thought of as evidence bearing on it, for the exponents of necessary
views regard probability as a generalization of implication.
(1954, p. 67, emphases added)
Similarly, E.T. Jaynes declares:
The most elementary requirement of consistency demands that two persons

with the same relevant prior information should assign the same prior
probability.... The theory of personalistic probability has come under severe
criticism from orthodox statisticians who have seen in it an attempt to destroy
the “objectivity” of statistical inference by injecting the user’s personal opin

ions into it. (1968, Sect. I)
There is certainly a strong current of opinion in modern science that evi

dence should be (at least in principle) shareable. But epistemic standards are
presumably shareable as well—they needn’t be inscribed in some mysterious,
Wittgenstinian private language. Beyond being shareable, why insist that they
be shared!
Here we enter deep waters in the philosophy of science. I will simply
comment that the absence of dispute is not obviously a hallmark of reasonable
or even desirable scientific inquiry. Good scientists disagree about howto draw
conclusions from their experiments just as much as they disagree about the
conclusions themselves. So it’s unclear whether a proper account of science
must provide a path for the ultimate reconciliation of all rational differences.
There may be pressure to explain what consensus does exist, but the Subjective
Bayesian can chalk this up to intersubjective agreement in the priors of human
agents who share a biological and cultural background. Such commonalities of
perspective can be real without being rationally required.
Going in a different direction, one might worry that if an agent’s opinions are
not properly grounded in something outside herself, she will have insufficient
reason to remain committed to those opinions. If nothing objective like
empirical evidence ties the agent to a particular hypothetical prior, then when
the evidence leads her to an opinion she doesn’t like, why not switch to another
prior on which that evidence generates a rosier conclusion? (See White 2005.)
Again, we should emphasize that a Subjective Bayesian’s adherence to a
particular prior need not be based on nothing at all. But we should also point
out that attitudinal flip-flopping is banned by Conditionalization. When an
agent updates by Conditionalization, her final credences are entirely dictated
by the combination of her priors and her new evidence. And as we saw in
Chapter 4, an agent who always updates by Conditionalization will be repre
sentable as having stuck with a single set of hypothetical priors across those
updates. If Conditionalization is a rational requirement, then it’s rationally
impermissible for an agent to jump from one set of epistemic standards to
another. And notice that the arguments for Conditionalization in Chapters
9 and 10 (based on Dutch Books and accuracy considerations, respectively)
were perfectly consistent with Subjective Bayesianism. Even if multiple priors
are rationally acceptable, it will still be the case that an agent with a particular
prior who violates Conditionalization will face an expected accuracy cost or
a diachronic Dutch Book. So Bayesians can argue against switching among

hypothetical priors without arguing that some such priors are objectively
better than others.6
Finally, there’s the concern that if objective evidence doesn’t fully constrain
an agent’s opinions, she’ll be free to believe any old crazy thing she wants. Just
as moralists fear the rational defector, Bayesians have long been haunted by the
rational counterinductivist. Suppes writes:
Given certain prior information is one a priori distribution as reasonable as

any other? As far as I can see, there is nothing in my or Savage’s axioms which
prevents an affirmative answer to this question. Yet if a man bought grapes
at [a certain] store on fifteen previous occasions and had always got green
or ripe, but never rotten grapes, and if he had no other information prior
to sampling the grapes I for one would regard as unreasonable an a priori
distribution which assigned a probability 2/3 to the rotten state.
(1955, p. 72)
In the same vein, D.H. Mellor suggests that we:
Take Othello, whom Iago makes so jealously suspicious of Desdemona that

conditionalizing on whatever she then says only strengthens his suspicion:
reactions whose Bayesian rationality makes him no less mad. If this does not
make Bayesianism false, it does at least make it seriously incomplete as an
epistemology. (2013, p. 549)
Yet Subjective Bayesianism need not be anything-goes. Just because the

Subjective Bayesian thinks rational constraints are insufficient to single
out a unique hypothetical prior, this needn’t prevent her from developing
strong requirements on rational credence. Suppes and Mellor are right that a
Bayesianism constrained only by the probability axioms would deliver severely
restricted epistemological verdicts. But we saw in Chapter 5 that all sorts of
further constraints are available and defensible for Bayesians. Agents may
be required to respect frequencies, chances, their own future opinions, or
even the opinions of others. So the Subjective Bayesian is as free to deride
counterinductive inferences as anyone else.
We have now worked our way through a number of possible concerns

about Subjective Bayesianism—and responses to those concerns available to
Bayesians—without settling on a unitary Problem of the Priors. I think that’s
13.1 THE PROBLEM OF THE PRIORS 453
representative of the literature; rather than a single, well-defined problem,

Subjective Bayesians face a cluster of interrelated issues felt to be problematic.7
Yet despite this vagueness, “the Problem of the Priors” is consistently cited as a
crucial challenge to Bayesian epistemology, and a key motivation for endorsing
other statistical approaches. Later in this chapter, we’ll consider approaches to
evidential support that seek to secure objectivity by eliminating the influence
of priors. First, however, we’ll investigate the claim that Subjective Bayesians
may recover the desired objectivity through the application of formal conver
gence results.8
13.1.2 Washing out of priors
We’ll begin our discussion of Bayesian convergence results with a simple

example. Suppose two investigators, Fiona and Grace, have been given an urn
containing ten balls. Each ball is either black or white, and the investigators
know there is at least one of each color in the urn. Fiona and Grace then have
nine hypotheses to consider: the urn contains one black ball; the urn contains
two black balls; etc. on up to nine black balls. Fiona and Grace do not have any
further evidence about the urn’s composition, but each of them has a prior
biasing her toward an opinion about the contents of the urn. The left-hand
graph in Figure 13.1 depicts Fiona’s and Grace’s prior distributions over the
urn hypotheses; Fiona’s with solid lines and Grace’s with dashed. Fiona expects
more of the balls to be white than black, while Grace expects the opposite.
Now some evidence is gathered: one at a time, a ball is drawn at random,
shown to the investigators, then returned to the urn. Let’s say that out of the
first four balls drawn, two are black and two are white. Fiona and Grace update
by conditionalization, generating the new distributions shown on the right
hand side of Figure 13.1.
Notice that the posterior distributions have begun to converge; Fiona’s and
Grace’s opinions are closer together than they were before the evidence came
in. Why is that? If an agent updates by conditionalization on some evidence E
between two times ti and tj, her credences in hypotheses H1 and H2 will evolve
as follows:
v<⅞) = cr,(H1) CΓ,(B∣⅞)
cry(¾) crz∙(¾) crl(E∣¾)
The final fraction in this equation—the ratio of the likelihood of the evidence
on Hl to the likelihood of the evidence on H2-is known as the likelihood
ratio for H1 and H2.9 When Hl assigns E a higher likelihood than H2 does, this
ratio will be greater than 1, and the ratio of the agent’s posteriors in H1 and H2
will be greater than the ratio of her priors in those hypotheses. So relatively
speaking, the agent will become more confident in H1 and less confident
in¾.
More generally, when a probabilistic agent updates by conditionalization,
her credence shifts toward hypotheses that assign higher likelihoods to the
evidence that was observed. In our urn example, the more equally a hypothesis
takes the urn to be split between black and white balls, the higher a chance it
will assign to randomly drawing two black balls and two white. So if Fiona
and Grace satisfy the Principal Principle (or some other principle of direct
inference), they will assign higher ti likelihoods to a 2-2 observation on
hypotheses that posit a fairly equal split. Once that observation is made, each
investigator will shift some of her credence towards such hypotheses, which in
turn will push their distributions closer together.
What happens if the observations continue? Let’s suppose that, unbe
knownst to our investigators, the urn is actually split 5-5 between black
and white balls. The law of large numbers (Section 7.1) assures us that with
probability 1, the ratio of black to white balls observed as the number of draws
approaches the limit will approach 1:1. As this occurs, Fiona’s and Grace’s
distributions will assign more and more credence to equal-split hypotheses
and less and less credence to unequal splits. As a result, their distributions
will move arbitrarily close to one another. In his (1954), Savage proved that
with probability 1 (in a sense we’ll clarify shortly), as the number of draws
approaches infinity, the difference between the investigators’ credences in any
given urn hypothesis will approach 0.
It’s important to understand why this convergence occurs. The underlying
cause is that with probability 1, as the number of draws approaches infinity,
each investigators credence in the true urn hypothesis will approach 1. Since
both investigators’ opinions approach the truth (and the truth is the same for
both of them), their opinions approach each other’s as well.
This is the simplest of many formal convergence results that have been
proven since Savage’s work. The general thrust of all of them is that condi-
tionalizing on more and more evidence will eventually wash out the influence
of agents’ priors. As the evidence piles up, its effect overwhelms any differences
in the priors, and posterior opinions grow arbitrarily close together. If priors
are a pernicious, subjective influence, the objectivity of evidence will cleanse
scientific opinion of that influence if we just wait long enough.
Later results generalized Savage’s work in a variety of ways. While we
gave our investigators regular distributions over the available hypotheses,
Regularity is not strictly required. Convergence results obtain as long as
the investigators initially rule out the same possibilities by assigning them
credence 0 (and of course don’t assign credence 0 to the hypothesis that
is true)10. Generalized results also tend to work with distributions over a
continuous parameter, as opposed to the finite partition of hypotheses in our
simple example. And the evidence-gathering process need not be so highly
regimented as drawing balls with replacement from an urn. Gaifman and Snir
(1982) proved a highly general convergence result which assumes only that the
evidence and hypotheses are stated in a standard propositional language.
While Bayesian convergence results are technically impressive, their philo
sophical significance has come in for a lot of abuse over the years. I will present
some of the criticisms in just a moment. But first I want to note that these
results do establish something important. Observing the wide variety of priors
permitted by the Subjective Bayesian approach, one might have worried that
some priors could trap agents in a rut—by contingency and sheer bad luck,
some agents might receive priors that forever doom them to high credences in
wildly false hypotheses. (And then the skeptic asks how you know you aren’t
one of these doxastically tragic figures....) Yet the convergence theorems
guarantee what Earman calls a “long-run match between opinion and reality,
at least...for observational hypotheses” (1992, p. 148). And this guarantee
makes minimal demands (the probability axioms, perhaps the Principal Prin
ciple) on the priors with which investigators begin.
Of course, we need to be careful what sort of guarantee we’ve been given.
Both Savage’s result and the law of large numbers provide for convergence
“with probability 1”. What sort of probability do we mean here; is it something
like objective chance, or is it subjective credence? For the simple sampling
situations Savage considered—like our urn example—either interpretation
of “probability” will suffice. Applying the law of large numbers to chance

values shows that in the limit there’s a chance of 1 that the ratio of black
to white balls in the sample will approach the true ratio in the urn (and
therefore that conditionalizing agents will converge on the true hypothesis).
A similar conclusion can also be drawn from within the scientists’ point of
view. Assuming she meets the minimal requirements for the theorem, each
scientist will assign credence 1 that as the number of samples approaches
the limit, her opinions will ever more closely match both the truth and the
opinions of her peer.11 Savage writes, “To summarize informally, it has now
been shown that, with the observation of an abundance of relevant data, the
person is almost certain to become highly convinced of the truth, and it has
also been shown that he himself knows this to be the case” (1954, p. 50).
Since we’re dealing with an infinitistic case here (number of observations
approaching the limit), “probability 1” does not mean “necessarily must occur”.
As we saw in Section 5.4, when it comes to the infinite, probability-0 outcomes
may be possible, and probability-1 outcomes may fail to occur. But many of us
will be content to have probability 1 of reaching the truth even without an
absolute guarantee. What’s more problematic is that once we get past Savage
and into the more advanced convergence results, the “probability 1” guarantee
admits of only the subjective interpretation. It can no longer be proven to be
a fact out in the world that the agent will converge on the truth with objective
chance 1; we can only prove that the agent should have confidence 1 that
she will approach the truth. It’s unclear how reassuring we should find such
predictive self-satisfaction, especially in the face of skeptical challenges.
One might also worry that many of the advanced results rely on Countable
Additivity, to which we saw objections in Section 5.4. But the biggest problems
for Bayesian convergence results center around their being results in the limit.
The theorems demonstrate that in the long run, accumulating evidence will
eventually overcome our priors and send us to the truth. But as Keynes (1923,
p. 80) famously quipped, “In the long run we are all dead.” (Woody Allen
concurs that “eternity is very long, especially towards the end.”)12 Some of
the simpler convergence results offer hopeful tidings for the shorter term: In
straightforward sampling situations, we can assign a precise probability that
opinions will converge to a certain degree within a certain number of samples.
But for wider-ranging results, no such bound maybe available. In that case we
know only that objective influences will overtake our subjective priors if we
hold out long enough.
While we wait, science may appear a subjective, conflicted mess. Given
any body of total evidence, any hypothesis neither entailed nor refuted by
13∙2 FREQUENTISM 457
that evidence, and any nonextreme posterior value, one can write down a
probabilistic prior assigning that hypothesis that posterior in light of that total
evidence. So no matter how much evidence we collect, it will be possible to
find (or at least imagine) a probabilistic agent who disagrees with us by any
arbitrary amount in light of that evidence. As Savage puts it, “It is typically true
of any observational program, however extensive but prescribed in advance,
that there exist pairs of opinions, neither of which can be called extreme in any
precisely defined sense, but which cannot be expected, either by their holders
or any other person, to be brought into close agreement after the observational
program” (1954, p. 68).
In practice such disagreement may be cut down by Subjective Bayesians’
imposing stronger constraints on hypothetical priors than just the probability
axioms. But the basic issue is that no matter how much evidence we gain,
until we pass to the limit our hypothetical priors’ influence will never entirely
disappear. Subjective Bayesians must concede that as long as our evidence is
finite, the total objectivity and perfect scientific consensus sought by those who
press the Problem of the Priors will never be achieved, de Finetti concludes:
When the subjectivistic point of view is adopted, the problem of induction

receives an answer which is naturally subjective but in itself perfectly logical,
while on the other hand, when one pretends to eliminate the subjective factors
one succeeds only in hiding them (that is, at least, in my opinion), more
or less skillfully, but never avoiding a gap in logic. It is true that in many
cases... these subjective factors never have too pronounced an influence,
provided that the experience be rich enough; this circumstance is very impor
tant, for it explains how in certain conditions more or less close agreement
between the predictions of different individuals is produced, but it also shows
that discordant opinions are always legitimate. (1937/1964, p. 147)
13.2 Frequentism
We will now discuss two statistical approaches to data analysis distinct from
Bayesianism: frequentism and likelihoodism. Frequentists and likelihoodists
often contrast their approaches with Bayesianism by noting that their methods
do not invoke priors. Instead, they assess the significance of evidence by
making various calculations involving likelihoods. As we saw earlier, like
lihoods can often be established by objective, non-controversial methods:
likelihoods for diagnostic tests can be obtained by trying them on individuals
whose condition is known; likelihoods associated with well-defined scientific

hypotheses can be read off of their contents; etc. So these approaches claim to
secure a kind of objectivity for scientific inference unavailable to Bayesians.
Assessing such claims is made difficult by the fact that each camp offers a
variety of statistical tools, designed to do different things. Here it’s helpful to
follow Richard Royall (1997, p. 4) in distinguishing three questions one might
ask about a particular observation:
1. What do I believe, now that I have this observation?

2. What should I do, now that I have this observation?
3. What does this observation tell me about A versus B? (How should I
interpret this observation as evidence regarding A versus B?)
Distinguishing these questions helps us clarify the aims of various approaches.

For instance, the frequentists Neyman and Pearson explicitly motivate their
techniques with prudential considerations of what to do after receiving some
data. On the other hand Royall (a likelihoodist) sets out to address the
contrastive question of what the evidence says about A versus B.
We’ve seen over the course of this book that Bayesianism offers tools for
answering all three questions. What an agent should believe after making an
observation is her posterior credence upon conditionalization. What to do is
addressed by decision theory, as described in Chapter 7. And whether the
observation tells more strongly in favor of hypothesis A or B is revealed by
the degree to which it confirms each (Chapter 6).
But addressing all three of RoyalΓs questions doesn’t automatically make
Bayesianism the victor among statistical schools. Each approach has some
tasks it accomplishes better than the others. For example, while frequentism
and Bayesianism each offer tools for interpreting data after it’s been collected,
frequentism historically has had much more to say about the proper design of
experiments to generate that data.
To describe every purpose one might try to achieve with statistical analysis,
then assess the strengths and weaknesses of all of an approach’s offerings
with respect to each of those purposes, would be far too vast a project for
this book.13 Instead, for each broad approach I will focus on one or two of
the tools it offers. For each tool, I will ask what it reveals about relations of
evidential support. I do this for two reasons: First, this book is primarily about
epistemology, and questions of evidential support (or justification) are cen
tral to epistemology. Second, frequentists and likelihoodists attack Bayesian
confirmation theory on the grounds that evidential support is an important
concept in science and so must be suitably objective. In light of this attack, its
fair to ask whether the methods promoted by frequentists and likelihoodists
offer promising accounts of evidential support to take Bayesianism’s place.
13.2.1 Significance testing
Frequentist methods are the methods taught in traditional statistics classes—

significance tests, regression analyses, confidence intervals, and the like. If
you’ve taken such a class, you’ll know that frequentism is not a single, unified
mathematical theory; instead, it’s a grab-bag of tools for the analysis of data.
Some of these tools address different questions from each other (say, finding
a correlation coefficient versus significance testing), while other tools offer
multiple ways of accomplishing roughly the same task (for instance, the variety
of significance tests).
What do these tools have in common, such that they embody a common
statistical approach? The term “frequentism” provides a clue. While many fre
quentists have historically adopted a frequency interpretation of “probability”
(see Section 5.1.1), that isn’t really what the “frequentist” moniker means.
Also—contrary to what one sometimes hears—frequentism isn’t really about
basing one’s opinions exclusively on observed frequency data. Instead, the
hallmark of frequentism is to assess a given inference tool by asking, were it
repeatedly applied, how frequently it would be expected to yield verdicts with
a particular desirable (or undesirable) feature.
To illustrate, ∏l focus on a particular frequentist statistical tool: the p-value
significance test, most commonly associated with the work of R. A. Fisher. This
type of test is applied when we have collected a body of data with a particular
attribute. The significance test helps us determine whether the data’s displaying
that attribute was merely the result of chance, or whether it instead indicates
something important about the underlying process that generated the data.
Let’s take a specific example: We perform IQ tests on each of the sixteen
members of Ms. B’s second-grade class. We find that the average (mean) IQ
score in the class is 110. This is interesting, because IQ tests have a mean in
the general population of 100. We start to wonder: Is there some underlying
explanation why Ms. B’s class has a high average IQ score? Perhaps Ms. B
is doing something that improves students’ scores, or perhaps students were
assigned to Ms. B’s class because they possess certain traits that are linked to
high IQs. On the other hand, the high average may have no explanation beyond
the vagaries of chance. Even if a teacher’s students are selected randomly from
the general population, and nothing that teacher does affects their IQs, the
luck of the draw will sometimes give that teacher a class with a higher mean
IQ than average.
This “luck of the draw” hypothesis about the high IQ scores will be our
null hypothesis. As a matter of definition, the null hypothesis is whatever
hypothesis one sets out to assess with a significance test. In practice, though,
the null is usually a hypothesis indicating “that the probabilistic nature of the
process itself is sufficient to account for the results of any sample of the process.
In other words, nothing other than the variation that occurs by chance need
be invoked to explain the results of any given trial, or the variation in results
from one trial to another” (Dickson and Baird 2011, p. 212).
How might we test the null hypothesis in this case? Here it helps that IQ
scores are calculated so as to have a very specific statistical profile. In the
general population, IQ scores have a normal distribution, with a mean of 100
and a standard deviation of 15.1 won’t explain what all that means—you can
find an explanation in any traditional statistics text—but suffice it to say that
this statistical profile allows us to calculate very precisely the probability of
various outcomes. In this case, we can calculate that under the null hypothesis,
the probability is less than 0.4% that the sixteen members of Ms. B’s class would
have an average IQ score at least as high as 110.14
This statistic is called the p-value of the null hypothesis on our data. The
p-value records how probable it would be, were the null hypothesis true, that a
sample would yield at least as extreme an outcome as the one that’s observed.
In our case, we add up the probability on the null hypothesis that the average
IQ in Ms. B’s class would be 110, the probability that it would be 111, that it
would be 112, and so on for every IQ score at least as great as 110. The sum
of these probabilities is the p-value of the null. The p-value in our example is
quite low; if we drew a class of sixteen students at random from the general
population, we should expect to get an average IQ score at least as high as that
of Ms. B’s class less than 0.4% of the time.15
Once we’ve calculated our p-value, we apply the significance test. Before
examining the data, a statistician will usually have picked a numerical thresh
old a—typically 5% or 1%—to serve as the significance level for the test. If
the p-value for the null hypothesis determined from the data is less than a, the
result is deemed significant and we reject the null. In the case of Ms. B’s class, a
statistician working with a significance level of 1% will notice that the p-value
associated with our sample is less than that. So the statistician will recommend
“rejecting the null hypothesis at the 1% significance level.”
Notice that the calculations leading to this recommendation worked exclu

sively with the data and with likelihoods relative to the null hypothesis. In
our case, the null hypothesis says that the IQ scores in Ms. B’s class are the
chance result of a normal distribution with mean 100 and standard deviation
15. That hypothesis yields a particular likelihood that a class of sixteen will
have an average score of 110, a likelihood that such a class will average 111, a
likelihood of 112, etc. The p-value is the sum of these likelihoods. And all of
them are determined directly from the content of the hypothesis being tested;
no priors or catchalls are required.
Moreover, these calculations tell us something important about the fre
quency profile of the test. Suppose we make it our general policy to reject the
null hypothesis if and only if our data exhibits a p-value for that hypothesis
less than 1%. Focusing on cases in which the null hypothesis is true, in what
percentage of those cases should we expect this policy to make the mistake of
rejecting the null? Answer: less than 1% of the time. Call anybody of data that
leads us to reject the null hypothesis under this policy “rejection data”. If the
null hypothesis is true, the probability is less than 1% that a given sample will
yield rejection data. So given the law of large numbers, we should expect in the
long run to reject the null hypothesis in less than 1% of cases where the null
hypothesis is true.
A frequentist statistical test is one for which we can use uncontroversial
probabilities to generate an expectation for how frequently the test will display
a particular desirable or undesirable feature. The previous paragraph performs
that analysis for a Fisherian significance test. The probabilities in question
are likelihoods derived from a well-defined null hypothesis. The (undesirable)
feature in question is rejecting the null hypothesis when it’s true.
13.2.2 Troubles with significance testing
Perhaps the biggest real-world problem with significance tests is how often
their results are misinterpreted. Misinterpretation of p-values is so common
that in February of 2016 the American Statistical Association (ASA) felt
compelled to publish a “Statement on Statistical Significance and P-values”
(Wasserstein and Lazar 2016), the first time in its 177-year history the asso
ciation had taken an official position on a specific matter of statistical practice.
The statement listed six “widely agreed upon principles underlying the proper
use and interpretation of the p-value”:
1. P-values can indicate how incompatible the data are with a specified
statistical model.
2. P-values do not measure the probability that the studied hypothesis is
true, or the probability that the data were produced by random chance
alone.
3. Scientific conclusions and business or policy decisions should not be
based only on whether a p-value passes a specific threshold.
4. Proper inference requires full reporting and transparency.
5. A p-value, or statistical significance, does not measure the size of an effect
or the importance of a result.
6. By itself, a p-value does not provide a good measure of evidence regard
ing a model or hypothesis.
The misconceptions this list warns against are common not only among
scientific practitioners in the field16 but even in introductory statistics texts.17
In elaborating the second principle, the ASA warned in particular:
Researchers often wish to turn a p-value into a statement about the truth
of a null hypothesis, or about the probability that random chance produced
the observed data. The p-value is neither. It is a statement about data in
relation to a specified hypothetical explanation, and is not a statement about
the explanation itself. (Wasserstein and Lazar 2016,p.l31)
The point here is that the p-value associated with the null hypothesis is not
a statement about that hypothesis by itself—it doesn’t, for example, establish
the unconditional probability of the null hypothesis. Instead, the p-value
establishes a specific relation between the data and the null hypothesis, which
we can roughly characterize with the following conditional probability:
p-value = Pr(outcome at least as extreme as what was observed ∣

null hypothesis) (13.6)
Perhaps it’s unfair to criticize frequentism based on the behavior of those

who misuse it. So what’s the proper way to understand a significance test’s
conclusions? A p-value doesn’t say anything directly about the truth of the
null hypothesis, but can we use it to adopt some attitude toward the null? When
data yields a very lowp-value for the null, a careful statistician will recommend
“rejecting the null hypothesis at the 1% significance level”. What does “reject”
13.2 FREQUENTISM 463
mean in this context? Is this a recommendation that we disbelieve the null

hypothesis, or believe the null to be false? Probably not, for two reasons: First,
it’s unclear what it would mean to believe or disbelieve a proposition “at the 1%
significance level”.18 Second, in many statistical paradigms “reject” contrasts
with “accept” rather than “believe”. Philosophers of science and statisticians
have taken pains to clarify that “acceptance” is a technical term in this context,
distinct from “belief”. We should distinguish rejection from disbelief as well.
So if a lowp-value doesn’t justify believing the null hypothesis is false, what
does it tell us? Fisher (1956, p. 39) suggested we conclude from a low p-value
that either the null hypothesis is false, or something very unlikely occurred. For
instance, in the case of Ms. B’s third-grade class, if her students’ IQs were
random samples from the general population, the probability is less than 0.4%
that an average IQ score at least as great as 110 would be observed. So if the
null hypothesis is true, observing such a score is extremely unlikely. When the
observation actually comes to pass, we conclude that either the null hypothesis
is false, or something very unlikely occurred.19
Given this disjunction, we might apply Cournot’s Principle (attributed to
the nineteenth-century philosopher and mathematician Antoine Augustin
Cournot), which recommends treating sufficiently unlikely outcomes as prac
tical impossibilities. That would license a disjunctive syllogism allowing us
for practical purposes to treat the null as false.20 But this inference looks
dubious on its face, as illustrated by an example from Dickson and Baird (2011,
pp. 219-20). Consider the hypothesis that John plays soccer. Conditional on
this hypothesis, it’s unlikely that he plays goalie. (For the sake of the example
we can make this as unlikely as we want.) But now suppose we observe John
playing goalie. By the logic of significance testing, we know that either John
doesn’t play soccer or something unlikely has happened. Yet it would be a
mistake to conclude that John doesn’t play soccer.
A frequentist might reply that while the relevant inference pattern will
sometimes yield this kind of mistaken rejection, for true hypotheses that will
happen very infrequently. (After all, we started off by stipulating that goalies
are rare soccer players.) But this reply misses the underlying issue: unlikely
events occur, and occur all the time. We can even find ourselves in a situation in
which we’re certain some unlikely event has occurred. Consider a case in which
we start with a partition of hypotheses, then observe some data that receives
a low p-value on every hypothesis in the partition. Whichever hypothesis is
true, something unlikely has occurred. In such a case it would be oddly biased
to reject the null because of its lowp-value.
Or consider a case in which we’re comparing the null hypothesis with some
alternative, our experimental result receives a low p-value on the null, but
the alternative hypothesis had a low probability going into the test. Should
we reject the null in such a case?21 Admittedly, the framing of this example
brings prior probabilities into the discussion, which the frequentist is keen to
avoid. But ignoring such considerations encourages us to commit the Base
Rate Fallacy (Section 4.1.2). Suppose a randomly selected member of the
population receives a positive test result for a particular disease. This result
may receive a very lowp-value relative to the null hypothesis that the individual
lacks the disease. But if the frequency of the disease in the general population
is even lower, it would be a mistake to reject the null.
Perhaps when the frequency of a disease in the general population is known,
the frequentist can factor that into her testing methodology. But reflecting
on the role of priors can lead us to question significance testing in more
subtle ways. Many professional scientific journals select a particular threshold
(often 5%), then consider an experimental result reliable enough to publish
just in case it’s significant to that level. Of course reliability of a result is not
the only criterion for publication—the hypothesis offered as an alternative to
the null must be sufficiently novel, germane to scientific topics of interest,
etc. But presumably scientists can determine whether a hypothesis has those
sorts of qualities without empirical testing. So let’s imagine that a group of
scientists, without a strong sense of where the truth lies in their discipline,
generates 1,000 hypotheses meeting the criteria of novelty, level of interest,
etc. for publication. And let’s imagine that, to be generous, roughly 5% of
the hypotheses generated are true. There will be approximately 950 cases in
which the suggested hypothesis is false and the null hypothesis is true. When
the scientists run empirical experiments in these cases, a significance test at
the 5% level will reject the null around forty-seven or forty-eight times. On the
other hand, in the cases involving the fifty true hypotheses, not every empirical
test will yield results significant enough to reject the null. Taking all these
cases togther, the scientists will clear the bar for publication on something like
ninety to 100 of their hypotheses, and almost half of those hypotheses will
be false.
In this example I simply stipulated that about 5% of the scientists’
hypotheses are true. In real life there’d be no way of knowing. But it’s worth
thinking about what percentage of hypotheses scientists put to the test actually
are true, and the downstream effects this has on the percent of results published
in significance-test journals that actually support the hypothesis claimed.
Many commentators suggested that journals’ reliance on significance tests was
responsible for psychology’s recent “replication crisis”. A group of psychologists

(Open Science Collaboration 2015) set out to replicate randomly selected
results published in three prominent psychology journals. Of the ninety-seven
results withp-values under 5% they attempted to replicate, they obtained only
thirty-five outcomes significant at that a level.22
To be clear: The mathematics of p-values is entirely uncontroversial. Γm
not challenging the relevant math, nor am I challenging the objectivity of
the likelihoods underlying frequentist calculations. Γm trying to determine
whether these mathematical calculations have any epistemological significance.
(Recall that frequentists raise a similar question about Bayes’s Theorem, which
they’re happy to concede is a theorem.) Perhaps it’s a mistake to use signif
icance tests for hypothesis rejection (in any sense). Could we find a more
conservative—yet still epistemologically important—lesson to draw from low
p-values? Suppose the null hypothesis makes it highly unlikely that something
as extreme as a particular observation would occur. When that observa
tion is actually recorded, doesn’t this disconfirm the null, at least to some
extent?
The prospects for this confirmational interpretation of significance testing
dim when we think back on the case in which every available hypothesis
receives a lowp-value from the data. In such a case it maybe that none of the
hypotheses is disconfirmed by the data. But there’s an even deeper problem
with reading low p-values as disconfirmatory: p-values exhibit a worrying sort
of language dependence.
Suppose we have a coin of unknown bias, and our null hypothesis says that
the coin is fair. We flip the coin twenty times, and observe the following string
of outcomes:
HHHTHHHHHTHHHHTHHHHH
This string of twenty flip outcomes is extremely unlikely on the null. But then
again, any particular string of twenty Hs and Ts will be extremely unlikely on
the null. To run a meaningful significance test, we need to set aside some of
our total evidence and describe the data in a coarse-grained fashion. We might
select the number of heads as our test statistic, then calculate ap-value on the
null hypothesis for the observation “seventeen heads out of twenty flips.” The
resulting p-value is under one-half of one percent.
Yet number-of-heads isn’t the only statistic we might use to summarize flip
data. Instead of asking how many heads were observed in a string of twenty
tosses, we might ask for the length of the longest run of heads observed.
For example, the string of outcomes above has a longest-heads-run of five.
There’s no obvious reason to prefer number-of-heads as a test statistic over

longest-heads-run. They each carve up the possibilities with the same fineness
of grain (in each case the possible values run from zero to twenty), and each
is positively correlated with the coin’s bias toward heads. But these statistics
yield differentp-values for the null hypothesis. As I mentioned above, number-
of-heads yields a p-value for this string of outcomes sufficient to reject the
null at the 1% significance level. But the probability on the null of getting a
longest-heads-run of at least five is almost exactly 25%. So should we count
this observation as significant enough to reject the null hypothesis?
It’s easy to cook up examples that work in the other direction, as well: If my
flips came out ten heads followed by ten tails, the longest-heads-run p-value
for this observation would be 0.59%.23 But using number-of-heads, the null
hypothesis would receive a p-value over 50%. Set aside questions of rejection
for a moment—if p-values are our tool for assessing confirmation, should we
take this evidence to disconfirm the null hypothesis or not?24
It’s time to sum up. Despite the purportedly objective character of frequen
tist methods, we have identified a number of subjective influences on the use of
significance tests. First, while a significance test is meant to assess a single null
hypothesis in light of experimental data, the epistemological import of such a
test can depend heavily on features of the alternative hypotheses with which
the scientist contrasts the null.25 Second, significance tests can operate only
when the data is summarized by some test statistic. Yet as we saw above, the
very same data can yield wildly divergent p-values for the null depending on
which statistic the experimenter uses to summarize her data.26 Finally, while
we haven’t delved into this issue here, the choice of a significance level a (5%?
1%?) sufficient for rejection seems to have little objective basis.27
Fisherian significance testing is hardly the only tool in the frequentist’s
toolbox. Other frequentist tools, such as Neyman-Pearson statistics, may fare
better on the particular examples I’ve mentioned, but ultimately admit sub
jective influences for very similar reasons. (The details are spelled out at great
length in this chapter’s Further Readings.) Moreover, frequentists’ abstention
from priors leaves them open to the Base Rate problem I discussed above, as
well as a bigger-picture problem I’ll discuss at the end of Section 13.3.1. One
is reminded of the de Finetti remark I quoted earlier:
When one pretends to eliminate the subjective factors one succeeds only in
hiding them (that is, at least, in my opinion), more or less skillfully, but never
avoiding a gap in logic. (1937/1964, p. 147)
13-3 LIKELIHOODISM 467
13.3 Likelihoodism
Earlier, in Equation (13.5), we saw that when an agent conditionalizes on some

evidence E, her relative credences in hypotheses Hl and H2 change as follows:
crj(H1) _ cr,(⅛1) cr,(E∣H1)

cr∕¾) cr,(¾) cr,(B∣H2) l ' ’
The left-most ratio in this equation captues how the agent compares H1 to
H2 after the update. The middle ratio expresses how the agent made that
comparison before the evidence came in. To see how the comparison has
changed, we focus on the right-most ratio—the likelihood ratio. The likeli
hood ratio expresses the evidence’s effect on the agents relative credences in
the hypotheses. If the likelihood ratio is greater than 1, the agents relative
confidence in H1 compared to H2 increases; less than 1, Hl fares worse with
respect to H2, and a likelihood ratio of exactly 1 yields no change.
Likelihoodists take this equation very seriously: according to them, the
likelihood ratio is our best tool for understanding what a piece of evidence says
about one hypothesis versus another. They endorse Hackings (1965)28
Law of Likelihood: Evidence E favors hypothesis H1 over H2 just in case

Pr(E ∣ H1) > Pr(E ∣ H2). In that case, the degree to which E favors
EE over EE is measured by the likelihood ratio...-.. '.......
7 Pr(B∣⅞)
The Law of Likelihood has two components: First, it makes the qualitative
claim that E favors H1 over H2 just in case the likelihood ratio is greater than 1;
second, it makes a quantitative claim that the likelihood ratio measures the
degree of favoring.29
Notice that while Equation (13.7) worked with credence values (cr), in
stating the Law of Likelihood I switched to generic probability notation (Pr).
That’s because likelihoodists think the likelihood values that drive personal
changes in relative confidence should ultimately be grounded objectively. And
it’s objectively grounded likelihoods that are supposed to figure in the Law
of Likelihood. Where do these likelihoods come from? As we’ve discussed,
probabilities of experimental outcomes can be read directly off of well-defined
scientific hypotheses; similarly, diagnostic test likelihoods may be based on
frequency data from past trials. Likelihoodists stress that in such situations,
likelihoods will be independent of priors; the reliability profile of a diagnostic
test doesn’t depend on how frequently the disease it tests for appears in a
population.30 So all the values in the Law of Likelihood can be established

on a purely objective basis; likelihoodists think this gives their approach to
evidential support a strong advantage over the subjectivity of Bayesianism.
Likelihoodists also think they succeed better than frequentists at achieving
objectivity. Recall that in order to apply a significance test, the frequentist
must summarize her observations with a test statistic. Different test statistics
may yield different verdicts (about rejection of the null, etc.), so the choice of
test statistic seems to introduce a subjective element into significance testing.
The Law of Likelihood, on the other hand, works with the full description
of an observation, honoring the Principle of Total Evidence and eschewing
summary statistics.
This difference between likelihoodism and frequentism springs from a
deeper, underlying difference: When we apply a significance test to a null
hypothesis based on some particular observation, we ask how likely the
null would make that observation or any other observation more extreme.
The calculated p-value thus depends on what other observations might have
occurred. This is the point at which different methods of partitioning the
possible observations make a difference. The Law of Likelihood, however,
operates only on the two hypotheses under comparison and the observation
that was actually made. So likelihoodism has no troubles with language depen
dence. Moreover, interpreting the Law of Likelihoods favoring results does not
require us to ask what further hypotheses beyond H1 and H2 might have been
under consideration. Contrast this with significance tests on a hypothesis; we
sometimes felt we had to know how other hypotheses might have fared before
we could interpret the meaning of a significant p-value.
Richard Royall neatly summed up this case for likelihoodism in his (1997),
when he wrote:
Fortunately, we are not forced to choose either of these two evils, the
sample-space dependence of the frequentists or the prior distributions of
the Bayesians. Likelihood methods avoid both sources of subjectivity.
(p. 171)
Bayesians and frequentists retort that whatever the Law of Likelihoods objec-
tivist bona fides, it fails at a fundamental level: it gets basic cases of evidential
support wrong. To borrow one of RoyalΓs own examples (1997, Sect. 1.7.1),
suppose you draw an ace of diamonds from a shuffled deck of cards. Con
sider the hypothesis that this is an ordinary fifty-two-card deck, versus the
hypothesis that the deck is all aces of diamonds. The ordinary-deck hypothesis
13∙3 LIKELIHOODISM 469
confers a probability of 1/52 on drawing an ace of diamonds, while the

trick-deck hypothesis gives a likelihood of 1. So by the Law of Likelihood,
drawing an ace of diamonds favors the trick-deck hypothesis over an ordinary
deck. This has struck many commentators as problematic; it seems like no
matter what card we draw from an ordinary deck, that card will count against
the hypothesis that the deck is ordinary.
To understand the likelihoodist response to this case, we need to clarify
a couple of features of likelihoodism. Like Bayesians and frequentists,
likelihoodists offer an account of evidential support. But there’s a key
difference between their approaches. Bayesians and frequentists are happy
to analyze two-place relations between a body of evidence and a single
hypothesis—whether the evidence suffices to reject the hypothesis, whether
the evidence confirms the hypothesis, etc. Likelihoodism restricts itself to
three-place relations, between a body of evidence and two hypotheses.31
Likelihoodists emphasize that their view is contrastive.
It may feel like drawing an ace of diamonds shouldn’t be any evidence
against the ordinary-deck hypothesis. But the likelihoodist never said it was,
because the Law of Likelihood doesn’t say whether a particular observation is
evidence for or against a particular hypothesis. The likelihoodist asks whether
the observation offers stronger support for the ordinary-deck hypothesis than
some other particular hypothesis. If the two hypotheses you’re entertaining
are ordinary-deck versus trick-deck-of-diamond-aces, drawing an ace of dia
monds does look like it speaks in favor of the latter over the former. Notice,
by the way, that if we consider other trick-deck hypotheses (trick-deck-of-
diamond-kings? trick-deck-of-spade-deuces?), the Law of Likelihood has an
ace of diamonds observation favoring the ordinary-deck hypothesis over
those. So the observation favors ordinary-deck over some hypotheses, but not
over others.
One still might protest that having drawn the ace of diamonds, we would
feel no inclination to believe the deck was all aces of diamonds or to abandon
an ordinary-deck assumption. But this brings us to the second key feature
of likelihoodism: likelihoodism isn’t about what you should believe. Royall
distinguished three questions we can ask about an observation (Section 13.2)
specifically to point out that likelihoodism addresses question three (What
does this observation tell me about A versus B?), not question one (What do
I believe?). What to believe (or what unconditional credence to assign) is the
kind of question a Bayesian answers, by calculating a posterior using Bayes’s
theorem. When first reading the ace of diamonds example, you probably
assumed some kind of background setup that gave the ordinary deck a much
higher prior than the trick-deck-of-diamond-aces. And this probably accounts

for your high credence in the ordinary deck even after the observation. But
that’s separate from the question of which hypothesis the observation favors
more strongly when considered alone.32
13.3.1 Troubles with likelihoodism
There are, however, more worrisome counterexamples to likelihoodism. Fitel-

son (2007) asks us to consider a card drawn at random from a deck known
to be ordinary. Suppose you are told that the card is a spade. Which of two
hypotheses is favored by this evidence: that the card is the ace of spades, or
that it’s black?
Most of us think the answer is obviously the latter. Yet the likelihood of
drawing a spade on the ace-of-spades hypothesis is 1, while the likelihood
of spade on black is 1/2. So the Law of Likelihood goes in the opposite
direction. Here we’ve focused on a purely contrastive question, about what
the evidence says (not about what you should believe), that likelihoodism
gets dead wrong. Moreover, we can back up our intuition about this case
with a general principle: the Logicality principle from Section 6.4.1. In that
section we offered Logicality as an adequacy condition on measures of (two-
place) confirmation, but it can be read as a purely comparative principle: Any
observation favors a hypothesis it entails over a hypothesis that it doesn’t (and
treats equally any two hypotheses that are both entailed). The general idea is
that deductive entailment is the strongest kind of evidential support we can
get. But likelihoodism says that the card’s being a spade favors its being the ace
of spades (which it doesn’t entail) over the card’s being black (which it does).
Likelihoodists have some available responses to this counterexample. First,
some likelihoodists (such as Chandler 2013 and Gandenberger ms) think
hypotheses can be competing only if they are mutually exclusive, and so
apply the Law of Likelihood only in that case. In the present example, the
hypothesis that the card is the ace of spades and the hypothesis that it’s black
are not mutually exclusive, so the Law of Likelihood yields no verdict (much
less a counterintuitive one). Second, a likelihoodist might say that examples
invoking Logicality are necessarily special cases. Likelihoodism is driven by a
quest for objectivity in scientific data analysis. Deductive entailment relations
are clearly objective, so likelihoodists may be happy to concede an intuitive
condition on favoring that can be applied entirely using entailment facts.
Perhaps the likelihoodist will grant that, when the evidence deductively entails
13∙3 LIKELIHOODISM 471
exactly one of the hypotheses, the favoring relations are as Logicality says. But
in the vast majority of cases—where Logicality doesn’t settle the matter—we
should revert to the Law of Likelihood. (We’ll presently discuss an interpreta
tion of likelihoodism as this kind of “fallback” position.)
These responses are best addressed by a counterexample that avoids both of
them. We want an example in which the hypotheses are mutually exclusive,
neither is entailed by the evidence, yet the Law of Likelihood still gets the
favoring wrong. We might create such an example by taking Fitelson’s spade
case and introducing a bit of statistical noise. (Perhaps you thought you heard
that the card is a spade, but aren’t entirely certain... etc.) Instead, let’s work
with a new, cleaner example:
We’re playing the card game Hearts (with an ordinary deck). The goal of
Hearts is to score as few points as possible. At the beginning of the game,
the player to my right passes me one card, face down. Some cards I might
receive give me no risk of scoring points. The two of hearts exposes me to
some risk, but that risk is fairly low. So if Γm passed the two of hearts, Γm
mildly annoyed. However if I receive a different heart, or the queen of spades,
those represent real trouble, and I get really pissed off.
Now suppose you catch a glimpse of the card passed to me, and see only that
it’s a heart. Does this evidence favor the hypothesis that Γm mildly annoyed
or that Γm pissed off? (Assume these hypotheses are mutually exclusive.)
In this example the evidence that the card is a heart entails neither hypoth
esis, and by stipulation the hypotheses are mutually exclusive. So neither
likelihoodist response above applies. Yet I submit that the Law of Likelihood
gets this case wrong. The probability of heart-passed given mildly annoyed
is 1, while the probability of heart-passed given pissed-off is 12/13. So by
likelihoodist lights the former is favored. But intuitively, catching a glimpse
of a heart favors the hypothesis that Γm pissed off over the hypothesis that Γm
mildly annoyed.33
One can respond to both this counterexample and Fitelson’s spade case
using a different likelihoodist tack. Notice that in both examples, Bayesian con
firmation calculations track our intuitions. If we apply the log likelihood ratio
to measure confirmation (Section 6.4.1), drawing a spade in Fitelson’s example
favors black over ace-of-spades, while glimpsing a heart favors pissed-off over
mildly annoyed.34 Elliott Sober suggests we accept the Bayesian’s confirmation
verdicts—and her methods of reaching them—for these particular examples.
Sober is a likelihoodist because he wants scientific analyses to proceed on

purely objective grounds. In these card-playing examples the distribution of
cards in the deck is available, and the draws are assumed to be random, so
it’s easy to calculate any prior, likelihood, or catchall values we might desire.
When all these values can be established objectively, Sober is happy to let
the Bayesian employ all of them in making a judgment of evidential support.
But when objective priors are not available, likelihoodism comes into its own.
Sober writes:
These examples and others like them would be good objections to likeli
hoodism if likelihoodism were not a fallback position that applies only when
Bayesianism does not. The likelihoodist is happy to assign probabilities to
hypotheses when the assignment of values to priors and likelihoods can be
justified by appeal to empirical information. Likelihoodism emerges as a
statistical philosophy distinct from Bayesianism only when this is not pos
sible. The present examples therefore provide no objection to likelihoodism;
we just need to recognize that the ordinary words “support” and “favoring”
sometimes need to be understood within a Bayesian framework in which it
is the probabilities of hypotheses that are under discussion; but sometimes
this is not so. Eddington was not able to use his eclipse data to say how
probable the [General Theory of Relativity] and Newtonian theory each are.
Rather, he was able to ascertain how probable the data are, given each of these
hypotheses. That’s where likelihoodism finds its application.
There are three problems with Sobers “likelihoodism is a fallback position”

response, one technical and two more methodological. First, it’s easy to modify
our examples so that objective priors are unavailable. Imagine that in either
Fitelson’s spade example or the Hearts example a few cards from the deck
have been lost, but you have no idea which cards they are (except that in the
spades example you know the ace of spades is still there, while in the Hearts
example the two of hearts and the queen of spades remain). In that case we
don’t know the distribution of the deck, and so can’t calculate any objective
priors. According to Sober’s fallback position, we should therefore abandon
Bayesian confirmation measures and judge favoring relations using the Law of
Likelihood. But I submit that our intuitions about favoring in these lost-card
cases are the same as in the original examples, and continue to run counter to
the Law of Likelihood.
13-3 likelihoodism 473
Second, thinking about Sobers fallback methodology yields even bigger

problems. Here’s an analogy: There’s a very popular international magazine
I used to read to learn about goings-on in far-flung reaches of the world. Then
one day I read an article in that magazine about a local issue I knew quite well.
rΓhe article got both the facts and their significance fairly starkly wrong. And
so I began to wonder: If the magazine is so unreliable about this particular case
I understand, can I really trust what it says about matters I know little about?
Sober agrees with the Bayesian’s take on favoring in examples where the
priors are objective. In some of those examples (Fitelson’s spade, the Hearts
example), the Law of Likelihood disagrees with Bayesian confirmation theory
on where the favoring falls. So Sober must grant that in those examples, the
Law of Likelihood gets favoring wrong. Why, then, should we trust the Law
of Likelihood to get favoring relations right in the cases where objective priors
are unavailable?
Third, and finally, we should have learned something from the problems
likelihoodism confronts when objective priors are available. If we’re willing
to grant that Bayesianism gets those cases right, we should see if there’s any
clear explanation of why likelihoodism sometimes gets them wrong. And here
I think the answer is straightforward: likelihoodism relies on tools that are
fundamentally backward.
Positive probabilistic relevance is symmetrical between E and H: condition
ing on E increases the probability of H just in case conditioning on H increases
the probability of E. So if all we want is a judgment on whether E supports H, it
doesn’t matter whether we work with Pr(E ∣ H) or Pr(H ∣ E). But when it comes
to measuring degree of support, or comparing whether evidence supports one
hypothesis over another, the order in which those propositions appear can
make all the difference. Ask yourself: When it comes to evidential support,
should the question of favoring be settled by asking whether one hypothesis
entails the evidence (as occurs in both our counterexamples)? Or is it more
relevant whether the evidence entails one of the hypotheses?
Royall justifies the Law of Likelihood by writing, “The hypothesis that
assigned the greater probability to the observation did the better job of pre
dicting what actually happened, so it is better supported by that observation”
(1997, p. 5). This sounds intuitive at a first pass, but we should attend to the
transition across that “so”. RoyalΓs third question asks what the evidence says
about the hypotheses; likelihoodism examines what the hypotheses say about
the evidence. It would be nice if you could discern the former by examining the
latter. But that’s exactly the bit that fails in the spade and Hearts examples.35
In the end, likelihoodists and frequentists have a common problem. They

demand statistical tools built from quantities with a certain sort of objectivity.
Sometimes they admit priors and catchalls, but often only likelihoods are
sufficiently objective. So they build tools from the pieces they’ve allowed
themselves. (The Law of Likelihood combines likelihoods in a simple ratio;
frequentist methods make more baroque likelihood calculations.) Yet these
pieces point in the opposite direction from the kinds of conclusions they
want to draw. No matter how you combine them, likelihoods don’t suffice
to measure evidential favoring. You need priors or catchalls to truly capture
evidential support.
13.4 Exercises
that the distributions under discussion satisfy the probability axioms and
Ratio Formula. You may also assume that whenever a conditional probability
expression occurs or a proposition is conditionalized upon, the needed
proposition has nonzero unconditional probability so that conditional
probabilities are well defined.
Problem 13.1.0f What do you think it means when someone says that science
is objective? Do you think it’s important that science be objective in that sense?
Problem 13.2. j> Some of the exercises below demonstrate how Bayesianism,
frequentism, and likelihoodism evaluate a simple coin-toss scenario. To set you
up for those exercies, here are a few basic probability calculations you might
want to make first:
(a) Suppose I toss a fair coin six times. What is the chance it comes up heads
exactly five times? More generally, for each n from zero through six,
what is the chance that a fair coin tossed six times will come up heads
exactly n times?
(b) Now suppose instead that the coin is biased toward heads, such that its
chance of coming up heads is 3/4 (though results of successive tosses are
still independent of each other). For this biased coin, what is the chance
that it will come up heads exactly n times in six tosses, for each n zero
through six?
Problem 13.3. Suppose you entertain exactly two hypotheses about a

particular coin. H1 says that the coin is fair. H2 says the coin is biased toward
heads: it has a 3/4 chance of coming up heads on any given flip, though
outcomes of successive tosses are probabilistically independent. Let’s say that
at ti, you assign cri(H1) = 0.2 and crz∙(¾) = θ∙8> and you satisfy the Principal
Principle.
(a) Between ti and t7∙, I flip the coin six times, and it comes up heads exactly
five times. If you update on this evidence by conditionalizing, what will
be your crj(Hl)l
(b) Imagine that—unbeknownst to you—this coin is actually fair. Out of
all the outcomes I might have generated by flipping the coin six times
between ti and ty∙, which outcomes would have increased your credence
in the true hypothesis?
(c) Given that the coin is in fact fair, when I set out to flip it six times
between ti and tj, what was the chance that the result of those flips would
increase your credence in the true hypothesis?
(d) Explain what this has to do with the idea of priors’ “washing out” from
Section 13.1.2.
Problem 13.4. Imagine you’ve just seen me flip a coin six times; it came
up heads exactly five times. You suspect that I might be flipping a coin that’s
biased toward heads.
(a) Let’s take it as our null hypothesis that the coin is fair. If the null
hypothesis is true, what’s the chance that flipping the coin six times
would yield at least five heads?
(b) Does seeing five heads on six flips suffice to reject the null hypothesis at
a 5% significance level? At a 1% significance level? Explain why or why
not for each.
(c) Imagine all six of my flips had come up heads. Would that data rec
ommend rejecting the null at a 5% significance level? How about 1%?
Explain why or why not for each.
(d) In order to answer parts (b) and (c), did you need to consider the prior
probability of the null hypothesis?
Problem 13.5. & Returning to page 462, go through each of the ASA’s six
widely agreed-upon principles one at a time, and explain why it’s true.
Problem 13.6. j) Consider the hypotheses H1 and H2 about a particular coin

described in Exercise 13.3.
(a) Suppose that between ti and tj I flip the coin six times, and it comes up
heads exactly five times. According to the Law of Likelihood, does this
evidence favor Hl over H2?
(b) What possible outcomes of flipping the coin six times between ti and tj
would have favored H1 over H2, according to the Law of Likelihood?
(c) In order to answer parts (a) and (b), did you need to consider crz∙(H1)
or crl∙(H2)T
Problem 13.7. Suppose we have a probability distribution Pr, two mutu

ally exclusive hypotheses Hl and H2, and a body of evidence E. Here are two
conditions that might obtain for these relata:
(i) Conditional on the disjunction of the hypotheses, E is positively rele
vant to H1. That is,
Pr(H11E & (H1 V H2)) > Pr(H11H1 V H2)
(ii) According to the Law of Likelihood, E favors H1 over H2 on Pr.
Prove that these two conditions are equivalent. That is, the relata satisfy
condition (i) just in case they satisfy condition (ii).36
Problem 13.8. <9 Considering Bayesianism, frequentism, and likelihoodism,

which do you think offers the best tools for assessing relationships of evidential
support? Explain why you think so.
John Earman (1992). Bayes or Bust? A Critical Examination of Bayesian

Confirmation Theory. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press
Chapter 6 presents and evaluates a variety of Bayesian convergence results,

admittedly at a high level of mathematical sophistication.
Elliott Sober (2008). Evidence and Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni

versity Press
Chapter 1 provides a highly accessible introduction to Bayesianism,

likelihoodism, frequentism, and challenges faced by each—albeit from a
likelihoodist’s perspective.
Classic Texts
Leonard ∫. Savage (1954). The Foundations of Statistics. New York: Wiley
Contains Savage’s basic washing out of priors result, and a keen assessment of
its significance.
Ronald A. Fisher (1956). Statistical Methods and Scientific Inference. Edin

burgh: Oliver and Boyd
∫. Neyman and Egon Pearson (1967). Joint Statistical Papers. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press
Canonical sources in the development of frequentism.
Ian Hacking (1965). The Logic ofStatistical Inference. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press
A.W.F. Edwards (1972). Likelihood: An Account of the Statistical Concept of
Likelihood and its Application to Scientific Inference. Cambridge: Cam
bridge University Press
Richard M. Royall (1997). Statistical Evidence: A Likelihood Paradigm. New
York: Chapman & Hall/CRC
Canonical books making the case for likelihoodism.
Extended Discussion
James Hawthorne (2014). Inductive Logic. In: The Stanford Encyclo

pedia of Philosophy. Ed. by Edward N. Zalta. Winter 2014. URL:
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives∕win2014∕entries∕logic-inductive∕
Presents state-of-the-art Bayesian convergence results, many of which have

marked advantages over previous efforts in the area. For instance, some of
these resqlts eschew Countable Additivity, and some avoid concerns about the
irrelevance of the long-run.
Colin Howson and Peter Urbach (2006). Scientific Reasoning: The Bayesian
Approach. 3rd edition. Chicago: Open Court
Statistically sophisticated defense of the Bayesian perspective, with extensive,

detailed critiques of frequentist methods.
Deborah Mayo (2018). Statistical Inference as Severe Testing: How to Get

beyond the Statistics Wars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
An extended defence of frequentism, which (among many other things) offers

responses to the objections raised in this chapter.
Prasanta S. Bandyopadhyay and Malcolm R. Forster (2011). Philosophy of

Statistics. Vol. 7. Handbook of the Philosophy of Science. Amsterdam:
Elsevier
A collection of excellent philosophical essays—many accessible to the

beginner—exploring and assessing a wide variety of techniques in statistics.
Notes
1. Efron’s (1986) article “Why Isn’t Everyone a Bayesian?” begins by pointing out that
“Everyone used to be a Bayesian. Laplace wholeheartedly endorsed Bayes’s formulation
of the inference problem, and most 19th-century scientists followed suit.” When Efron
reaches, at the end of his article, his “summary of the major reasons why [frequentist]
ideas have shouldered Bayesian theory aside in statistical practice,” he cites as crucially
important that “The high ground of scientific objectivity has been seized by the
frequentists.”
2. Some experiments test the value of a continuous physical parameter. In that case we
have an infinite partition of hypotheses—one for each possible value of the parameter.
Assuming we can determine the likelihood of E on each possible setting of the
parameter, and we have a prior distribution over the possible parameter settings, a
calculation like that of Equation (13.4) can be accomplished with integrals.
3. Notice that switching from Conditionalization to Jeffrey Conditionalization (or the
other Bayesian updating rules discussed in Chapter 11) would make no difference here.
Priors play a role in determining the posterior credences generated by all of those rules.
4. Looking back at the list of historically significant Bayesian confirmation measures
in Section 6.4.1, each one invokes either the agent’s prior in the hypothesis or some
credence involving the catchall.
notes 479
5. Like Howson and Urbach, Savage was a Subjective Bayesian. It’s a consistent theme
throughout this part of the book that objections to Bayesianism are often stated more
clearly by the targets of those objections than by the objectors themselves.
6. There’s an interesting comparison here to the action theory literature on intentions.
Most authors agree that there are situations in which either of two incompatible
intentions is equally rationally permissible for an agent. (Consider Buridan’s ass, for
instance.) Once the agent forms one of those permitted intentions, is there rational
pressure for the agent to stick with that choice? The lack of an objective reason for the
initial selection needn’t entail that that selection may be rationally abandoned later on.
(See Bratman 1987 and the literature that followed.)
7. A similar point could be made about the general concern for “objectivity” in science.
See Reiss and Sprenger (2017).
8. In Chapter 14 we will discuss another approach to recovering objectivity for
Bayesianism: modeling agents’ confidence using intervals of values instead of single real
numbers.
9. The Bayes factor, which we discussed in Section 4.1.2, is a special case of the likelihood
ratio in which the two hypotheses are H and ~H. Equation (13.5) generalizes Equation
(4.8) from our discussion there. (Recall that the likelihood ratio also furnished our
measure of confirmation I in Section 6.4.1.)
10. Actually, some Bayesian convergence results (Lele 2004) work even when the true
hypothesis isn’t included among those the investigators consider. In that case, opinion
converges on the hypothesis in the agents’ partition that is closest to the truth, in a well-
defined sense. (Thanks to Conor Mayo-Wilson for the reference.)
11. One slight difference between the two interpretations of “probability” here: On the
chance interpretation, there is one particular composition of the urn (5 black, 5 white),
such that the chance is 1 that both scientists’ opinions will converge on the hypothesis
describing that composition. On the other hand, there is no particular hypothesis such
that either scientist assigns credence 1 that the two of them will converge on that
hypotheses. The scientists are certain that a truth exists, assign credence 1 that they’ll
eventually converge on whatever it is, but are uncertain where exactly it lies.
12. Quoted at Bandyopadhyay and Forster (2011, p. xi), which in turn attributes the quo
tation to Rees (2000, p. 71).
13. Though it is arguably accomplished by another book, Howson and Urbach (2006).
14. For those who understand such things, the z-score of our sample is 8/3.
15. If you’re new to significance testing, it might seem awfully odd to assess the probability
on the null hypothesis that our sample would yield a result at least as extreme as
what was observed. Why not assess the probability that the sample would yield exactly
what was observed? Well, consider that in our IQ example, even though IQ scores
are reported as whole numbers, Ms. B’s class contains 16 students, so the average IQ
observed could have been any fraction with a denominator of 16—not just the integers
I mentioned in the text. That means there are a lot of exact averages that might have
arisen from our sample, which in turn means that none of them has a particularly
high probability. Even the probability of getting a 16-student sample with an average
IQ of exactly 100—the most probable average on the null given the way IQ scores are
calculated—is extremely low. Now generalize that thought to more common statistical
tests, which often have hundreds or thousands of individuals in their samples, and you’ll
see that the probabilities attached to getting a body of data with the exact attribute
observed grow so low as to be near-useless. (Never mind situations in which your data
estimates the value of a continuous parameter, in which case all the probabilities may
be 0!)
You might also wonder why we calculated the p-value by summing the probabilities
of only IQ averages greater than or equal to 110, instead of the probabilities of all aver
ages at least as unlikely as 110. (Given the IQ distribution in the general population, an
average of 90 is just as unlikely as 110; an average of 89 is even less likely than 110, etc.—
so why didn’t we add the probabilities of those sub-90 averages into our sum?) Because
the alternatives to the null hypothesis we proposed (Ms. B increases students’ IQ scores,
the class was drawn from a high-IQ population, etc.) all would push the observed IQ
in the same direction (that is, upwards), we performed what’s known as a one-sided
test. If we had calculated the p-value using not just the probabilities of averages above
110, but also the probabilities of averages below 90, that would be a two-sided test.
Differences between one-sided and two-sided tests—and reasons for using one kind
rather than the other—are discussed in standard statistics texts.
16. For instance, a study by Carver (1978) found education researchers espousing the
following “fantasies” about the p-value: (1) p is the probability that the trial result is due
to chance; (2) 1 — p indicates the replicability of the trial; and (3) p is the probability
that the null hypothesis is true.
17. Picking a popular introductory statistics textbook (Moore, McCabe, and Craig 2009) at
random, I found all of the following:
• “The smaller the P-value, the stronger the evidence against [the null hypothesis]
provided by the data.” (p. 377, in the definition of P-value)
• “If the P-value is less than or equal to [the significance level], you conclude that the
alternative hypothesis is true.” (p. 380)
• “This P-value tells us that our outcome is extremely rare. We conclude that the null
hypothesis must be false.” (p. 381)
• “The spirit of a test of significance is to give a clear statement of the degree of evidence
provided by the sample against the null hypothesis. The P-value does this.” (p. 395)
This isn’t an instance of cherry-picking—Moore, McCabe, and Craig (2009) was literally
the first text I examined in search of examples. I certainly don’t mean to beat up on them;
similar passages appear in many other statistics texts.
18. “Rejecting the null hypothesis at the 1% significance level” does not mean assigning the
null a credence of 0.01 or less. To conflate these is a version of the second mistake on
the ASA’s list.
19. For what it’s worth, it’s not entirely clear how to derive Fisher’s disjunction with a
probabilistic disjunct from the kind of conditional probability we equated with p-value
in Equation 13.6. It looks like we’re moving from “the conditional probability of this
kind of observation given the null hypothesis is low” to “if the null hypothesis is true,
then the probability of what was observed is low” en route to “either the null is false
or what was observed is improbable.” In light of our discussion of conditionals and
conditional probabilities in Section 3.3, the first of these steps is highly suspect.
NOTES 481
20. Instead of describing the relevant inference as a disjunctive syllogism, some authors call
it “probabilistic modus tollens”. We begin with the conditional “If the null hypothesis is
true, then something very unlikely occurred”, take as our minor premise that nothing
very unlikely occurred, then conclude that the null is false.
21. A wonderful xkcd comic (that I wish I had the rights to reproduce) involves a neutrino
detector designed to determine whether the sun has gone nova. When the button on
the device is pressed, it rolls two fair six-sided dice. If the dice come up double-sixes,
the device buzzes no matter what. On any other dice result, the device buzzes only
if the sun has exploded.
Someone presses the button, and the device buzzes. A frequentist statistician says,
“The probability of this result happening by chance is 1/36 = 0.027. Since p < 0.05,
I conclude that the sun has exploded.” The Bayesian statistician replies, “Bet you $50 it
hasn’t” (xkcd.com/1132, by Randall Monroe).
22. Besides suggesting journals decrease their reliance on significance tests, some scholars
of scientific methodology have advocated scientists’ reporting all the hypotheses they
test, not just the ones for which they obtain significant results. This is one motivation
for item #4 on the ASA’s list of principles above.
For more dramatic reactions, see Woolston (2015), about a psychology journal
that stopped publishing papers containing p-values, and Amrhein, Greenland, and
McShane (2019), a commentary with over 800 signatories calling “for the entire concept
of statistical significance to be abandoned.”
23. The longest-heads-runp-values in this section were calculated using a web application
by Max Griffin, which in turn developed out of a discussion dated July 24, 2010 on
the online forum askamathematician.com. For further examples of statistical redescrip
tions that flip a significance test’s verdicts about a sequence of coin flips, see Fitelson
and Osherson (2015).
24. Frequentists will of course have responses to this type of example. For instance, they
might complain that longest-heads-run is not what statisticians call a “sufficient”
statistic, while number-of-heads is. In that case, we can shift the example to compare
two sufficient statistics. (In any particular experimental setup, many sufficient statistics
will be available—for one thing, combining a sufficient statistic with any other statistic
will automatically yield another sufficient statistic.) Fisherian statisticians may now
complain that only one of the statistics used is a “minimal” sufficient statistic, but it’s
not clear that there’s a good justification for confining our attention to those. (Thanks
to Conor Mayo-Wilson for extended discussion on this point.)
25. Also, when more advanced statistical methods are applied, it can sometimes make a
difference which among the rival hypotheses the scientist chooses to designate as the
null.
26. As I hinted earlier, significance testing a statistic that captures only some features of
one’s data violates the Principle of Total Evidence (Section 4.2.1). Beyond the language
dependence problem discussed in the main text, this generates another problem for
significance tests having to do with the optional stopping of experiments. It’s sometimes
suggested that on a frequentist regime, one can interpret the results of an experiment
only if one knows whether the experimenters would have kept collecting data had they
received a different result. This seems to inject the experimenters’ subjective intentions
into the interpretation of objective results. (See, e.g., Berger and Berry 1988).
27. Deborah Mayo (2018) has defended what she sees as a non-subjective approach to
selecting significance levels. She also offers thoughtful, epistemologically sensitive
responses to many of the other critiques of frequentism I describe in this section.
Unfortunately, engaging with her proposals goes well beyond the scope of this book.
28. Hacking is oft-cited by likelihoodists for having articulated the Law of Likelihood. Yet
Reiss and Sprenger (2017) trace the origins of likelihoodism back to Alan Turing and
I.J. Good’s work on cracking the Enigma code during World War II.
29. The Law of Likelihood should not be confused with another likelihoodist commit
ment, the likelihood principle. The Law of Likelihood considers one experimental
observation, and explains how it bears on the comparison between two hypotheses.
The likelihood principle considers two different observations, and explains when they
should be taken to have the same evidential significance. Birnbaum (1962) gave the
latter principle its name, and showed how it could be proven from two other, commonly
accepted statistical principles. (See also Gandenberger 2015.)
30. The claimed independence between likelihoods and priors isn’t supposed to be a
mathematical independence; likelihoods and priors have well-defined mathematical
relationships captured by equations such as Bayes’s Theorem. Instead, the idea is that
likelihoods can be established without consideration of priors, usually because their
values are determined by different physical systems than the values of priors. The
likelihood profile of a medical diagnostic test is determined by the biological mechanics
of the test and the human body; the prior probability that a given subject has the tested-
for condition is determined by the broader health situation in the population. The
likelihood that a particular experiment will yield a particular outcome if the General
Theory of Relativity is true is determined by the content of that theory; who knows
what determined the prior probability that General Relativity would be true in the first
place.
31. Perhaps all these relations should include yet another relatum—a background corpus—
in which case Bayesians and frequentists would go in for three-place relations while
likelihoodists would hold out for four. I will suppress any mention of background
corpora in what follows.
32. Royall drives the point home by considering a case in which we start out with two decks,
one ordinary and one full of aces of diamonds, then a fair coin flip determines which
deck a card is drawn from. Now which hypothesis does the ace of diamonds observation
incline you to believe? Is the evidential favoring in this case really any different than it
was in the original?
33. A bit of history on this example: I originally proposed it to Greg Gandenberger, who
posted it to his blog along with a poll (Gandenberger 2014). Seventy-two percent
of respondents to the poll agreed with my intuition about favoring in the example,
though admittedly the sample was small and perhaps not broadly representative. Jake
Chandler responded to the example with a principle he proposed in Chandler (2013):
that a piece of evidence favors one hypothesis over another just in case it favors that
hypothesis when we first conditionalize on the disjunction of the hypotheses. If we first
conditionalize on mildly-annoyed-or-pissed-off, then heart-passed intuitively favors
notes 483
mildly annoyed over pissed-off, so Chandlers principle has the Law of Likelihood
getting the case right. Steven van Enk, however, replied that Chandler’s principle cannot
be used to support the Law of Likelihood, because unless one has already accepted
the Law, assuming the hypotheses’ disjunction looks like it “change[s] our background
knowledge in a way that is not neutral between the two hypotheses” (2015, p. 116). van
Enk’s paper also contains the only published discussion of the Hearts example of which
Γm aware.
34. It’s easy to get the log likelihood ratio measure of confirmation confused with likeli-
hoodists’ use of likelihood ratios, so let me distinguish the two approaches. Bayesians
use the log likelihood ratio to calculate a numerical answer to a question about two
relata: to what degree does this body of evidence support this hypothesis? They do this
by comparing Pr(E ∣ H), the probability of the evidence on the hypothesis, to Pr(E ∣ ~H^),
its probability on the negation of the hypothesis (the catchall). If a Bayesian wants to
know whether E favors Hl over H2, she calculates the log likelihood ratio separately for
each hypothesis, then checks which numerical result is greater.
A likelihoodist, on the other hand, answers the comparative favoring question
directly by comparing the likelihood of the evidence on one hypothesis to the likelihood
of that evidence on the other (that is, by comparing Pr(E ∣ H1) to Pr(E ∣ H2))∙ This can
yield different results than the Bayesian approach—as we’ve already seen, comparisons
of log likelihood ratios satisfy Logicality while the Law of Likelihood does not. Also, the
likelihoodist approach yields no answer to two-place questions about, say, how strongly
E supports Hl straight out.
35. Frequentism is sometimes described as a probabilified Popperian falsificationism. One
might say Γm suggesting that likelihoodism is a probabilified hypothetico-deductivism.
36. This equivalence is reported by Chandler (2013), who says it was pointed out to him by
Branden Fitelson.
14
Comparative Confidence, Ranged
Credences, and Dempster-Shafer Theory
Through most of this book we’ve considered one kind of doxastic attitude—
degree of belief—and represented it with one kind of formal device—a numer
ical distribution over a propositional language. This is the descriptive basis of
traditional Bayesian epistemology. On the normative side, we started off by
articulating five core normative Bayesian rules. We then experimented with
supplementing them, and perhaps tweaking them a bit (especially in Chapters
5 and 11). But our main business has been to consider the arguments for,
applications of, and challenges to this basic formalism.
In this chapter I will describe three alternative formalisms for representing
an agents confidence in propositions. First, I will give a much more in-depth
treatment of comparative confidence rankings than I provided in Chapter 1.
Second, I will consider the ranged credence approach, which models an agent’s
doxastic state using a set of numerical distributions. And finally, I will consider
Dempster-Shafer theory, which employs one distribution to model an agent’s
evidence and a second, associated distribution to model her doxastic attitudes.
For what it’s worth, under the definition offered in Section 1.2.2 I would
consider ranged credences a genuinely Bayesian epistemology, and the other
two Bayesian-adjacent. But I don’t think the labels are terribly important.
Instead, we will focus on how these formalisms depart from—and hope to
improve upon—the traditional approach of assigning a single real number
to each proposition in a language. Comparative confidence rankings claim to
better match the coarseness of actual agents’ psychologies. Ranged credences
claim to represent a wider variety of doxastic states, including some that
respond more appropriately to certain types of evidence. Dempster-Shafer
theory is more supple in its representations of evidence, and offers (among
other things) an elegant solution to the Problem of the Priors (Chapter 13).
For each formalism I will describe: the formal elements it uses to represent
doxastic states; the formalism’s normative rules for rational doxastic states;
claimed advantages of the formalism over the traditional Bayesian approach;
and some challenges for and potential extensions to the formalism. I will also

14-1 COMPARATIVE CONFIDENCE 485
compare the three new formalisms to each other as we go along. My treatment

will necessarily be abridged (especially in the case of Dempster-Shafer theory),
but hopefully will explain the attractions of these approaches and make their
affiliated literatures more accessible should you wish to explore further.
14.1 Comparative confidence
This weekend my colleague from the philosophy department is going to a

conference. The conference is somewhere on the East Coast, but Γm not sure
where. However, Γm more confident that she’s going to New York than I am
that she’s going to Boston.
How might we represent this comparative confidence? Suppose we have a
language £ of propositions. For the time being, we’ll assume that I entertain
only a finite number of doxastic possibilities, so the language £ will contain a
finite number of atomic propositions. For any two propositions P and Q in .£,
we write
P≥Q (14.1)
to indicate that I am at least as confident of P as Q. When I am equally confident
in P and Q, we write
P~Q (14.2)
Notice that when I am equally confident in P and Q, I am at least as confident
of P as Q, and at least as confident of Q as P. So we can define ~ in terms of >:
P ~ Q just in case P>Q and Q ≥ P.
What if I am strictly more confident in P than Q? Then we write
P>Q (14.3)
This relation holds just in case P ≥ Q but not Q ≥ P.1

When discussing comparative confidence, it’s easy to slip into ways of
talking that suggest an underlying numerical scale. Perhaps I say to you,
“my confidence that my colleague is going to New York is greater than my
confidence that she’s going to Boston.” That makes it sound like I have a
confidence in New York, a confidence in Boston, each confidence has a number
attached, and the New York number is greater than the Boston number. But
when we write
N>B (14.4)
486 COMPARISONS, RANGES, DEMPSTER-SHAFER
the comparative doxastic attitude expressed need not be understood in terms

of underlying numerical credences. It might be that I assign quantitative
credences to each proposition, and > simply expresses a greater-than relation
between those numerical values. But the comparative relation might be more
basic than the credal relation,2 or it might obtain in cases in which I fail to
assign precise credences to N and B at all. Patrick Suppes writes:
The intuitive idea of using a comparative qualitative relation is that individ

uals can realistically be expected to make such judgments in a direct way, as
they cannot when the comparison is required to be quantitative. On most
occasions I can say unequivocally whether I think it is more likely to rain or
not in the next few hours at Stanford, but I cannot in the same direct way
make a judgment of how much more likely it is not to rain than rain.
(2002, p. 226-7, emphasis in original)
This section examines norms for rational comparative confidence. We will

make no assumptions to start about whether an agents comparative attitudes
are tied (descriptively or normatively) to numerical credences. Instead, we will
treat confidence comparisons simply as a kind of doxastic attitude that an agent
may assign, capable of being studied and normatively evaluated in its own
right.
14.1.1 de Finetti’s comparative conditions
As we pointed out a moment ago, the > and ~ relations may both be defined
in terms of the > relation. So we will focus on rational constraints for > (while
occasionally employing > and ~ for convenience).
Up until this chapter, Γve talked loosely about comparisons (confidence
comparisons, preference comparisons) introducing “rankings” of proposi
tions, some of which are “complete”. While I’ll continue to use “ranking” in
this intuitive fashion, I will now also employ more careful terminology. Strictly
speaking, ≥ introduces a preorder on X just in case it satisfies
Comparative Equivalence: For any propositions P and Q in X, if P =41= Q,

then P ~ Q.
Comparative Transitivity: For any propositions P, Q, and R in X, if P > Q
and Q > R, then P>R.
14∙1 COMPARATIVE CONFIDENCE 487
Comparative Equivalence is intuitively appealing for similar reasons as our

probabilistic Equivalence rule; if two propositions are true in exactly the
same possible worlds, it seems irrational to be more confident in one than
the other.3
Comparative Transitivity is a bit more interesting. Transitivity meshes with
the intuitive idea that comparative confidence is about ranking propositions.
It orders that ranking in a single direction, ruling out the kinds of loops that
would occur if an agent could be more confident of P than Q, Q than R, and
R than P. Yet by itself, Comparative Transitivity still allows for gaps (propo
sitions that are part of the language but aren’t placed in the ranking), and
branches (cases in which two propositions are both ranked above a single
proposition, but aren’t ranked with respect to each other). To create what
mathematicians call a total preorder, we need to add
Comparative Completeness: For any propositions P and Q in Z3, either

P ≥ Q or P ≤ Q (or both).
Comparative Completeness says that for any two propositions in £, the agent
makes some confidence comparison between the two. Most commentators
have found this implausible as a rational requirement, especially for agents
working with realistically large propositional languages. However, assuming
Comparative Completeness dramatically simplifies formal theorizing about
the > relation. So we will take Completeness on board for now, then consider
formalisms for non-total confidence preorders in Section 14.1.3.4
Next we have three conditions on ≥ that we can think of as comparative
correlates to Kolmogorov’s probability axioms:
Comparative Non-Negativity: For any proposition P and contradiction F in

£,P> F.
Comparative Non-Triviality: For any tautology T and contradiction F in £,
T>F.
Comparative Additivity: For any propositions P, Q, and R in £, if P and Q
are each mutually exclusive with R, then P > Q just in case P V R ≥
QvR.
“Non-Negativity” may be a bit of a misnomer for the first condition, because

comparisons aren’t numerical values. But this condition has the same effect as
Kolmogorov’s Non-Negativity: forbidding an agent from being less confident
of some proposition than she is of a contradiction. A contradiction represents
something the agent has entirely ruled out of her doxastic possibility space, so
this requirement establishes impossibility as a confidence floor.
If we wanted, we could add a Comparative Regularity requirement that for
every non-contradictory P in £, P > F. (Compare Section 4.2.) But we wont
assume that here. We will, however, require an agent to be more confident in
a proposition that is required by her doxastic space than a proposition that is
ruled out by it. That’s Comparative Non-Triviality. Comparative Non-Triviality
is also important because it forbids trivial preorders in which every proposition
in the language is ranked the same.
Comparative Additivity is the most interesting of the three. It says that if
you’re at least as confident in P as Q, then adding the same mutually exclusive
disjunct to each shouldn’t change that ranking.5 To bring out the intuition,
consider this example of a preorder that violates Comparative Additivity:
Suppose I tell you Γm certain my colleague is traveling to exactly one East
Coast city for her conference, and that Γm more confident that the city is New
York than I am that it’s Boston. But then I also tell you Γm more confident she’s
traveling to either Boston or Washington than I am that she’s traveling to New
York or Washington. This combination of attitudes seems irrational.6
These conditions on comparative confidence have a variety of plausible
consequences, which improve their case for representing rational constraints.
Together, Comparative Equivalence, Transitivity, Completeness, Non
Negativity, Non-Triviality, and Additivity entail:
• For any proposition P in £, P > P. (Comparative Reflexivity)

• For any proposition P and tautology T in £, T ≥ P. (Comparative Normal
ity)
• For any propositions P and Q in ∕C, if P 1= Q then P < Q. (Comparative
Entailment)
• For any propositions P, Q, R, and S in £, if P =11= R, Q =11= S, and P > Q,
then R>S. (Comparative Substitution)
• For any contradiction F and mutually exclusive propositions P and Q in
AifQ>FthenPvQ>P.
• For any propositions P and Q in ∕C, if P > Q then ~P ≤ ~Q.
• For any propositions P and Q in if P ≥ ~^P and Q ≤ ~Q, then P > Q.
• For any propositions P, Q, R, and S in £, if P > Q, R > S, and P and R are
mutually exclusive, then P V R ≥ Q V S.
Perhaps the intuitive plausibility of these conditions suffices to convince you

that they are all rational requirements on confidence comparisons. But there’s
another argumentative route we could take. Surely there are at least some cases
in which it’s appropriate for an agent to assign precise numerical credences—if
you’re not convinced that that’s all cases, focus on simple examples involving
dice or urns in which clear objective chance information is available. So
let’s take an agent (call her Raina) in a situation like that, and represent
her credences with a distribution cr(∙) over £. We devoted a great deal of
attention in Chapters 8 through 10 to arguments that rationality requires
Raina’s credences to satisfy the probability axioms. What consequences does
this normative claim have for Raina’s confidence comparisons?
Presumably for cases in which an agent assigns numerical credences over
the entirety of /3, rationality requires her to satisfy
Comparative Matching: For any propositions P and Q in £, P > Q just in

case cr(P) ≥ cr(Q).
This principle allows us to convert rational constraints on Raina’s credences

into constraints on her comparative confidence attitudes. For instance, from
the Kolmogorov axioms we proved the Entailment rule that if P 1= Q, then
cr(Q) ≥ cr(P). From this, Comparative Matching allows us to quickly prove
the Comparative Entailment condition above. In general, all of the previously
mentioned comparative confidence conditions can be proven by combining
the probability calculus with Comparative Matching (plus the assumption that
cr assigns a value to every proposition in ∕C).7
To put the same point in a slightly different way, the comparative confi
dence conditions are necessary for probabilistic representability. An agent’s
confidence ranking is probabilistically representable just in case there exists
a probabilistic distribution over her language that aligns with that ranking
through Comparative Matching. For a preorder to be probabilistically repre
sentable, it must satisfy all the conditions on > we’ve described so far.
de Finetti (1949/1951) famously conjectured that these conditions are
also jointly sufficient for probabilistic representability More specifically, he
conjectured that for any agent whose confidence ranking satisfies Comparative
Equivalence, Transitivity, Completeness, Non-Negativity, Non-Triviality,
and Additivity, we can write down a probabilistic distribution over that
agent’s language that matches the agent’s confidence comparisons.8 This was
important to authors such as de Finetti and Savage because it suggested to them
that everything they needed for a full theory of rational confidence could be
accomplished in a purely comparative setting, without having to make the
psychologically implausible assumption that agents actually assign numerical
credence values. If those six conditions suffice for probabilistic representability,

they capture all the consequences of the probability calculus (and the various
arguments for the probability calculus) for comparative attitudes.
Think about Raina again: From the assumption that rationality requires
Rainas credences to be probabilities, and Comparative Matching, we can
deduce a number of rational constraints (Comparative Entailment, etc.) on
her confidence ranking. If de Finettis six conditions suffice for probabilistic
representability, then every rational constraint on Rainas comparative confi
dences that can be deduced from the probability calculus follows from those
six conditions. While it might sometimes be mathematically convenient to
consider Rainas underlying numerical credences, strictly speaking everything
the probability calculus could teach us about rational constraints on Rainas
confidence comparisons could be recovered equally well by just working with
the comparative conditions, and not thinking about numerical credence at all.
Unfortunately, de Finettis sufficiency conjecture was incorrect—his six
comparative conditions turn out not to be sufficient for probabilistic repre
sentability. This follows from a counterexample constructed by (Kraft, Pratt,
and Seidenberg 1959). In order to work, the counterexample requires at least
a five-member partition of the agents doxastic space. So let’s suppose our
agent has a partition {A, B, C, D, E}. Using the members of this partition,
we can express thirty-two nonequivalent propositions, all of which (except
the contradiction) are disjunctions of partition members. For the sake of
efficiency, and for this example only, we will abbreviate the disjunction AVBvC
as “ABC”, and so forth. Using that notation, suppose the agent comparatively
ranks the thirty-two propositions as follows:
F<A<B<C<AB<AC<D<AD<BC<E< ABC
<BD< CD <AE<ABD < BE<ACD <CE< BCD
(14.5)
< ABE < ACE <DE< ABCD < ADE < BCE < ABCE
< BDE < CDE < ABDE < ACDE < BCDE < T
Next, fill in the further comparisons required by Comparative Equivalence,

Transitivity, and Completeness. (For example, the agent assigns F < A and
A < B, so add in F ■< B.) These additions give us a total preorder. Since F is
the lowest element in the ranking, the preorder satisfies Comparative Non
Negativity, and it obviously satisfies Non-Triviality as well. The preorder also
satisfies Comparative Additivity, though I will leave checking that condition
as an exercise for the reader. (Just to give one example how the check would
go: The preorder assigns A -< C, DE is mutually exclusive with A and with C, so
to satisfy Comparative Additivity the preorder must assign ADE √ CDE, which
it does.)
Now let’s try to construct a probabilistic credence distribution cr that
matches these confidence comparisons. Applying Comparative Matching to
particular comparisons in Equation (14.5), we get:9
cr(AC) <x cr(D) (14.6)

cr(AD) < cr(BC) (14.7)
cr(CD) < cr(AE) (14.8)
Because cr satisfies the probability axioms, and because the individual capital
letters represent mutually exclusive propositions, we can apply Finite Additiv
ity to obtain
cr(A) + cr(C) < cr(D) (14.9)

cr(A) + cr(D) < cr(B) + cr(C) (14.10)
cr(C) + cr(D) < cr(A) + cr(E) (14.∏)
Adding up the left- and right-hand sides of these three inequalities, then
canceling terms that appear on both sides, we obtain
cr(A) + cr(C) + cr(D) < cr(B) + cr(E) (14.12)
Finally, applying Finite Additivity (Extended) yields
cr(A CD) < cr(BE) (14.13)
So if cr is probabilistic, Comparative Matching will require ACD < BE. But

checking Equation (14.5) above, we find the opposite. So while the ranking
described by Equation (14.5) satisfies all of de Finettis comparative conditions,
it is impossible to construct a probabilistic distribution matching that ranking.
Satisfying de Finettis six conditions is not sufficient for being representable by
a probabilistic distribution.
14.1.2 The Scott Axiom
Why do de Finettis conditions fail to suffice for probabilistic representability?

It turns out there’s a further necessary condition for a preorder to match a
probability distribution. I will first state the condition, then explain what the
various parts of it mean:
Scott Axiom: For any two equinumerous, finite sequences of propositions

drawn from ,£, {A1, A2, ... ,An} and {B1, B2, ..., Bn}∙.
• if in each of the agents doxastically possible worlds, the

A-sequence contains the same number of truths as the
B-sequence
• then if there exists some i such that Ai > Bi, there also exists
some; such that Ay -< Bj.
Let’s take this one step at a time. Start with a total preorder > over language
£. Now create two finite sequences, each containing the same number of
propositions drawn from Zλ We’ll call the members of the first sequence
{A1,A2, .. .,An}, and the members of the second sequence {B1,B2, ..., Bn}.
The numerical subscripts allow us to pair off members of the sequences
(creating what mathematicians call a “one-to-one mapping”); A1 is paired with
B1, A2 is paired with B2, etc.
The if part of Scott’s Axiom requires that for any possible world the agent
entertains, the A-sequence and the B-sequence have the same number of truths
in that world. For example, the following two sequences have the relevant
property:
{P,PDQ} {Q,Q⊃P}
In any possible world where P and Q are both true, each of these sequences
contains two true propositions. In every other possible world, each sequence
contains exactly one true proposition. (This part of Scott’s Axiom is sometimes
expressed by saying that the two sequences are “logically guaranteed to contain
the same number of truths”.)
Finally, the then part of the axiom: Suppose we’ve selected our two equinu
merous, finite sequences from £>■> with their order establishing a one-to-
one mapping between them. Suppose also that the sequences we’ve selected
contain the same number of truths as each other in each doxastically possible
world. Then no matter which sequences we picked, if the agent is strictly more
confident of some member of the A-sequence than its paired B-proposition,
there must be some compensating member of the B-sequence in which the
agent is strictly more confident than its corresponding A-proposition. In the
example above, P is paired with Q and P D Q is paired with Q D P. So if
the agent assigns P > Q, satisfying the Scott Axiom requires her to assign
P D Q < Q DP.
Now let’s try to get a grip on what the Scott Axiom says, and why one might
think that it represents a rational requirement. The easiest way to get two
sets of propositions that are guaranteed to have the same number of truths in
each possible world is to take two partitions. (In each possible world, exactly
one member of each partition will be true.) So suppose I am certain that my
philosophy colleague traveling to the East Coast is going to exactly one of the
following destinations: Boston, New York, or Washington D.C. At the same
time, the chair of my department is traveling to the West Coast, and will be
going to exactly one of these destinations: Los Angeles, Portland, or Seattle.
Now we start comparing my confidences concerning my colleague’s and my
chair’s destinations. I tell you Γm just as confident that my colleague is going to
Boston as I am that my chair is going to Los Angeles, and Γm just as confident
in New York as I am in Portland. But I am more confident that my colleague is
going to Washington than I am that my chair is going to Seattle.
This combination of comparative attitudes violates the Scott Axiom.
Suppose language & contains a bunch of propositions about who’s traveling
where. Draw from £ an A-sequence containing the three propositions about
my colleague’s possible East Coast destinations, ordered alpabetically as
I have above; then draw a B-sequence listing alphabetically my chair’s three
possible destinations. Since the members of each sequence form a partition,
each sequence contains exactly one truth in each doxastically possible world.
So these sequences satisfy the if part of the Axiom. But now consider the
pairing generated by these sequences: Boston-Los Angeles, New York-
Portland, Washington-Seattle. Γm strictly more confident in one of the
A-propositions (Washington) than its paired B-proposition (Seattle), but
there is no B-proposition in which Γm more confident than its corresponding
A-proposition. So these sequences fail to satisfy the then part of the Axiom,
and I’ve violated Scott’s Axiom as a whole.
If you think about it for a bit, my combination of comparisons not only
violates the Scott Axiom—it’s also intuitively irrational. Γm just as confident
in Boston as Los Angeles, and in New York as Portland. I know that neither
Boston nor New York will happen just in case my colleague goes to Washing
ton, and neither Los Angeles nor Portland will happen just in case my chair
goes to Seattle. But Γm strictly more confident in Washington than Seattle? It
seems like I should be equally confident in Seattle as Washington. Or if I insist
on being more confident in Washington than Seattle, I should compensate
by being more confident of one of the other West Coast destinations than its
paired East Coast destination.
Beyond these intuitive considerations, pragmatic arguments (akin to money
pumps, Dutch Books, and representation theorems) have been offered for
the Scott Axiom. Fishburn (1986, pp. 337-8) considers an agent who violates
the Scott Axiom by assigning Ai > Bi for some paired propositions in the
A- and B-sequences, but then assigns Aj ≥ By for every other pair. This agent
views each A-proposition at least as favorably as she views its corresponding
B-proposition, and views atleast one ofthe A-propositions more favorably than
its corresponding B-proposition. So presumably she would look favorably on
a game in which she wins $1 for each member of the A-sequence that’s true,
but loses $1 for each true member of the B-sequence. In fact, the agent would
rather be on this side of the game than the side that wins on B-truths but loses
on A-truths. No matter how weak that preference might be, the agent should
be willing to pay at least some small amount of money to be on her preferred
side of the game. But then the agent is guaranteed to come out a financial loser,
because once she’s made her initial payment, the wins that follow will equal her
losses no matter which possible world she’s in. (The A- and B-sequences in the
Scott Axiom are specifically selected to contain the same number of truths in
each possible world!)10
So if we accept the Scott Axiom, what does that get us? In Exercise 14.3,
you’ll prove that satisfying the Scott Axiom is a necessary condition for
a comparative confidence ranking to be probabilistically representable. As
I mentioned at the beginning of this section, this necessary condition goes
beyond what’s required by de Finetti’s conditions on comparative confidence.
In fact, the Kraft et al. example in Equation (14.5) fails to be probabilistically
representable because it violates the Scott Axiom. Consider the sequences
{ACD, D, BC,AE} and {BE, AC, AD, CD}. The reader may verify that on each
member of the partition {A, B, C, D, E}, these sequences contain the same
number of truths. Now pair up the members of the sequences in the order
in which I’ve listed them. (So ACD pairs with BE, D pairs with AC, etc.) In
the confidence ranking presented in Equation (14.5), the agent is strictly more
confident in each member of the first sequence than in the corresponding
member of the second sequence (ACD > BE, D > AC, etc.). The confidence
ranking in Equation (14.5) satifies de Finetti’s conditions, but does not satisfy
the Scott Axiom. Thus de Finetti’s conditions do not entail the Scott Axiom.
On the other hand, the combination of Comparative Completeness, Com
parative Non-Negativity, Comparative Non-Triviality, and the Scott Axiom
entails all of de Finetti’s conditions. So, among other things, that combination
entails Comparative Equivalence, Transitivity, Additivity, and all of the

comparative confidence conditions from our list on page 488.11 Moreover,
in the same (1959) paper in which Kraft et al. provided their counterexample,
they also proved a result that gives necessary and sufficient conditions for a
ranking to be probabilistically representable. A few years later, Dana Scott
(1964) situated their result in a more general mathematical framework,
reformulating the crucial condition in a way that was easier to understand.12
It’s that reformulated condition we call the Scott Axiom; combining it with
Comparative Completeness, Non-Negativity, and Non-Triviality yields a set
of necessary and sufficient conditions for probabilistic representability. The
Scott Axiom thus provides a crucial link between probabilistic theories of
rationality and conditions for rational comparative confidence. If we want
to list all the constraints imposed on an agent like Raina by the probability
calculus and Comparative Matching, we have to include the Scott Axiom, not
just the weaker Comparative Transitivity and Additivity.
Any confidence ranking that satisfies the Scott Axiom along with Compar
ative Completeness, Non-Negativity, and Non-Triviality will be representable
by a probabilistic numerical distribution. But in most cases we won’t get a
unique probabilistic representation. For example, suppose I become certain
my colleague is headed to exactly one of Boston and New York; I am more
confident in New York than Boston; and I satisfy all of the conditions we
have listed so far. Even then, there are many possible probabilistic credence
distributions that match this ranking. I might assign
cr(N) = 2/3 cr(B) = 1/3 (14.14)
or I might assign
cr(N) = 0.51 cr(B) = 0.49 (14.15)
and so forth.
It’s possible to supplement the comparative confidence constraints we’ve
seen so far with additional constraints that ensure a unique probabilistic repre
sentation. For example, Patrick Suppes suggests the following condition, which
(combined with Comparative Equivalence, Transitivity, Completeness, and
Additivity) is sufficient but not necessary for probabilistic representability:
Suppes Continuity: For any propositions P and Q in £, if P > Q then there

exists an R in £ such that P ~ Q V R.
Any confidence ranking that satisfies Suppes Continuity (and the conditions
in the previous parenthetical) has exactly one probabilistic numerical rep
resentation. While this might seem an attractive feature, it comes about
because Suppes Continuity forces an agent to assign equal confidence to
each doxastically possible world she entertains (thereby leaving only one
numerical representation available).13 So Suppes Continuity should be wor
rying for anyone who gets nervous around the Principle of Indifference
(Section 5.3).
One can also achieve unique probabilistic representability by moving to
a language with infinitely many atomic propositions, and adopting various
continuity and Archimedean conditions. For more on such approaches, see
(DeGroot 1970) and (Krantz et al. 1971, §5.2.3).14
In closing, it’s worth a quick reminder that just because an agent’s confidence
comparisons are representable by a numerical, probabilistic distribution—
even a unique such distribution—that may not suffice to establish that the
agent has probabilistic credences. As we’ve discussed in Section 8.3.1, Section
10.4, and elsewhere, different levels of realism about psychological states
generate different standards for attitude attribution; some philosophers hes
itate to attribute quantitative doxastic attitudes to actual people at all. Also,
whenever a probabilistic numerical representation of a confidence ranking is
possible, multiple non-probabilistic distributions matching that ranking will
be available as well. (We’ll look at some details of this in the next section’s
discussion of comparative decision theory.) Nevertheless, having comparative
conditions that are necessary and sufficient for probabilistic representability
is useful in the following sense: Anything we can prove about an agent’s
confidence ranking by invoking those conditions can also be proven using the
probability axioms and Comparative Matching—and vice versa.
14.1.3 Extensions and challenges
In this section we’ll consider a number of distinct issues that either challenge
the constraints on comparative confidence we’ve seen so far, or call on us to
extend them.
Incommensurability. In ordinary English, “indifference” may connote non

chalance toward an event or possibility. But the indifference relation ~ we’ve
been considering is a very specific, committed attitude. A~B means the agent
is just as confident in A as she is in B.
What if the agent makes no comparison between propositions A and B,

either because it’s never occurred to her to do so, or because she views them
as incomparable in some way? I might be more confident that it will rain
tomorrow than shine, and I might be more confident that there is intelligent
extraterrestrial life in the universe than not, but I might balk at saying whether
Γm more confident in rain or alien intelligence.
To represent this kind of incommensurability, and the potential for lack of
comparison between propositions in general, we need to drop Comparative
Completeness as a constraint on comparative attitudes. In other words, we
need to allow preorders that fail to be total. When an agent doesn’t assign any
kind of comparative attitude to a pair of propositions A and B, her confidence
ranking will not include the relation A> B, but it also won’t include A < B.
(Again, this is distinct from the case of indifference, in which we have both
A>B and A < B.)
We saw in the previous section that a total preorder satisfying even
very strong rational conditions may still be matched by many different
numerical credence distributions. If we drop the assumption of Comparative
Completeness—allowing our preorder to be “partial” rather than “total”—we
allow for an even wider variety of numerical correlates. This makes preorders
very flexible in representing incommensurability. We saw in Section 12.2
that it’s possible to construct partial credence distributions—distributions
that assign numerical values to some but not all of the propositions in a
language. Such partial distributions can do some work in representing agents
who don’t make particular comparisons. Again, suppose I fail to compare
the pair of propositions A (that there is intelligent alien life) and R (that
it will rain tomorrow). We can represent this lack of comparison with a
partial distribution that either doesn’t assign a credence value to A or doesn’t
assign a value to R (or both). But suppose that while I fail to compare A to R,
I nevertheless am more confident in A than ~A and more confident in R than
~R. The only way to capture these comparisons in a credence distribution
is to assign numbers to all four propositions. Yet the moment I do that, a
comparison between A and R is implied.
A partial preorder, on the other hand, can assign A > ~A and R > ~R without
assigning any comparison to the pair of A and R. Thus preorders are able to
represent a wider variety of doxastic states involving incommensurability than
can be represented by partial credence distributions.15
So suppose we’ve decided to work with partial preorders. How do we
evaluate such structures for rationality? The standard approach holds that a
preorder is rational just in case it is extendable to a total preorder satisfying
some preferred set of comparative constraints. In other words, given a partial

preorder, if there is some way to add > relations to it so as to yield a
total preorder that satisfies Comparative Completeness and other constraints
(Comparative Non-Negativity, Additivity, etc.), then the partial preorder is
rational despite being incomplete.16
To illustrate, suppose I tell you Γm more confident in rain tomorrow than
shine, and Γm more confident in alien intelligence than not. Then I tell you
Γm more confident in shine tomorrow than I am in alien intelligence. In other
words, I make the following three comparisons:
R>~R A>~A ~R>A (14.16)
Intuitively, there’s something wrong with this set of comparisons. But to verify
that the ranking is irrational, let’s see what happens when we try to extend it
to a rational total preorder. Any preorder containing the three comparisons
above would be defined over a language containing R, ~R, A, and ~A (among
other propositions). To be total, the preorder would have to satisfy Compara
tive Completeness, and so would have to assign R > ~A or R ≤ ~A (or both). If
we think de Finettis conditions (Comparative Non-Negativity, Non-Triviality,
and Additivity) are at least minimal requirements for rationality, then the
preorder would also have to satisfy the bulleted conditions in the list on page
488. The sixth of those conditions, combined with R ≥ ~A, gives us ~R < ~~A,
which by Comparative Substitution yields ~R<A. That contradicts the third
comparison above. On the other hand, R ≤ ~A combines with the first com
parison above and Comparative Transitivity to yield ~A > ~R (keeping in
mind that > entails ≥). With the third comparison and another Transitivity
step, we get ~A > A, which contradicts the second comparison.
If we accept at least de Finettis rational requirements, there’s no comparison
between R and ~A rationally consistent with the three comparisons above.
That set of comparisons cannot be extended to a rational total preorder. So
assigning those three comparisons is irrational.
Perhaps some readers will resist this final inference. You might grant me
that particular conditions are rational requirements for the cases in which
an agent truly makes comparisons among every proposition in her language
(cases likely to be few and far between), but resist the claim that a confidence
ranking is rational only if it can be extended to a rational total preorder. Well,
imagine that in the weather and aliens case above, I’ve assigned the three given
comparisons, but have never really thought about how to compare R and ~A.
Or perhaps I have no idea of any basis on which to make that comparison.
Then you come to me and ask about my relative opinions concerning those
propositions. If I am clever—and have read my de Finetti—I may soon realize
that there is no way to fill out my confidence ranking without violating his
conditions. So what do I do then? Simply refuse to compare R and ~A, so as
to avoid a rational inconsistency? (Keep in mind that we’ve granted arguendo
that de Finetti’s conditions do indeed represent rational requirements on total
preorders.)
We formalize incomplete rankings because we recognize legitimate reasons
why an agent might fail to compare particular propositions. But the cogency
of an attitude set should not crucially depend on its incompleteness.17 Among
other things, such a set stands in a precarious position with respect to possible
future courses of evidence. We might find out that in a short time we will
receive evidence that strongly supports a particular comparison between R and
~A. Even before receiving that evidence, I can tell that whatever comparison it
supports will be rationally incompatible with my present attitudes. And notice
that this isn’t a case in which I currently have an attitude that I expect to alter
as I become more informed. Instead, it’s a case in which my other attitudes
leave me no rationally viable option to fill in a missing attitude when I gain
evidence that merits such completion.
Conditional comparisons. As we saw in Equations (14.14) and (14.15), it’s

often possible to find many different numerical credence distributions match
ing the same confidence ranking. Among other things, this means that confi
dence rankings usually underdetermine confidence ratios. If Equation (14.14)
depicts the credence distribution underlying my confidence ranking, then
I am twice as confident that my colleague is headed to New York as Boston. But
the credence distribution in Equation (14.15), while yielding the same ranking
of propositions, gives those propositions a confidence ratio of almost 1:1.
Why do confidence ratios matter, and why might we want to recover such
information from confidence comparisons? For one thing, agents sometimes
say things like, “I’m twice as confident in New York as Boston,” and we might
want to meaningully represent such declarations in our doxastic formalism.18
But perhaps more importantly, confidence ratios are centrally implicated in
the standard Bayesian approach to conditional confidence.
Just as agents can make unconditional confidence comparisons (more confi
dent in New York than Boston), it seems natural for them to make conditional
confidence comparisons. I might tell you that, while Γm still not certain
whether my colleague is headed to Boston or New York, on the supposition
that she’s going to Boston Γm more confident that she’ll try some seafood
than I am that she’ll avoid it entirely. We could represent this confidence

comparison as
S ∣ B > -S ∣ B
This comparison indicates that Γm more confident in seafood given Boston

than I am in no seafood given Boston.
How might such conditional comparisons be rationally linked to uncon
ditional comparisons? One path runs through probabilistic representations
and the Ratio Formula. Suppose we take an agents unconditional confi
dence comparisons over language £, and find a probabilistic distribution
over £ matching those comparisons. Given that unconditional probabilistic
distribution, we can calculate conditional credences using the Ratio Formula.
Presumably if the agent is rational, those conditional credences should match
her conditional confidence comparisons according to
Conditional Comparative Matching: For any propositions P, Q, R, and S in

£, PIR ≥ Q ∣ S just in case cr(P ∣ R) ≥ cr(Q ∣ S).
In Chapter 3 we introduced the Ratio Formula as a principle relating a rational

agents unconditional credences to her conditional. Now we have a similar
strategy for relating an agent’s unconditional confidence comparisons to her
conditional. But there’s an important difference between the two cases. Given
the Ratio Formula, a rational agent’s conditional credences supervene on her
unconditional credences: fully specifying the agent’s unconditional credence
distribution over £ also suffices to specify her conditional credence distribu
tion over all ordered pairs of propositions in £. (Or at least, those ordered
pairs in which the condition receives nonzero unconditional credence.) But in
the comparative case, an agent’s unconditional confidence ranking will often
underdetermine her conditional confidence rankings.
We can see how this underdetermination plays out when we try to use
probabilistic representations and the Ratio Formula to link conditional and
unconditional comparisons in the manner described above. I imagined us
taking the agent’s unconditional confidence ranking and finding a probabilistic
distribution matching those comparisons. But as we saw in Section 14.1.2,
even given plausible constraints on rational comparative confidence, a total
unconditional preorder on a propositional language may not generate a unique
matching probabilistic distribution. (Not to mention the non-probabilistic
matching distributions that will also be available.) So even if an agent makes
unconditional confidence comparisons between every pair of propositions in
her language, multiple probabilistic representations of her confidence ranking

will often be available. These multiple representations will yield differing
conditional credence distributions, which may in turn match up with different
conditional confidence rankings. (For an example of this phenomenon, see
Exercise 14.4.) So for a typical unconditional confidence ranking, there will
be many different conditional rankings that can be matched up to it via
probabilistic representation and the Ratio Formula.
This point isn’t an artifact of our particular Ratio-Formula strategy for
linking unconditional comparisons with conditional. In general, uncondi
tional confidence rankings (even total preorders) underdetermine conditional
confidence comparisons. Many authors have responded to this fact by starting
their account of comparative confidence with conditional comparisons rather
than unconditional.19 Domotor (1969), for instance, carried out the analog of
the Kraft/Pratt/Seidenberg program for conditional comparisons: he offered
rational constraints on conditional confidence rankings necessary and suffi
cient to make them probabilistically representable.
Since then further work has been done on axiomatizing conditional
confidence rankings (e.g., Krantz et al. 1971, §§5.6ff., Fishburn 1986, §7),
but many questions remain unanswered and much remains unknown. Rather
than delve into the details here, I want to highlight a couple of applications
for which conditional comparisons might be crucial. First, on a traditional
Bayesian approach, the concepts of evidential independence, relevance, and
confirmation are all defined using conditional credences. So if someone
working in a comparative framework wanted to employ these concepts,
conditional comparisons would seem to be needed.20 Second, conditional
doxastic attitudes are central to the traditional Bayesian approach to updating:
According to Conditionalization, an agents unconditional attitude toward
a proposition after an update should equal her earlier attitude toward that
proposition conditional on whatever she learned in-between. If this idea is
on the right track, then a rule for rationally updating confidence comparisons
might have to work with conditional confidences as well.
Interpersonal comparisons. Interpersonal comparisons of utility have been a

notorious problem for decision theorists since the birth of the field. My wife
seems to enjoy chocolate more than I do—is there some meaningful sense
in which she assigns more utils to a bite of chocolate than I? Following the
representation theorem approach from Chapter 8, one might closely observe
my preferences and derive a utility scale from them, then do the same for
my wife. The trouble is that each of those scales will be unique only up to
positive affine transformation. My preference ranking over acts determines a

utility ranking over propositions, and requires my utility gap sizes to stand
in particular ratios. But it doesn’t pin me to any particular number of utils for
any particular proposition, such that my utility assignment could be compared
meaningfully to my wife’s assignment to the same proposition. I might, for
instance, be indifferent between an act that guarantees me a bite of chocolate
and an otherwise-similar act yielding no chocolate, while my wife prefers the
former act to the latter. Yet that information doesn’t discriminate between
these two ways that she and I might assign utilities to chocolate outcomes:
me wife me wife
bite of choc 100 2 bite of choc 0 200
no chocolate 100 1 no chocolate 0 100
On the other hand, when agents assign rational numerical credences, those
might be comparable across persons. As Stefansson (2017) points out, the
crucial foundation for interpersonal credence comparison is that all rational
agents share the same “top” and “bottom” propositions. An agent who sat
isfies the Kolmogorov axioms will assign identical, maximal credences to all
tautologies, and identical, minimal credences to all contradictions. While the
choice of numerical measurement scale is somewhat arbitrary past that point,
it seems reasonable to represent every rational agent with the same scale—
whether it’s 0 for contradictions and 1 for tautologies, 0 for contradictions
and 100 for tautologies, or whatever else. My certainty should be considered
just as certain as your certainty, and vice versa.21 Assuming Finite Additivity,
representation theorem techniques will then allow us to fill in each agent’s non
extreme credence values from her preference rankings, in a way that yields
substantive interpersonal information when one agent assigns (say) credence
0.9 to a particular proposition while the other assigns 0.6.
Similar structural features offer hope for limited interpersonal comparisons
of confidence rankings, depending on which axiom system we select. Most
systems establish tautologies and contradictions as “top” and “bottom” propo
sitions in rational confidence rankings. With a strong enough additivity axiom,
we might be able to say of any two agents who are both as confident of rain
tomorrow as not that they are equally as confident in rain as each other.
Beyond that, the specifics of the axioms will dictate how many meaningful
confidence comparisons can be made between arbitrary rational agents. Notice
that the availability of such interpersonal confidence comparisons may be
important to some applications, such as aggregating comparative attitudes
across individuals to generate a group ranking of propositions.
Risk aversion. Daniel Ellsberg proposed a famous counterexample to the con

ditions we’ve surveyed, now known as the Ellsberg Paradox.22 He imagines
“an urn known to contain 30 red balls and 60 black and yellow balls, the
latter in unknown proportion” (Ellsberg 1961, p. 653). A single ball is to be
drawn at random from the urn. First, you are asked whether you would prefer
a bet that yields a large prize on red or a bet that yields the same prize on
black. Ellsberg reports that in systematic studies (and nonsystematic polls of
his famous economist friends), many subjects report that they would prefer the
bet on red. This seems to be driven by a kind of risk aversion: You’re certain
that at least thirty of the balls are red, while for all you know there may be no
black balls in the urn. Now second, you are asked whether you would prefer
a bet that pays out on red or yellow, or a bet that pays out on black or yellow.
Ellsberg finds that many subjects apply the same risk-averse reasoning to prefer
black-or-yellow (guaranteed sixty balls in the urn) over red-or-yellow (only
guaranteed thirty balls).
Ellsberg suggests that this betting pattern indicates the following confidence
comparisons:
R>B (14.17)
RvY<BvY (14.18)
Yet this combination of comparative attitudes violates Comparative Additivity.

If assigning these comparisons is rationally permissible, then neither
Comparative Additivity nor the Scott Axiom (which entails it) are rational
requirements. Fishburn (1986, §3) lists additional intuitive counterexamples
to the confidence conditions we’ve seen in this chapter. If any of these
counterexamples holds up, we may need to explore alternative sets of
comparative confidence conditions.23
Decision theory. Finally, the question of how agents might make practical
decisions on the basis of confidence comparisons—rather than full-blown
numerical credences—remains wide open. As we’ve noted since Chapter 1,
an agent’s decisions may depend not only on her confidence ranking of propo
sitions but on how much more confident she is in one than another. Suppose
I get an opportunity to travel to either New York or Boston, and I consider it
desirable to go to the same place my colleague went. (Perhaps she can give me
good restaurant recommendations.) But suppose a ticket to New York is more
expensive than a ticket to Boston. If I have the credence distribution about
my colleague’s possible destinations described in Equation (14.14), it might be
worth the extra expense. But if my credences are those ofEquation (14.15), my
gap in confidence between New York and Boston is so small it probably isn’t
worth paying more. The two credence distributions match the same confidence
ranking, but rationalize different decisions. Rational decisions may depend on
the relative sizes of confidence gaps.
Suppes Continuity can give us some leverage on this problem. Any total
preorder that satisfies Suppes Continuity and Comparative Transitivity, Com
pleteness, and Additivity is numerically representable by a unique probabilistic
distribution, every positive affine transformation of that distribution, and
nothing else. So we can choose whether to represent such a confidence ranking
using a probabilistic distribution assigning values from 0 to 1, a percentage
style distribution from 0 to 100, a Zynda-style distribution from 1 to 10 (Zynda
2000), or whatever we want.24 But, because they are positive affine transfor
mations of each other, all of these distributions will agree on the relative sizes
of confidence gaps. Thus we may conclude that, at least for decision-making
purposes, there is no significant difference between them. Perhaps in the end
these representations differ only in the numerical conventions they stipulate
for measuring a single, underlying reality—much the way we view the Kelvin,
Celsius, and Fahrenheit scales for measuring temperature. Given an arbitrary
choice among such measurement scales, we might pick the probabilistic one
for mathematical convenience. But there’s no real threat that we’d be misrepre
senting the agent’s attitudes by working with any of the matching distributions.
So once we generate our preferred numerical representation of the agent’s
confidence ranking, we can plug it into a standard decision theory to determine
how the agent should behave on the basis of her confidence comparisons.25
Yet many Bayesians would reject Suppes Continuity for its ties to Indiffer
ence. Unfortunately, if we have a preorder (over finitely many possibilities)
that satisfies de Finettis conditions and the Scott Axiom but not Suppes
Continuity, a vast variety of numerical distributions will align with that
preorder via Comparative Matching—even if the preorder is total. Typically,
those distributions will not all be affine transformations of each other, and
will not all agree on the relative sizes of confidence gaps. Return, for example,
to the distributions in Equations (14.14) and (14.15). They both match the
same preorder that satisfies de Finettis conditions and the Scott Axiom. Yet
in Equation (14.14), my confidence in N is as far from my confidence in B as
the latter is from a contradiction; while in Equation (14.15) my confidences in
the two propositions are much closer together.26 Suppose all you know about
my doxastic attitudes is that I assign the confidence ranking matching those
two distributions. If you choose to represent me using one of the distributions
14∙2 RANGED CREDENCES 505
rather than the other, you are making substantive assumptions about my
confidences not in evidence from the preorder provided. If you then, say,
try to predict my actions (which plane ticket will I purchase?) on the basis
of the representation you’ve chosen, you might make an important error.
(A similar point can be made about inferring confirmation relations from
different numerical representations of the same confidence ranking; both gap
sizes and confidence ratios can make a difference to confirmation judgments.)
So if an agents confidence comparisons fail to satisfy a strong requirement
like Suppes Continuity, can anything substantive be said about what decisions
she should make on the basis of those comparisons? Fine (1973, §IIG) made
some progress on a comparatives-based decision theory by relying heavily
on dominance reasoning. This allowed him to rule out a number of possible
decision rules involving comparative confidence, but not to choose an optimal
rule among those that remained. In the end he conceded:
The approach to decision making we tentatively propose is intended more

as an illustration of our assertion [that interesting decision problems can
be resolved using comparative probability] than as a thoroughly considered
“best” formulation of decision-making in [a comparative probability frame
work]. Much more research is needed before we can claim a satisfactory
complete analysis of decision-making in [comparative probability], (p. 37)
14.2 Ranged credences
In the previous section we considered an example in which I am certain

that my philosophy colleague is traveling to either Boston or New York,
and I am more confident in New York than Boston. If that’s all you know
about my doxastic state, then there are many possible probabilistic numerical
distributions that would match what you know. If you assume that at all times,
any agent’s doxastic state is best represented by a particular numerical credence
distribution, then the credence distribution representing my state must be one
of the distributions compatible with those comparative constraints. You just
don’t know which distribution it is.
But there may be cases in which an agent’s doxastic state is not best repre
sented by a point-valued, numerical credence distribution. It maybe that I view
certain propositions as incommensurable, in a manner not representable by a
numerical distribution. (See Section 14.1.3.) Or perhaps my state is simply not
committal enough to merit specific numerical representation—I maybe more
confident of New York than Boston, but there may simply be no fact of the
matter how much more confident I am.
If a numerical credence distribution is not the best formal tool for represent
ing an agent’s attitudes in such cases, what other options are available? In the
previous section, we took an agents confidence comparisons and used them to
establish a ranking over a language of propositions. We then worked directly
with this ranking, and various rational constraints to which the ranking might
be subject.
But other formal options are available. For instance, instead of associating
a single real number with each proposition in a language, we might assign a
range of reals to each proposition. Take the proposition A that there is intelli
gent alien life in the universe. We might represent an agent’s attitude toward
this proposition with the numerical range [0.6,0.75]. (0.75 is sometimes called
the upper probability of A in this range, and 0.6 the lower probability.) We
could then represent the agent’s attitude towards ~A with the range [0.25,0.4].
Because the lower probability of A’s range is higher than the upper probability
of the range for ~A, we would be representing that agent as more confident in
A than ~A. But if the two ranges had some amount of overlap—say, [0.3,0.6]
and [0.4,0.7]—that would allow us to represent an agent who has not settled
on a definite confidence comparison between those propositions.
Notice that this formalism allows us to represent incommensurability with
out any gaps in our representation. We don’t go silent on some of the propo
sitions, failing to assign anything numerical to them. We assign each of the
propositions a numerical range; it’s just that some pairs of ranges don’t give rise
to confidence comparisons. The formalism also allows us to represent point
valued credences, of the type discussed in this book prior to this chapter. All
we have to do is assign some proposition a range containing only one value,
like [2/3,2/3]. When we assign a wider range, containing multiple values,
this represents a different type of doxastic attitude, which I’ll call a ranged
credence.
Exactly what kind of attitude is a ranged credence? What kinds of views
about a proposition are better represented by a range of reals than a single
point value? We’ll explore these questions in the sections to come, and talk
about how this type of attitude connects to decisions, evidence, other attitudes,
etc. First, though, I’ll devote the rest of this section to the formal machinery
behind ranged credences.
Many early authors who worked on ranged credences (such as Smith (1961),
Kyburg (1961), and Good (1962)) represented them by simply assigning a
range of reals to each proposition in a language. But in his (1974), Isaac Levi
A R Prχ Pr
T T 1/2 2/5
T F 1/4 1/5
F T 1/6 4/15
F F 1/12 2/15
Figure 14.1 A simple representor
argued for a richer formal representation, of which these numerical ranges

were simply one aspect. The formalism Levi favored subsequently became
standard in the field. I’ll start by explaining this formalism, then show why
it’s an improvement over working exclusively with numerical ranges.
Start again with an agents confidence comparisons. Consider all of the
point-valued, probabilistic distributions that match those comparisons (in the
sense of the Comparative Matching principle I articulated earlier). Now collect
all of those distributions into a set. This set of probability distributions—what
van Fraassen (1980) famously called a representor—might serve as our formal
representation of the agents doxastic state.27
How can a set of probability distributions represent an agents doxastic state?
The trick is to say that the agents overall state displays certain properties only
if those properties are shared by every distribution in the set. For example, take
the case from Section 14.1.3 in which I am more confident in the proposition
A (that there is intelligent alien life) than ~A, and more confident in R (that
it will rain tomorrow) than ~K. Now suppose my representor—the set of
probability distributions that best represents my overall doxastic state—turns
out to contain just the two distributions described in the probability table
of Figure 14.1.28 There, each of the right-hand columns contains enough
information to specify a full probabilistic distribution over a language 23 whose
atomic propositions are A and R. Those two distributions, Prx and Prjκ, are
the members of the representor. With a bit of math, you can determine that
in each of those distributions, Pr(A) > Pr(~A). So this representor represents
me as being more confident of A than ~A. Similarly, both distributions assign
Pr(-R) > Pr(~P), so the representor has me more confident in R than ~R.
But notice that while the first distribution has 3/4 = Prx(A) > Prx(P) = 2/3,
the second assigns 3∕5 = Prj,(A)<Prjv(P) = 2∕3. Since the two distributions
in the representor do not agree on the relative rankings of A and R, this
representor represents me as being neither more confident of A than R, nor
more confident of R than A, nor equally confident in the two. According to
this representor, A and R are incommensurable for me. So a set of probability
distributions can represent a doxastic state that is committal on some com

parisons (e.g., A vs. ~A, R vs. ~R) while remaining noncommittal on others
(A vs. R).
A representor is a formal representation of an agents entire doxastic state;
it encapsulates how she views all the propositions in the language. If we’re
interested in how she views just one proposition, we can extract a numerical
range from the representor. Notice that the lowest value assigned to A by any
of the distributions in my representor is 0.6, while the highest value is 0.75.
So we might summarize my attitude toward A on this representor with the
range [0.6,0.75]. Similarly, we can summarize my attitude toward ~A with
[0.25,0.4]. This is another way of seeing that this representor has me more
confident in A than ~A. On the other hand, we can calculate out that both the
distributions in Figure 14.1 assign Pr(jR) = 2/3. So the range for R associated
with this representor is [2/3,2/3], representing a point-valued credence. In
this way, we can read numerical ranges for specific propositions off the rich
representation in a full representor.
Warning
The idea of representing a state with a set of assignments that agree on

particular properties but not on others resembles certain supervaluationist
approaches to vagueness. Yet a ranged credence need not be a vague
or ambiguous attitude towards a proposition.29 Moreover, while we find
it formally convenient to represent a ranged credence with a collection
of point-valued numerical probability distributions, this does not mean
that the ranged credence attitude itself is somehow a collection of point
valued credence attitudes. A ranged credence is a distinct type of doxastic
attitude from a point-valued credence, regardless of whether we represent
it formally with a numerical range, a set of point-valued distributions, or
something else.
If we can convey an agent’s attitudes toward individual propositions by asso

ciating each proposition with a numerical range, why go the extra step of
building a full representor? Levi argued that a representor has much more
expressive capacity than just a set of numerical ranges assigned to propositions.
For example, suppose an agent assigns the range [0.2,0.5] to proposition
J and [0.6,0.8] to proposition L. This agent is clearly more confident in L
than J. But now suppose the agent also assigns [0.4,0.7] to K. Is the agent
more confident in K than J? It turns out we can build different representors
assigning the propositions those very same ranges which answer that question
differently. We can construct one representor associated with those ranges
that contains only probability distributions with Pr(J) < Pr(K). According to
that representor, the agent is more confident in K than ∕. But there’s another
representor associated with those ranges in which some distributions have
Pr(f) < Pr(K), while at least one distribution has Pr(J) > Pr(K). (See Exercise
14.5.) On that representor, J and K are incommensurable for the agent. So
we have two representors associated with the same numerical ranges, which
disagree on the answer to an important comparative question. Representors
may contain more information than their affiliated numerical ranges.
Similarly, if I took the representor from Figure 14.1 and reported to you
only the upper and lower probabilities it generates for various propositions,
you would miss an important feature of that representor. If we use the Ratio
Formula to calculate conditional probabilities for each of the two distributions
in that representor, we’ll find that each assigns Pr(A ∣ R) = Pr(A). While they
disagree on the precise values assigned to A, the distributions are unanimous
that A is probabilistically independent of R. So according to this representor,
I take the prospects for rain tomorrow to be uncorrelated with the prospects
for intelligent alien life. A representor may encode judgments of probabilistic
independence, judgments of probabilistic correlation, and therefore also con-
firmational judgments.30 Such judgments are not conveyed by mere numerical
ranges, and as we saw in Section 14.1.3, cannot typically be recovered from
unconditional confidence comparisons.
The information encoded in a representor also enables a very natural updat
ing scheme. Suppose I start with the representor of Figure 14.1, then learn the
proposition A D R. We can update the representor by conditionalizing each of
its individual distributions on the evidence gained. After the update, my new
representor is the one described in Figure 14.2. In this representor, my range
for A is [1/2,2/3], and my range for R is now the non-singleton [5/6,8∕9].
Once more, numerical ranges or unconditional comparisons alone wouldn’t
provide enough information to uniquely specify such an update.
One does, however, need to be careful when working with representors.
Knowing which unanimous features of the distributions in the set to read as
genuine features of the agent is a bit of an art form.31 For example, every
distribution in the set assigns a point value to each proposition; yet we use rep
resentors to represent attitudes that aren’t best understood as point-valued.32
Perhaps more interestingly, we apply probabilism to ranged credences by
A R Pry
T T 2/3 1/2
T F 0 0
F T 2/9 1/3
F F 1/9 1/6
Figure 14.2 Representor after an update
requiring each distribution in a representor to satisfy the Kolmogorov axioms

and Ratio Formula. What consequences does this have for the numerical
ranges we read off the representor for individual propositions?
The answer is simplest for Normality: Since each distribution in the set will
assign 1 to tautologies, a rational agent will assign [1,1] to every tautology.
Non-Negativity entails that no rational range assigned to a proposition will
ever contain a negative value. The implications of Finite Additivity are more
subtle. For example, in the post-update representor of Figure 14.2, the mutu
ally exclusive propositions A and ~A have ranges of [1/2,2/3] and [1/3,1/2]
respectively. Adding the upper probabilities assigned to A and ~A yields
7/6, while adding their lower probabilities yields 5/6. Yet the tautological
disjunction A V ~A receives a range of [1,1]. In general, whenever you have
two mutually exclusive propositions, the sum of their upper probabilities will
be at least as great as the upper probability of their disjunction. The sum of
their lower probabilities will never be greater than the lower probability of
the disjunction. Using the terminology we introduced in Chapter 2, lower
probabilities are sometimes superadditive, while upper probabilities may be
subadditive.33
14.2.1 Ranged credences, representation, and evidence
If, in Chapter 1, you found it unrealistic to characterize an agent as assigning a

particular real number to each proposition she entertains, this ranged credence
business might make you really nervous—now we need the agent to assign two
numbers to each claim? Or sign on to a whole set of numerical distributions?
You might also wonder about the phenomenology of ranged credences. We
think we have some grasp of what it is to believe a proposition, and maybe even
to be highly confident of one. But what is it like to assign a ranged credence?
Levi (1980, §9.1) thought an agent adopted a ranged credence towards
a proposition when she saw multiple point-valued credences towards that
proposition as permissible given her evidence, and wanted to suspend judg

ment among them. Other authors, though, think of ranged credences as more
fundamental than point-valued credences; they characterize the latter in terms
of the former, rather than vice versa. Moreover, there may be situations (we’ll
consider some candidates below) in which a ranged credence is rationally
required while no point-valued credence is rationally permitted.
When I introduced credences in Chapter 1,1 eschewed the idea that they
required agents to have numbers in their heads. And I tried not to rely on
any phenomenological characterization of credence. Instead, I asked whether
agents’ doxastic attitudes have a level of structure that is usefully represented
by a numerical distribution over a propositional language. There seemed to
be features of an agent’s doxastic state at a time—or changes in her doxastic
state over time—that couldn’t be adequately captured by a purely classificatory
or comparative representation. Now we’ve seen that point-valued credence
distributions may be similarly inadequate. It seems very plausible that an agent
could simultaneously satisfy all of the following conditions for a particular pair
of propositions A and R:
(1) be more confident of A than ~A;

(2) be more confident of R than ~R;
(3) take A and R to be independent; while at the same time
(4) view A and R as incommensurable (that is, make no unconditional
confidence comparison between the two)
There is no single probability distribution (complete or partial) that satisfies all

four of these conditions. To capture the first two conditions, the distribution
would have to assign precise numerical values to A, ~A, R, and ~R. But this
would yield a comparison of A to R, which would ruin the fourth condition.
On the other hand, we’ve seen a representor (in Figure 14.1) that depicts a
doxastic state satisfying all of these conditions. So representors allow us to
represent realistic doxastic states not properly representable by point-valued
credences.34
As a formal tool, representors allow us to represent a broader range of
doxastic states than point-valued distributions do. Every doxastic state that
can be represented by a point-valued distribution can also be captured by a
representor, but the converse does not hold. So working with representors
may enhance the descriptive project of Bayesian epistemology. Interestingly,
though, the case for using representors has most often been made by appealing
to normative considerations. Levi once wrote that, “even if men have, at least
to a good degree of approximation, the abilities Bayesians attribute to them,

there are many situations where, in my opinion, rational men ought not to
have... precise probability judgments” (1974, pp. 394-5). In such situations,
representors are offered as the best representation of a type of attitude ratio
nally mandated in place of point-valued credences.
What kind of situation are we talking about? Adam Elga suggests the
following example:
A stranger approaches you on the street and starts pulling out objects from
a bag. The first three objects he pulls out are a regular-sized tube of tooth
paste, a live jellyfish, and a travel-sized tube of toothpaste. To what degree
should you believe that the next object he pulls out will be another tube of
toothpaste?
The answer is not clear. The contents of the bag are clearly bizarre. You have
no theory of “what insane people on the street are likely to carry in their bags,”
nor have you encountered any particularly relevant statistics about this. The
situation doesn’t have any obvious symmetries, so principles of indifference
seem to be of no help....
It is very natural in such cases to say: You shouldn’t have any very precise
degree of confidence in the claim that the next object will be toothpaste. It is
very natural to say: Your degree of belief should be indeterminate or vague or
interval-valued. (2010, p. 1, emphases in original)
Elga is clearly on to something here; a point-valued credence feels like an

uncomfortable response to this body of evidence. But why? The precision of
point-valued credences—the seeming arbitrariness of selecting 0.7 as opposed
to 0.71, or 0.69, etc.—can’t be the real problem. After all, when we move to
ranged credences there will still be an arbitrariness concern about why the
endpoints of a given range weren’t 0.01 higher or lower.35
If there are cases (such as, perhaps, Elga’s) in which an agent’s evidence ratio
nally requires her to assign something other than a point-valued credence to a
particular proposition, we need to get clear on what kinds of cases those might
be, and what exactly about them makes the point value inappropriate. Here
Joyce (2005) helpfully distinguishes three features of a body of evidence that
may call for different types of attitudinal responses. He calls them “balance”,
“weight”, and “specificity”. We will discuss each feature of evidence in turn,
and ask whether it can be adequately reflected in point-valued credences or
requires a ranged attitude.
The balance of a body of evidence relative to a particular proposition

indicates which way that evidence leans on that proposition, and how far it
leans. For example, suppose I show you an urn containing 100 balls, and tell
you that each ball is either black or white. In a while your friend Raj will come
into the room and draw one ball from the urn, but you have a chance to get a
sneak peek first. So you pull out ten balls, one at a time, replacing each ball in
the urn before drawing the next one. Let’s suppose your draw is eight black balls
and two white. I now ask how confident you are that Raj’s ball will be black.
The balance of this evidence is toward black rather than white. If your sample
had been 5-5, the evidence would have been perfectly balanced between black
and its negation.
The balance of an agent’s total evidence with respect to a proposition
is easily reflected in a rational point-valued credence adopted towards that
proposition—perfectly balanced evidence merits a credence of 0.5, while
imperfect balance is indicated by a higher or lower value (depending on which
way the evidence leans).
The weight of a body of evidence relative to a particular proposition captures
how much information about that proposition the evidence provides. This
terminology originated in Keynes, who wrote:
As the relevant evidence at our disposal increases, the magnitude of the

probability of the argument may either decrease or increase, according as the
new knowledge strengthens the unfavourable or the favourable evidence; but
something seems to have increased in either case—we have a more substantial
basis upon which to rest our conclusion. I express this by saying that an
accession of new evidence increases the weight of an argument. New evidence
will sometimes decrease the probability of an argument, but it will always
increase its “weight.” (1921, p. 78, emphases in original)
For example, suppose that instead of drawing ten balls from the urn with
replacement and observing a 5-5 split, you had drawn one thousand balls with
replacement and found a 500-500 split. Each of these evidential samples is
perfectly balanced between the propositions that Raj’s draw will be black or
white, but the larger sample bears more weight than the former.
While the weight of an agent’s total evidence with respect to a particular
proposition may not be reflected in the point-valued credence she assigns to
that proposition, it might be captured by other point-valued credences she
assigns. After both the 5-5 draw and the 500-500 draw, the most rational
point-valued credence in the proposition that Raj’s ball will be black seems
to be 0.5. So that particular value doesn’t vary with the weight of the evidence.
But consider your credences in various chance propositions about Raj’s draw.
Let’s suppose that before you drew any balls from the urn, you were equally
confident in each of the 101 available hypotheses about the urn’s contents
(running from 100 black∕0 white to 0 black/100 white). This “flat” distribution
over hypotheses is depicted by the dashed line in Figure 14.3. Drawing a sample
of ten balls with a 5-5 split will rule out the most extreme hypotheses about
the contents, make you less confident of hypotheses close to those, and make
you more confident of compositions close to 50/50. The resulting credence
distribution is represented by the thin solid curve in Figure 14.3. Finally, a
perfectly split sample of 1,000 balls will make you even more confident of the
urn compositions in the middle and even less confident of the options near the
edges. This distribution is represented by the bold curve in the figure. While
your credence that Raj’s draw will be black is 0.5 in all three cases, the weight
of the evidence behind that credence is reflected by the narrowness of your
credence distribution over affiliated chance hypotheses.
In this case, your credence in the proposition that Raj’s ball will be black
develops out of your credences in a set of associated chance propositions.
So changes in the weight of your evidence for the former proposition can
be reflected by changes in your credences assigned to the latter. But there
may be propositions for which an agent’s credence is not constructed from
affiliated chance propositions. How can we represent the weight of agents’
evidence concerning such propositions? Brian Skyrms (1980a) pointed out
that the three distributions depicted in Figure 14.3 vary in their resilience. The
resilience of a credence in a particular proposition measures how dramatically
that credence would change in the face of specific pieces of possible future
evidence—with more resilient credences changing less. For example, suppose
it is suddenly revealed that before you sampled any balls from the urn, another
friend of Raj’s came along and drew a sample of nine black and one white. How
much will this new evidence change your credence that Raj’s ball will be black?
If your distribution over chance hypotheses is the flat one depicted with the
dashes in Figure 14.3, your credence may move a great deal, landing near 0.9.
But if you’ve already drawn your own sample that came out 5-5 (and so assign
the thin-lined curve in Figure 14.3), adding evidence about the other friend’s
sample will move your credence less. Your new credence that Raj’s draw will
be black may land near 0.7. And if you’ve already drawn a sample with a 500-
500 split (and therefore assign the bold curve), your credence in black will be
highly resilient, and the new evidence will move it almost not at all.36
In other words, each of the distributions in Figure 14.3 yields the same value
for cr(Raj⅛ ball black), but assigns a different value to
cr(Rajs ball black ∣ 9-1 sample) (14.19)
The closer this conditional value is to the unconditional prior, the more
resilient your credence. And it seems rational to have more resilient credences
the weightier one’s evidence is. (For another example of this effect, see Exercise
14.6.)
Finally, here’s the kicker: Even when an agent’s unconditional credence in
a proposition is not driven by her credences in associated chance hypotheses,
she may still assign conditional credences that govern how her attitude toward
that proposition will change in light of possible future courses of evidence.
These conditional credences dictate the resilience of her unconditional stance.
So while an agent’s current unconditional credence in a proposition reflects
the balance of her total evidence with respect to that proposition, the agent’s
conditional credences that drive potential updates reflect not only the balance
of her current evidence but also its weight.37
The responses I’ve offered to evidential balance and weight can both take
place within a point-valued credence regime.38 Of Joyce’s three features of
evidence, the only one that seems to require a ranged response is the evidence’s
degree of specificity. Joyce characterizes this feature as follows:
In the terminology to be used here, data is less than fully specific with respect
to X when it is either incomplete in the sense that it fails to discriminate X
from incompatible alternatives, or when it is ambiguous in the sense of being
subject to different readings that alter its evidential significance for X. Both
incompleteness and ambiguity are defined relative to a given hypothesis, and
both are matters of degree. (2005, p. 167, emphases in original)
Return to the urn of 100 either black or white balls, and consider the initial
moment when you don’t yet have any sampling information about its contents.
How confident should you be that Raj’s ball will be black? A Subjective
Bayesian (in the normative sense) will say that this credence should be driven
by your priors, and multiple priors are rationally acceptable in this case.
Objective Bayesians, on the other hand, demand a unique rational response
even to such scant data. As we saw in Section 5.3, the Principle of Indifference
could be applied to set your credence at 0.5. But indifference principles face a
number of objections. And in any case, Joyce and others argue that to assign
a credence of 0.5 (or any other point-valued credence) is to act as if you have
specific evidence about the urn’s contents when you don’t. As Knight (1921,
Ch. VIII) put it, this is to confuse “risk” with “uncertainty”.39 You face risk
when you sit down at a roulette wheel—the outcome is unknown, but you
have specific evidence about frequencies and chances on which to base your
attitudes. Elga’s jellyfish bag, on the other hand, generates uncertainty—the
evidence doesn’t offer any similar basis for probability assignments.40
Point-valued credences are appropriate when your evidential situation
involves only risk. But many authors would argue that to assign a point
valued credence in the face of uncertainty is to pretend like you’re in a kind
of evidential situation that you’re not. Better in such cases to adopt a ranged
credence. When you don’t have any evidence about the contents of the urn,
your representor should assign the proposition that Raj’s ball will be black a
range of values from 0 to 1.
This approach might be used to build an Objective Bayesianism without
indifference principles. After all, it gives us a unique rational response to the
initial urn situation. Even if one thinks that cases involving unspecific evidence
rationally require ranged credences, one could maintain that in each such
case exactly one ranged credence is permitted.41 Or one might hold that some
unspecific bodies of evidence allow for multiple permissible ranged responses
(generated by alternative rational ranged priors), in which case one would be
a Subjective Bayesian about ranged credences.42
14.2.2 Extensions and challenges
Now that we have some idea of the representor formalism and what sorts of
work it’s meant to accomplish, I will describe some challenges for the approach
and places in which it might be further fleshed out.
Convexity. Consider again the representor of Figure 14.1. I suggested we

associate that representor with the interval [0.6,0.75] for the proposition A.
I chose that interval because it’s the tightest interval that captures every real
value assigned to A by at least one distribution in the representor.
As I mentioned in note 28, the representor described in Figure 14.1 is
fairly unrealistic; it’s hard to imagine a real-life situation that would rationalize
the doxastic attitude represented by just those two probability distributions.
But despite being unrealistic, the example raises an important question: Is it
rationally acceptable for the probability distributions in a representor to assign
just a smattering of values to a particular proposition? Or if the features of
an agent’s evidence (weight, specificity, etc.) merit including distributions that
assign, say, both 0.6 and 0.75 to a particular proposition, shouldn’t they also
merit including some distributions that assign values in-between?
If we take this last suggestion to its logical extreme, we get what Weisberg
(2009) calls the
Interval Requirement: Suppose Prx and Pry are two distributions in the
representor, and P is some proposition in £. If Prx(P)=% and
Prγ(P) = y, then for any real number z between x and y, there is
a distribution Prz in the representor such that Prz(P) = z.
The representor of Figure 14.1 fails to satisfy the Interval Requirement. That
representor contains distributions assigning 0.6 and 0.75 to A, but no distri
bution assigning, for instance, a value of 0.7 (or any of the other values strictly
between 0.6 and 0.75).
Why might we adopt the Interval Requirement as a constraint on represen
tors? Here’s one reason: Suppose we think of a representor as a convenient
formal means of representing confidence comparisons. In the Figure 14.1
representor, both distributions assign Pr(A) > Pr(~A). But if that inequality
is satisfied by a distribution that assigns Pr(A) = 0.6, and by a distribution that
assigns Pr(A) = 0.75, then it’s also going to be satisfied by distributions that
assign A values between 0.6 and 0.75 (not to mention a variety of others!). The
set of values that satisfies an inequality forms a continuous range, not just a
discontinuous collection of scattered reals.
One important way in which a representor can satisfy the Interval Require
ment is for it to display
Convexity: If a representor contains two distributions Prx and Pry, it also

contains every linear combination of those two distributions.
Here’s what we mean by a linear combination of two distributions: Given the

distributions Prx and Pry, pick any real number a between 0 and 1 (inclusive).
Now generate a new distribution Prz as follows: For each proposition P ∈ ∕C,
Prz(P) = α∙Prx(P)+(l-α)∙Pry(P). (Notice that once you’ve chosen a value for
a, it’s held fixed as you construct all of Prz—you don’t choose a new a for each
proposition.) Convexity says that if a representor contains two distributions,
any new distribution you can generate by mixing them in this fashion will also
be in the representor. (As you’ll prove in Exercise 14.7, the linear combination
of two probability distributions is always a probability distribution, so we don’t
have to worry that Convexity will insert distributions into a representor that
violate the Kolmogorov axioms.)
While a convex representor will always satisfy the Interval Requirement,
Convexity is actually logically stronger than the Interval Requirement. (That
is, it’s possible for a representor to satisfy the Interval Requirement without
satisfying Convexity.)43 Should we hold that rationality demands something
as strong as Convexity?
That depends on how we understand ranged credences. Levi thought that
an agent adopted a ranged credence when she viewed multiple point-valued
credence distributions as permissible, and wanted to suspend judgment among
them. He wrote:
The suspension of judgment between the two [distributions] is manifested

as a sort of conlict between two systems of values.... Weighted averages of
the two [distributions] have all the earmarks of potential resolutions of the
conflict; and, given the assumption that one should not preclude potential
resolutions when suspending judgment between rival systems of valuations,
all weighted averages of the two [distributions] are thus to be taken into
account. (1980, p. 192)
When an agent is conflicted between distributions Prx and Pry, a linear

combination is a kind of compromise between the two. To be tolerant of all
such possible compromises, a reasonable agents representor will include all

such linear combinations.
But as I noted earlier, not everyone understands ranged credences this way.
Moreover, convex representors have an important formal problem. When you
make a linear combination of two probability distributions, some features
shared by both of the original distributions are maintained. For example,
if both original distributions assign a higher value to one proposition than
another, the linear combination will maintain that comparison. But other
shared features—especially features involving probabilistic correlation and
independence—may be lost. Jeffrey (1987), who pointed out this problem,
provided an example in which two distributions each treat a particular pair of
propositions as independent, yet a linear combination of those distributions
does not. (You’ll analyze his example in Exercise 14.8.) Generally, if we have an
agent who views two propositions as probabilistically irrelevant to each other,
and we want to represent that agent with a set of distributions unanimously
agreed on that irrelevance, that set may need to violate Convexity.44
Closed intervals and sticky ranges. Now Γd like to turn our attention to another
question about the range of values a representor should assign to a proposition.
Return to our example of the urn containing 100 balls. Suppose you haven’t
yet learned of any samples from the urn, and so know nothing more about
its composition than that each of the balls is either black or white. Due to
the maximal unspecificity of your evidence in this case, a ranged credence
enthuasiast might say that you should assign the proposition that Raj’s draw
from the urn will yield a black ball a credence ranging from 0 to 1. For instance,
Mark Kaplan writes:
Giving evidence its due requires that you rule out only those [probability
distributions] the evidence gives you reason to rule out. And when you
have no evidence whatsoever pertaining to the truth or falsehood of a
hypothesis P, then, for every real number n, 1 ≥ n ≥ 0, your set of [probability
distributions] should contain at least one assignment on which [Pr(P) = n].
Notice that Kaplan says your representor should contain a probability dis
tribution assigning P each real number between 0 and 1—including 0 and 1
themselves. In our urn example, that means the representor should contain
at least one distribution that assigns 0 to black, and another that assigns 1 to
black. We associate this representor with the closed interval [0,1] for black.
On the other hand, if your representor contained distributions assigning black

every real number strictly between 0 and 1, but no distributions assigning the
extreme values, we would associate your representor with the open interval
(0,1) for black.45
What’s the difference between these two ranges? Here it may help to think
about the values each distribution in the representor assigns to each of the
chance hypotheses consistent with your evidence. In order for the representor
to assign the closed interval to black, there must be a distribution in the
representor that assigns a value of 1 to black. If each distribution satisfies the
Principal Principle (Section 5.2.1), then each distributions value for black will
be a weighted average of all the chance hypotheses to which it assigns a positive
probability. So the only way a distribution can assign a value of 1 to black is if
it assigns probability 1 to the hypothesis that all the balls in the urn are black,
and 0 to every hypothesis with at least one white ball. At the other end, the
hard 0 at the bottom of the closed [0,1] interval requires a distribution that
assigns probability 0 to every hypothesis with at least one black ball.
These extreme distributions might be rationally ruled out for two reasons.
First, recall that on the ranged credence approach, we apply a rational require
ment to an agents attitudes by applying it separately to each of the distributions
in that agent’s representor. If we think that the Regularity Principle (Section
4.2) is a requirement of rationality, we might want to forbid any distribution
in a representor from assigning probability 0 to any doxastically possible
proposition.46
Second, a closed [0,1] interval would wreak havoc on the updating scheme
for ranges we outlined earlier. The idea there was to conditionalize each distri
bution in the representor on whatever new evidence is gained. But if our first
sample from the urn contains at least one white ball, this outcome will initially
have been assigned a probability of 0 by the 100%-black distribution. Given
the Ratio Formula and the definition of Conditionalization, it’s impossible to
conditionalize a distribution on evidence with a prior of 0. So while an agent
who assigns a range of [0,1] to black certainly thinks it’s possible that her
first sample will contain at least one white ball, the standard updating scheme
for ranged credences will leave her unable to update on that kind of evidence
should it be received.47
So maybe the rational initial attitude toward black is best represented by an
open (0,1) interval. Here’s one way to build a representor assigning that range:
Take the 101 initially available hypotheses about the contents of the urn, and
have one distribution in the representor for each possible assignment of values
to those hypotheses—provided those values honor the Kolmogorov axioms
and don’t assign 0 to any of the hypotheses. The resulting representor seems
particularly apt to the unspecificity of your evidence in this case, since you
entirely lack data about the black/white breakdown in the urn.
If you adopt that representor, how will your attitudes change as the evidence
comes in? As you sample from the urn—drawing one ball at a time, observing
it, then replacing it—something interesting will happen to your ranged atti
tude. Once you’ve seen at least one blackball and one white ball come out of the
urn, your ranged credence that Raj’s ball will be black will narrow to the open
interval (1/100,99/100). That’s because your evidence will have eliminated
hypotheses on which the chance of black is less than 1/100 (namely, hypotheses
in which the urn contains no black balls) and hypotheses on which the chance
of black is greater than 99/100 (hypotheses with no white balls). But as long as
all you do is sample balls one at a time with replacement—you don’t sample
multiple balls at a time, or dump out the entire urn and count—contionalizing
will then leave your range for black at (1/100,99/100) going forward. For
any sequence of draws you might get (no matter how long), and for any x
such that 1/100 < x < 99/100, there will have been some distribution in your
initial representor that assigned black a probability of exactly x conditional on
observing that particular sequence of evidence.48
Intuitively this may seem wrong. Suppose you make 1,000 draws with a 500-
500 split. This is weighty evidence, perfectly balanced between black and white.
It highly confirms that the urn contains somewhere around fifty blackballs. So
shouldn’t this sample narrow your ranged credence, drawing your upper and
lower probabilities that Raj’s ball will be black closer to 0.5?
Here we have to remember that on the ranged credence approach, rational
requirements apply to each distribution in the representor considered one at
a time. Requirements applied singly to distributions in a representor may not
produce intuitively expected effects on the overall range.
Start with the representor described above assigning (1/100,99/100) to the
proposition that Raj’s ball will black. Each distribution in that representor will
assign a particular (nonextreme) probability that there is one black ball in the
urn, a probability that there are two black balls, etc. Now imagine taking a
particular single one of those distributions, and conditionalizing it on a sample
of 500 black balls and 500 white. That evidence will make that distribution
more peaked around a 50-50 white/black split: the evidence will decrease the
distribution’s probability that there’s only one black ball in the urn; increase its
probability that there are fifty; etc. Since the sample increases the distribution’s
probability that there are fifty black balls in the urn, that sample is positively
relevant to the fifty-black hypothesis, relative to that distribution. Moreover,
each distribution in the representor will respond to the sample in a similar

fashion—the sample will be positively relevant to the fifty-black hypothesis on
every distribution. Since this property is shared by every distribution in the
representor, we can attribute it to your overall doxastic state: a 500-500 sample
confirms for you that the urn contains fifty black balls.49
But shouldn’t the sample also narrow the range of values the distributions
in your representor assign the proposition that Raj’s ball will be black? Well,
each individual distribution in your representor will respond to the sample by
moving its overall probability that Raj’s ball will be black closer to 0.5 (unless
the distribution already assigned that proposition exactly 0.5). So the intuition
that your attitude to black should move “toward” 0.5 is respected in some
sense. But because your initial representor contained distributions that were
arbitrarily far from assigning that proposition 0.5, moving each distribution’s
probability that Raj will draw black closer to 0.5 still leaves distributions that
are as far from 0.5 as you like (within the confines of 1/100 to 99/100). Each
individual distribution in the representor does the intuitive thing in response
to your evidence, but your overall range for the proposition that Raj’s ball will
be black remains unchanged.50
Dilation. Earlier I described the traditional updating procedure for ranged

credences: take each distribution in your representor, conditionalize it on the
evidence learned, then compose an updated representor from the set of dis
tributions that result. As an example, I took the two distributions described in
Figure 14.1, updated them on the evidence A D R, and obtained the representor
described in Figure 14.2.
There’s something odd about that update, which you may not have noticed
at the time. While the distributions in the representor prior to the update both
assign proposition R a probability of 2/3, the distributions in the posterior
representor assign distinct values to R. The update takes the ranged credence in
R from [2/3,2/3] to [5/6,8/9]. This is an example of dilation, a phenomenon
in which conditionalizing on new evidence widens the range of values an agent
assigns to a particular proposition.51
A number of Bayesians have found dilation intuitively troubling. In fact,
some Bayesians have found it so troubling that they reject either the condi-
tionalization updating scheme for ranged credences or the ranged credence
approach entirely! These Bayesians are especially troubled by cases in which an
agent knows in advance exactly what kind of evidence she’s going to get—she
knows that she will soon learn whether some particular proposition P is true
or false. At the same time, she knows that whatever evidence she gets about
P, it will dilate the ranged credence she assigns some other proposition Q. We
can even build cases in which the agent knows that learning the truth about
P will dilate her currently point-valued credence in Q all the way to a 0-to-l
range! (See Exercise 14.10 for an example.)
Seidenfeld and Wasserman illustrate the concern with a real-world example:
To emphasize the counterintuitive nature of dilation, imagine that a physician

tells you that you have probability 1/2 that you have a fatal disease. He then
informs you that he will carry out a blood test tomorrow. Regardless of the
outcome of the test, if he conditions on the new evidence, he will then have
lower probability 0 and upper probability 1 that you have the disease. Should
you allow the test to be performed? Is it rational to pay a fee not to perform
the test? (1993, p. 1140)
Considering a similar case, van Fraassen (2005, p. 28) complains that if dilation
is possible, then “reception of certain factual information can be damaging to
one’s epistemic health.”
But we should question the assumption that widening your ranged credence
in a proposition always represents an epistemic degradation. Seidenfeld and
Wasserman report (though don’t endorse) a “seeming intuition that when
we condition on new evidence, upper and lower probabilities should shrink
toward each other” (1993, p. 1140). This intuition conflates evidential weight
and specificity52—and it’s the latter that should drive the width of ranged
credences. Sometimes evidence that provides us with additional information
about a proposition (thereby increasing evidential weight) is nevertheless
less specific than the evidence we had before. Brian Weatherson offers this
example:
Imagine we are playing a rather simple form of poker, where each player
is dealt five cards and then bets on who has the best hand. Before the bets
start, I can work out the chance that some other player, say Monica, has a
straight. So my credence in the proposition Monica has a straight will be
precise. But as soon as the betting starts, my credence in this will vary, and
will probably become imprecise. Do those facial ticks mean that she is happy
with the cards or disappointed? Is she betting high because she has a strong
hand or because she is bluffing? Before the betting starts we have risk, but no
uncertainty, because the relevant probabilities are all known. After betting
starts, uncertainty is rife. (2002, p. 52)
The moment you learn the rules of Weatherson’s poker game, you can work
out the precise chance that Monica is dealt a straight, and assign a point-valued
credence equal to that chance. When Monica looks at her cards, adopts a facial
expression, then pushes some chips into the pot, all of this provides you with
important information about her hand. The weight of your evidence increases,
and in an important sense your epistemic situation improves. Yet this new
information is unspecific, and may lead you to a ranged posterior credence.
Nothing about this dilation seems to me the least bit irrational.
What about cases in which new evidence dilates your previously point
valued credence in a proposition to the full (0,1) range? For evidence E to
change your credence in hypothesis H at all, at least some of the distributions
in your prior representor must view E as probabilistically correlated with
H. Dilation occurs when the distributions disagree on that correlation—on
its direction (positive or negative?) and/or on its strength. Earlier we saw
that when your evidence is unspecific about the chance of a particular event,
ranged credence advocates require you to assign a ranged credence to that
event’s occurrence instead of acting as if your evidence had delivered a specific
point value. Similarly, when your evidence is unspecific about the correlation
between E and H, you shouldn’t respond to learning E as if you know precisely
how it’s correlated with H. You should dilate to a posterior attitude toward
H that reflects the unspecificity of what you know about its correlation with
E. And if what you know about that correlation is maximally unspecific, the
resulting posterior in H should be a maximal range.53
Decision theory. Since a representor often contains more information than

a comparative confidence ranking—in particular, information about relative
gap sizes between confidences—it provides a more promising basis for a
decision theory. Still, the topic of how to make decisions on the basis of
ranged credences is very unsettled, generating a great deal of controversy in
the literature. Rather than trying here to capture all the back and forth, I’ll
simply indicate some of the basic issues that arise.
Suppose an agent confronts a decision between two acts. The expected utility
she assigns to each act depends in part on her credence distribution over
possible states of the world. So if the agent’s representor contains multiple
distributions, the acts may receive different expected utilities relative to dif
ferent distributions. Following the idea of respecting any property shared by
all the distributions in a representor, everyone in the literature54 agrees that
if every distribution in an agent’s representor assigns the first act a higher
expected utility than the second act, then the agent should prefer the first act.
For example, the representor of Figure 14.1 assigns proposition A a ranged

credence of [0.6,0.75]. Suppose you have the corresponding doxastic state, and
I offer you a ticket that pays $1 if A is true, and nothing otherwise. If my ticket
costs you only $0.50, then you clearly ought to buy it. The distributions in your
representor generate different fair prices for that ticket: one yields $0.60, the
other $0.75. But on both distributions, $0.50 is below the fair ticket price. In
general, you should be willing to buy a ticket that pays $1 on A for any amount
up to $0.60. And you should be willing to sell such a ticket for any price of at
least $0.75.
It’s fairly easy to prove55 that if you follow this policy—buy a betting ticket
on a proposition for up to your lower probability for that proposition, sell a
betting ticket for at least your upper probability—and the distributions in your
representor are probabilistic, then the policy will never endorse a set of bets at
a given time that guarantees a sure loss come what may. In the terminology of
Chapter 9, you will not be susceptible to a Dutch Book.
But the policy provides incomplete advice. What should you do if I offer to
sell you a $1 ticket on A for $0.70? That’s a good price for this ticket relative to
one distribution in your representor, but relative to the other distribution it’s
too high. The ranged credence decision theory controversy is all about what
you should choose when the distributions in your representor disagree about
which act maximizes expected utility.56
One response is to leave the agent’s options open. Mark Kaplan, for instance,
holds that in this case you should remain “undecided” between purchasing the
ticket and declining. He clarifies that:
To say that you should be undecided in this case is not, of course, to advise
paralysis. It is rather to say that there is no option you have reason to prefer
to the others and that, among the options for which no superior option has
been found, there is nothing left but to pick one. (1996, p. 25, n. 20)
The idea (dating back at least to (Good 1952)) is that if an act maximizes
expected utility relative to at least one of the distributions in your representor,
then that act is rationally permissible, and in cases where multiple acts are
permitted by this standard, rationality has nothing more to say about which
act you should choose.
One question about this decision policy is whether an agent’s choices that go
beyond what rationality requires must remain consistent over time. Suppose
you make all your betting decisions today based on a fair price of $0.65 for A,
then your decisions tomorrow based on a fair A price of $0.70. If your ranged
credence for A remains at [0.6,0.75] throughout, both prices are acceptable

on the proposed policy. But if you sell an A-ticket for $0.65 today then buy
that ticket back for $0.70 tomorrow, you will have been diachronically Dutch-
Booked.
Sarah Moss (2015) wants to leave open the possibility of such rational mind
changes, in which the price you’re willing to pay for a bet changes over time—
even if these changes cost you some cash. Moreover, many authors point out
that the problem of diachronic choice consistency is not unique to ranged-
credence decision theory. Even with point-valued credences, two acts may be
tied for optimal expected utility, in which case a rationally-arbitrary decision
is required. (The canonical example is Buridahs Ass.) Such decisions may be
repeated over time, and there’s a question whether rationality requires you to
make the same decision at every opportunity.
Nevertheless, we may want less rational slack in our decision theory—
we may want specific advice about how to act when the distributions in
your representor are at odds. Here two broad types of strategy are available.
Strategies of the first type (what we might call “global” strategies) decide based
on some feature of your entire representor. For example, when faced with a
choice between two acts, you might calculate the lowest expected utility of the
first act on any distribution in your representor, calculate the lowest expected
utility of the second act, then choose whichever act has the best worst-case
scenario. (This is sometimes called the “minimax” strategy.) Strategies of the
second type (“local” strategies) specify a procedure for selecting one of the
distributions in your representor, then direct you to make all of your decisions
in line with its evaluations.
Global strategies have various strengths and weakenesses, depending on
their particulars. But Elga (2010) points out a problem common to most global
strategies: they instruct agents to pass up guaranteed gains.57 Suppose I offer
to sell you a ticket for $0.65 that pays $1 if A is true. A short time later, I offer
to sell you a ticket for $0.30 that pays $1 if A is false. If you have the doxastic
attitudes described by the representor of Figure 14.1, the minimax strategy
will lead you to decline both purchases. (The details are in Exercise 14.11.)
By declining both, you are guaranteed to neither gain nor lose any funds. But
there’s another course of action—purchasing both tickets—that is guaranteed
to net you $0.05 in every possible world. Elga claims it’s irrational to decline
both bets when another option is available that guarantees a better result. And
many global strategies direct agents to pass up pairs of bets like this.58
Local strategies don’t have this problem: no matter which single distribution
in your representor drives your betting behavior, it will direct you to purchase
14∙3 DEMPSTER-SHAFER THEORY 527
at least one of Elga’s two bets. Yet local strategies seem to have another prob
lem. After arguing that some epistemic situations demand a ranged credence
rather than a point-valued attitude, the ranged credence advocate with a local
decision theory now advises you to behave in such situations exactly as you
would if you possessed a single point-valued distribution. Its not clear why
this theorist went to the trouble to differentiate—let alone argue for—ranged
credences to begin with. Yet Levi (1980), Walley (1991), and Joyce (2010) all
emphasize that letting one distribution drive the bus for practical purposes
is not the same as possessing a representor containing only that distribution.
Doxastic states have many roles to play in our mental economy beyond their
role in decision-making.59
14.3 Dempster-Shafer theory
Most of this book has concerned the traditional Bayesian formalism for
representing an agent’s doxastic attitudes: point-valued credence distributions
over propositional languages. In this chapter, we have introduced two other
formalisms: comparative confidence rankings and sets of probability distri
butions. Still, we have barely scratched the surface of the many formalisms
available for representing agents’ doxastic states. A more complete survey
would describe AGM theory, dynamic epistemic logic, default logic, formal
learning theory, and ranking theory (just to name a few). While I lack both
the space and the expertise to do those other approaches justice, I want to
end with a brief overview of a formal approach that has much in common
with traditional Bayesianism, yet diverges from it in a number of interesting
ways.
The theory of belief functions originated in the work of Arthur P. Dempster,
starting with his (1966). It was then generalized and expanded by Glenn
Shafer’s pivotal (1976). In his (1981), Jeffrey A. Barnett dubbed the resulting
theory “Dempster-Shafer theory”; belief functions are therefore sometimes
known as Dempster-Shafer functions.
To understand how Dempster-Shafer theory differs from traditional
Bayesianism, consider an example adapted from (Halpern 2003, ch. 2): In
the next room is an urn containing balls, each of which is either red, blue, or
yellow. A ball has just been drawn from the urn. An absolutely reliable witness
walks in from the next room and tells you something in Urdu. Your Urdu is
rusty: you think there’s an 80% chance he just said, “The ball drawn was either
blue or yellow”; but there’s a 20% chance he said, “That’s a very attractive urn.”
To model the import of this piece of evidence, Dempster-Shafer theory starts

with a propositional language, just like the traditional Bayesian approach.
However, a Dempster-Shafer theorists propositional language will typically
not include all of the propositions that can be composed from its atomics using
propositional connectives. For technical reasons the Dempster-Shafer theorist
will work with a Boolean algebra—a proper subset of the full propositional
language that contains as many propositions as possible built from the atomics
without any two members’ being logically equivalent. As we noted in Exercise
2.3, a Boolean algebra with n atomic propositions will contain 22” propositions
overall, instead of the infinitely many propositions of the languages we’ve been
working with.
With this Boolean algebra in place, the Dempster-Shafer theorist will repre
sent the evidential significance of the Urdu testimony using a mass function.
Formally, a mass function is a non-negative distribution over a Boolean
algebra that: (1) assigns 0 to the contradiction; and (2) has values summing
to 1. Letting “R” stand for the proposition that the ball drawn was red, “B”
stand for blue, and “Y” stand for yellow, the mass function representing the
Urdu testimony would assign a value of 0.8 to B V Y and a value of 0.2 to the
tautology!.60 The mass value of 0.8 represents the evidential support supplied
by the Urdu testimony to the proposition that the ball drawn was either blue
or yellow. The other 0.2 of evidential mass supplied by this testimony does not
support any particular proposition about the ball’s color, so it gets assigned to
the informationally vacuous tautology.
This mass function represents the significance of a particular piece of
evidence, the Urdu testimony. We can generate a belief function from the
mass function, representing a doxastic state justified by that evidence. A belief
function is another distribution over the Boolean algebra. If we represent the
mass function as m, we can generate a belief function Bel from it as follows:
for each proposition X in the Boolean algebra, Bel(X) sums the m-values
of all of the propositions that entail X (including X itself). For example, the
mass function in the previous paragraph yields a belief function assigning
Bel(BV Y) = 0.8, Bel(T) = 1 (because both BvYandT entailT), and a Bel-value
of 0 to every other proposition in the algebra.
How do belief functions differ from traditional Bayesian credence func
tions? Like a probabilistic cr, Bel is a non-negative real-valued distribution
over a set of propositions. It assigns 0 to contradictions and 1 to tautologies.
So it satisfies Normality and Non-Negativity. But belief functions are superad
ditive: two mutually exclusive disjuncts may have Bel-values summing to less
than the Bel-value of their disjunction. For instance, the Urdu example has
Bel(B) = Bel(Y) = 0, yet Bel(B V Y) = 0.8.61 This is an important divergence

from the Bayesian approach. For a Bayesian, credence in a disjunction arises
from credence in its disjuncts. But on the Dempster-Shafer approach, belief in
a disjunction need not distribute to its disjuncts.
This difference at the level of doxastic states reflects a deeper difference in
the ways the two theories approach evidence. Under Finite Additivity, an agent
may become more confident in a disjunction of mutually exclusive disjuncts
only by growing more confident in at least one of those disjuncts. So on a
Bayesian confirmation theory, evidence for such a disjunction is always also
evidence for at least one of its disjuncts. Dempster-Shafer theorists, on the
other hand, think that a piece of evidence may support a disjunction without
supporting either of its disjuncts. (In our Urdu example, B V Y receives a
positive m-value while neither B nor Y does.) Logically stronger propositions
require stronger evidence; you can get evidence for something general (the
ball was either blue or yellow) without thereby getting evidence for something
more specific (that the ball was blue/that the ball was yellow).
Now there is a special case in which belief functions become probabilistic.
If all of the positive value in a mass function is assigned exclusively to state
descriptions, the corresponding belief function will be additive, and therefore
be indistinguishable from a Bayesian credence function. (See Exercise 14.13.)
A mass function like that represents evidence that is maximally precise; instead
of making various sets of possible worlds likely, the evidence speaks to each
doxastic possibility one at a time. The Dempster-Shafer theorist will admit that
evidence like this is possible, and therefore that probabilistic belief functions are
sometimes supported by an agents evidence. But this is a rather special case,
uncommon in the real world.
To get a better sense for how belief functions work, let’s consider one more
example. Suppose another witness to the ball draw comes in from the next
room, and says something in Swahili. Your Swahili is even worse than your
Urdu. You think there’s a 25% chance he said, “The ball was blue”; a 25% chance
he said “The ball was blue or yellow”; a 25% chance he said “The ball was
red”; and a 25% chance he said, “Lunch was delicious today!” Given our earlier
Boolean algebra, the mass function for this evidence would assign:
m(B) = 0.25
m(B V Y) = 0.25
(14.20)
m(B) = 0.25
m(T) = 0.25
Franz Huber (2016, §3.1) helpfully suggests we think of belief functions as

follows. Start with a particular proposition, say B V Y. We can divide the mass
of a particular piece of evidence into three parts: the part that speaks in favor
of our proposition, the part that speaks against, and the part that’s neutral. In
Equation (14.20), the masses of both B and B V Y speak in favor of B V Y;
the mass assigned to R speaks against (because it supports ~(B V Y)); and
the mass assigned to T is neutral. When we construct a belief function from
this evidence, Bel(B V Y) simply sums up all the mass supporting B V Y; so
Bel(B V Y) = m(B) + m(B V Y) = 0.5.62 We can define another function, which
Dempster-Shafer theorists call a plausibility function, that tallies up all the
evidential mass that either supports or is neutral on the proposition in ques
tion. For this evidence, P1(B V Y) = m(B) + m(B V Y) + m(T) = 0.75. The less
one’s evidence speaks directly against a proposition, the more plausible it leaves
that proposition. In general, for any proposition X in the Boolean algebra,
P1(X) = 1 - Bel(~X).
I hope it’s becoming clear that a mass function is an exceedingly flexible tool
for representing many kinds of evidence. When Bayesians update by Condi-
tionalization, evidence is always represented as a single (perhaps conjunctive)
proposition in the agent’s language. Mass functions are capable of representing
evidence like that—the proposition in question receives an m-value of 1, while
everything else receives a 0. In Jeffrey Conditionalization (Section 5.5), the
evidence spreads its support across a partition—0.70 that the cloth glimpsed
by candelight is green, 0.25 that it’s blue, 0.05 that it’s violet. We can define
a mass function like that as well.63 But mass functions don’t have to spread
their positive value over a partition; they can represent evidence that supports
multiple, not mutually exclusive propositions at once.
Mass functions may also be used to represent the significance of
information-bearing states that aren’t pieces of evidence. For example, a mass
function may represent the background knowledge an agent brings into an
evidence-gathering situation. When that background knowledge contains no
information relevant to the propositions in our Boolean algebra, we represent
it with a vacuous mass function: a function that assigns m(T) = 1 and a mass
of zero to everything else. This is a tidy solution to Bayesians’ vexing Problem
of the Priors (Section 13.1); we get a simple, elegant representation of total
ignorance without invoking any subjective elements or indifference principles.
Once we have a mass function representing an agent’s background knowl
edge, and a mass function for each piece of evidence she gains, we may
want to combine these into an overall belief function. When the information
represented by mass functions comes from unrelated sources, those functions
can be assembled using Dempsters rule of combination. The rule of com

bination takes two mass functions m1 and m2, and combines them into a
new distribution over the same algebra, m1 ® m2. Exercise 14.14 explains the
details of how that combination works. For our purposes, it’s important to note
that m1 φ m2 will itself be a mass function. So it can be used to generate a
belief function, or may be combined with another mass function to iterate the
process. In general, an agents overall belief function for a given situation may
be determined by combining the mass function representing her background
knowledge with the mass functions representing her pieces of evidence in that
situation, then generating a belief function from the mass function that results.
Dempster’s combination rule has further nice formal features. Like Condi-
tionalization, it is commutative and associative. (Its results don’t depend on
the order in which you combine mass functions, or on how you group them
together.) As a technique for combining disparate evidential sources, this gives
it an advantage over successive updates by Jeffrey Conditionalization. Also, the
vacuous mass function described above is the identity element for Dempster
combination—combining the vacuous function with any mass function m1
will simply output m1 again. So when an agent comes into a situation with
no relevant background knowledge, her belief function will be determined
entirely by the contributions of her evidence in that situation.
I’ve already mentioned how belief functions relate to probabilistic cre
dence distributions. We can also relate them to representors.64 Given any
belief function, we can construct a representor (containing only distributions
satisfying the probability axioms) such that for every proposition X in the
Boolean algebra, Bel(X) equals Xs lower probability on that representor, and
P1(X) equals Xs upper probability. Interestingly, the converse does not hold:
there exist probabilistic representors for which it’s impossible to find a belief
function such that Bel(X) equals the lower probability of X for every X in the
Boolean algebra.65
This inability of belief functions to match some representors may create a
problem for Dempster-Shafer theory. Walley (1991, §5.13.4) offers an example
in which you have two coin flips that are each fair, but whose outcomes may
be correlated, anti-correlated, or independent (you have no evidence speaking
to that question).66 On the ranged credence theory, it seems reasonable to
represent this situation with a representor in which each of the distributions
assigns 1/2 to heads on each flip, but one distribution takes the flip outcomes
to be independent, another takes them to be perfectly correlated, another
takes them to be perfectly anti-correlated, another takes them to be slightly
correlated, and so on. Walley shows (as will you in Exercise 14.15) that the
resulting representor cannot have its lower probabilities matched by any belief
function. To the extent that this representor captures the appropriate rational
response to this evidential situation, the lack of a corresponding belief function
seems a strike against Dempster-Shafer theory.
Yet although traditional credence distributions can be formally matched
to a subset of belief functions, and belief functions in turn can be formally
matched to a subset of representors, Dempster-Shafer theorists warn against
reading their belief functions as just another formalism representing the same
doxastic attitudes Bayesians have been modeling all along. Dempster-Shafer
theorists insist that belief functions are meant to model attitudes grounded in
evidence, while Bayesian credences may have other types of influences. (Most
obviously, subjective priors.) Shafer himself (1981, §1.2) repeatedly warns
against demanding that Bel values equal the chances that various propositions
are true. So the Walley example just described may not be immediately fatal to
the theory.
A similar point should be made about ongoing difficulties matching
Dempster-Shafer theory to a decision theory. Here the options resemble those
for the ranged credence approach: (1) give a rule for accepting bets below the
lower probability (Bel-value) and above the upper probability (Pl-value), then
go silent on all the rest; (2) associate a specific probability distribution with the
belief function, then let it drive the betting decisions; etc. None of these options
works great, but Dempster-Shafer theorists are keen to disentangle their belief
functions from Bayesians’ behavioristic past. Shafer emphasizes theoretical
goals (such as understanding) as primary to the formation of belief functions,
while Liu and Yager (2008, p. 27) write, “The theory of belief functions is not
meant to be a normative or descriptive theory for decision making.” They
emphasize that belief functions have many other important applications, in
fields such as engineering, business, and medicine.
There are, however, other problems internal to the Dempster-Shafer
approach, even relative to the goals its practitioners have set for themselves.
For example, Dempsters rule of combination is supposed to be applied when
the sources of information modeled by two mass functions are “unrelated”.
In practice, this condition is often read like a requirement of conditional
probabilistic independence: the reports of each information source should be
screened off from each other by the truth-value of the proposition reported
upon. But strictly speaking, unrelatedness is supposed to be a primitive notion
established antecedently to the application of theory. This leaves us to wonder
what exactly unrelatedness means, and how officially to adjudicate it. We also
need combination techniques for informational sources that are not unrelated.
14∙4 exercises 533
While there has been progress on both of these fronts over the years, neither
problem is entirely solved. Like all of the formal systems described in this
book, Dempster-Shafer theory remains a work in progress.
14.4 Exercises
Throughout these exercises, you should assume that any distribution appear
ing in a representor satisfies the probability axioms and Ratio Formula—
except when explicitly noted otherwise. You may also assume that whenever a
conditional probability expression occurs or a proposition is conditionalized
upon, the needed proposition has a nonzero unconditional value so that
conditional probabilities are well defined.
Problem 14.1.
(a) Take the bulleted conditions appearing in the list on page 488, and
prove each of them from the combination of Comparative Equivalence,
Transitivity, Completeness, Non-Negativity, Non-Triviality, and Addi
tivity. You need not prove them in the order in which they appear
in the list. Important: For now, do not prove the very last bulleted
condition.
(b) Now prove the very last bulleted condition in the list, using
Comparative Equivalence, Transitivity, Completeness, Non-Negativity,
Non-Triviality, and Additivity, plus anything you proved in part (a).
Beware: this proof is very difficult!
Problem 14.2. Suppose that given a five-proposition partition {A, B, C, D, E},

an agent assigns the following comparisons:
A~B
C-D
(AVB')~(CVDVE')
(AvE)~(CvD)
(a) Find a probabilistic credence distribution that matches these compar

isons as specified in the Comparative Matching principle.
(b) Is your distribution from part (a) unique, in the sense of being the only
probabilistic distribution that matches these comparisons? Explain how
you know.
(c) Create a numerical distribution that matches the comparisons, is an
affine transformation of your answer to part (a), but does not satisfy
any of the probability axioms.67
Problem 14.3. In this exercise we will prove that satisfying the Scott
Axiom is necessary for a total preorder to be probabilistically representable.
To start, assume we have two equinumerous, finite sequences drawn from Z—
{A1,A2, ... ,An} and {B1,B2, .. ∙,Bn}—that contain the same number of truths
as each other on each doxastic possibility.
(a) We can think of the agent’s doxastic possibilities as being represented by
the state-descriptions of ,6. Suppose you took each proposition in the A-
sequence and replaced it with its equivalent in disjunctive normal form,
then did the same for the B-sequence. Now imagine choosing a par
ticular state-description, counting how many A-sequence propositions
contained it as a disjunct, then counting how many B-sequence propo
sitions contained it. Explain why, no matter which state-description you
chose, these counts would come out the same.
(b) Suppose you had a probability distribution cr over £. Recall that on a
probability distribution, the probability of a proposition equals the sum
of the probabilities assigned to the state-descriptions in its disjunctive
normal form. Use this fact to explain why if you added up the cr-values
assigned to all of the propositions in the A-sequence, then added up the
cr-values assigned to all the propositions in the B-sequence, you’d get
the same result.
(c) Suppose some total preorder over Z matches probabilistic distribution
cr according to Comparative Matching, and Z contains two equinu
merous, finite sequences—{A1,A2, ... ,An} and {B1,B2, ... ,Bn}-that
contain the same number of truths as each other on each doxastic
possibility. Explain why, if there exists some Ai and Bi such that Ai > Bi,
then there must exist some Ay and By such that Ay -< By.
Problem 14.4. Suppose we have a language Z containing two atomic

propositions, P and Q. The probability table below specifies two distributions
over Z, cr and cr':
14-4 exercises 535
P Q cr cr'
τ T 2/3 6/11
τ F 1/4 3/11
F T 0 0
F F 1/12 2/11
(a) Create a comparative confidence ranking over all sixteen nonequivalent

propositions in £ that matches cr according to the Comparative Match
ing principle. Then show that cr' generates the same matching ranking
over the members of £.
(b) Now suppose you used the Ratio Formula to generate conditional
credences from cr and cr', then used those conditional credences to
generate matching conditional confidence comparisons. Show that cr
and cr' differ over whether the agent should be more confident in Q
given P than she is in P given ~Q.
Problem 14.5. Imagine our language contains the propositions ∕, K, and

L, and we want a representor that gives these three propositions the ranges
described below:
J : [0.2,0.5] K : [0.4,0.7] L : [0.6,0.8]
(a) Specify a representor associated with those ranges in which every

probability distribution assigns Pr(J) < Pr(K).
(b) Specify a representor associated with those ranges in which at least
one probability distribution assigns Pr(7) < Pr(K) and at least one
probability distribution assigns Pr(7) > Pr(K).
(c) What is the minimum number of distributions you could have in a
representor that would allow it to fulfill the conditions described in part
(b)? Explain why you need that many.
Problem 14.6. You have a coin. You’re certain that it’s either fair, biased with
a 1/4 chance of coming up heads, or biased with a 3/4 chance of heads. At t0
you divide your credence equally among those three chance hypotheses, and
you satisfy the Principal Principle. Then you start flipping the coin. Between
tQ and tl you flip it once and it comes up heads, between t1 and t2 it comes up
tails, and then between t2 and t3 it comes up heads again.
(a) For each of the times t1,t2, and t3, calculate your updated credence in
each of the three chance hypotheses, and your overall credence that the
next flip will come up heads.
(b) The first heads result you witness (between t0 and t1) changes your
overall credence in heads by a certain amount. The second heads result
you witness (between t2 and t3) also changes your overall credence in
heads by a certain amount. How do those two amounts compare? (If
you’ve been working in fractions, it might help to convert to decimals
here.)
(c) How does your answer to (b) illustrate the concept of resilience, and the
link between resilience and weight of total evidence?
Problem 14.7. Prove that if two distributions over the same language each
satisfy the Kolmogorov axioms, any linear combination of those distributions
will satisfy the axioms as well.
Problem 14.8. Jeffrey (1987) describes a representor containing two dis

tributions, Pr<j and Prr, over a language with atomic propositions A and B.
These distributions assign the following values:
Pr/A) = Pr<j(B) = 1/3

Pr^(A & B) = 1/9
Prr(A) = Prr(B) = 2/3
Prr(A & B) = 4/9
(a) Create a probability table for distributions Prfj and Prr.

(b) Show that Pηj and Prr each treat propositions A and B as probabilisti
cally independent.
(c) Use a probability table to specify a distribution Prs that: (i) makes
Prs(A & B) the average of Prq(A & B) and Prr(A & B); and (ii) is a linear
combination of Pηj and Prr.
(d) Show that your distribution Prs does not treat propositions A and B as
probabilistically independent.
(e) Use a probability table to specify another distribution Prf that: (i) makes
Prt(A & B) the average of Prg(A & B) and Prr(A & B); and (ii) makes A
and B probabilistically independent.
(f) Is Prt a linear combination of Pr^ and Prr? Explain why or why not.
Problem 14.9.
(a) The distributions Prx and Prμ specified in Figure 14.1 both make propo
sition A probabilistically independent of proposition B. Prove that they
also have a very curious feature: Any linear combination of those two
distributions also makes A independent of R.
(b) Suppose we have two probabilistic distributions Prfj and Prr which
agree that propositions X and Y are independent. Prove that if a lin
ear combination Prs of those two distributions also makes X and Y
probabilistically independent, then at least one of the following three
conditions must hold:
(i) Prs is identical to either Pr^ or Prr.
(ii) P√X) = Prr(X).
(hi) Prq(Y) = Prr(Y).68
Problem 14.10. Suppose P is a claim about which you have no specific

information—perhaps something obscure about the life of a long-dead author.
Yet you’re certain I know whether P is true (and am scrupulously honest). So
you take a fair coin, write “P” on its heads side, and “~p” on its tails side. You
then close your eyes, flip the coin, and ask me whether the side that landed up
has a true proposition written on it. I report that it does.
(a) Let H be the proposition that the coin lands heads. Explain why my
answer to your question is equivalent to telling you that P ≡ H.
(b) Suppose that before flipping the coin, you assign P a ranged credence
of (0,1), in recognition of your unspecific evidence concerning that
proposition. That is, for every real number strictly between 0 and 1,
there is a distribution in your representor assigning P that real number.
Suppose also that every distribution in your representor initially assigns
Pr(H) =1/2, and every distribution in your representor takes P and H
to be probabilistically independent.
Now suppose that when you learn P ≡ H, each distribution in your
representor updates by conditionalizing on this new evidence. After the
update, what range of values does your representor associate with P?
With H? (Hint: Try starting with a single distribution that assigns some
particular real value to P, and see what happens when you update it.
Then determine whether every other distribution will behave the same
way.)
(c) Suppose that in answer to your question I had instead reported that the
false side landed up. Assuming again that your distributions update by
conditionalization, how would your ranges for P and H have changed
in that case?
(d) Both Sturgeon (2010) and White (2010) see cases like this one as pre
sentingprima facie counterexamples to the traditional Conditionalization-
based method of updating ranged credences (and perhaps to the entire

ranged-credence regime). Do the results you reported in parts (b) and
(c) seem counterintuitive to you? Why or why not?
(e) Review your answers to Exercise 4.6—the “Speedy the racehorse” prob
lem. Does this change your opinions about the updates from parts (b)
and (c)?69
Problem 14.11.
(a) In the representor described by Figure 14.1, what expected value does
distribution Prx assign to a ticket that pays $1 if A is true and nothing
otherwise? What expected value does distribution Pry assign to such a
ticket?
(b) Suppose that representor describes your doxastic state, and I offer to
sell you a $1 ticket on A for $%. For what values of x will the minimax
decision strategy described on page 526 permit you to buy the ticket?
(c) Now suppose I offer to sell you for $y a ticket that pays $1 if A is false
and nothing otherwise. For what values of y will minimax permit you
to buy that ticket?
(d) Are there any values for x and y such that the minimax strategy will
permit you to purchase a pair of tickets that guarantees you a sure loss?
Explain why or why not.
(e) Are there any values for x and y such that the minimax strategy will
permit you to pass up a sure gain? Explain why or why not.
Problem 14.12. Each of the following is true of probabilistic credence

distributions. For each statement, replace all of the “cr”s with “Bel’s, then
investigate whether the resulting statement is still true. If it is, prove it. If it’s not,
provide a counterexample by supplying a Bel function and its corresponding
mass function m.
(a) For any cr and any proposition P, cr(~P) = 1 — cr(P).
(b) For any cr and propositions P, Q, if P 1= Q then cr(P) ≤ cr(Q).
(c) For any cr, specifying the cr-values of the state-descriptions in a propo
sitional language (or Boolean algebra) suffices to determine the cr-
values of all other propositions in the language(∕algebra).
Problem 14.13. Prove that a belief function is additive if and only if its
associated mass function assigns positive value only to state-descriptions.
Problem 14.14. If we start with two mass functions m1 and m2 defined over
the same Boolean algebra, Dempster’s rule of combination provides a four-step
process for generating a new, combined mass function m3 = m1 φ m2 over
that algebra:
1. Start by assigning m3(X) = 0 for every proposition X in the Boolean
algebra.
2. Now select propositions X and Fin 23 such that m1(X) > 0 andm2(Y) > 0.
Find the proposition in the algebra logically equivalent to the conjunc
tion of X and Y, which we’ll call Z. Then take the product m1(X) ∙ m2(Y)
and add it to the current value of m3(Z).
3. Repeat step 2 once for each pair of propositions in the algebra that receive
nonzero m1- and m2-values. Notice that in some cases X and Y may be
the same proposition, and in some cases the conjunction Z may be a
contradiction.
4. A mass function may never assign a positive value to a contradiction.
So set m3(F) = 0. Then normalize the remaining nonzero values of m3:
multiply them all by the same constant so that they sum to 1.
Let’s practice applying this combination algorithm!
(a) Let m1 be the mass function described on page 528 for the Urdu urn
testimony. Let m2 be the mass function described in Equation (14.20)
for the Swahili testimony. Suppose B, Y, and R form a partition, and are
all members of the Boolean algebra over which these mass functions are
defined. Use Dempster’s combination rule to calculate m1 φ m2. Then
construct the belief function corresponding to your result. (Hint: You
don’t need to consider all of the propositions in the Boolean algebra—
focus on those that receive positive mass- or belief-values.)
(b) Does this belief function strike you as capturing the intuitive upshot of
the combined Urdu and Swahili evidence?
Problem 14.15. This exercise will work through the details of Peter Wal
ley’s example from page 531.
Suppose we have a language whose two atomic propositions are H1 and H2,
representing respectively that each of two fair coin flips came up heads. Yet
the agent lacks any evidence as to whether the outcomes of these coin flips are
correlated. So we construct a representor, such that all of its distributions are
probabilistic, and all of its distributions assign Pr(H1) = Pr(¾) = 1/2.
(a) Imagine that the representor contains distributions representing all of
the possible ways in which the two coin flips might be correlated. Of
these, three distributions will be of particular interest. Let Prind be the

distribution on which the coin flips are probabilistically independent,
Prpos be the distribution assigning Hl ≡ H2 a value of 1, and Prneg be
the distribution assigning H1= H2 a value of 0.
Make a probability table representing the four state-descriptions of
our language, and the values these three distributions assign to each
one.
(b) Explain why Prpos will assign the lowest value out of all the infinitely
many distributions in the representor to H1V H2.
(c) Find the lower probability value associated with this representor for
each of the following propositions: Hl & H2, Hl 8c ~H2, ~H1 & H2,
~H1 & ~¾, H1, H2, and H1 V H2.
(d) Suppose we attempted to construct a belief function such that for each
propositionX, Bel(X) equalled As lower probability on this representor.
Explain why this construction would be impossible. (Hint: Investigate
the values of the associated mass function.)
(e) Does this impossibility result seem to you to present a problem for
Dempster-Shafer theory? Can you construct a belief function that is
intuitively faithful to the agents evidence in this case (even if it doesn’t
match the lower probabilities of this representor)?
Problem 14.16. Of the formalisms you’ve studied in this book, which do

you think does the best job of representing agents’ doxastic attitudes and what
rationality requires of them?
Peter C. Fishburn (1986). The Axioms of Subjective Probability. Statistical

Science 1, pp. 335-45
Excellent overview of the various axiom systems for comparative confidence,

and their intuitive strengths and weaknesses. (Note that Fishburn refers to
what we’ve called the Scott Axiom as “strong additivity”.)
Joseph Y. Halpern (2003). Reasoning about Uncertainty. Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press
Halpern’s Chapter 2 covers all of the formalisms discussed in this chapter, plus
a number of other formalisms for representing uncertainty. The coverage is
extensive and can get highly technical, but also is remarkably accessible at
times.
Richard Pettigrew and Jonathan Weisberg, eds. (2019). The Open Handbook
ofFormal Epistemology. Published open access online by: PhilPapers. url:
https://philpapers.org/rec/PETTOH-2
Contains excellent full-length survey articles on imprecise probabilities, com

parative probabilities, belief revision theory, ranking theory, doxastic logic,
and other related topics.
Liping Liu and Ronald R. Yager (2008). Classic Works of the Dempster-
Shafer Theory of Belief Functions: An Introduction. In: Classic Works of
the Dempster-Shafer Theory of Belief Functions. Ed. by Ronald R. Yager
and Liping Liu. Vol. 219. Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing. Berlin:
Springer, pp. 1-34
This volume introduction provides a useful overview of Dempster-Shafer

theory and its challenges, plus a history of the development of the theory.
Classic Texts
Charles H. Kraft, John W. Pratt, and A. Seidenberg (1959). Intuitive Proba

bility on Finite Sets. The Annals of Mathematical Statistics 30, pp. 408-19
Paper that disproved de Finetti s putative sufficient conditions for probabilistic

representability of a comparative confidence ranking, then provided correct
sufficient conditions to take their place.
Peter Walley (1991). Statistical Reasoning with Imprecise Probabilities. Lon

don: Chapman and Hall
Classic treatment of the mathematics of ranged credences.
Teddy Seidenfeld and Larry Wasserman (1993). Dilation for Sets of Proba
bilities. The Annals of Statistics 21, pp. 1139-54
First systematic mathematical analysis of the conditions under which ranged

credences dilate. Also includes references to early discussions of dilation in the
Bayesian literature.
Arthur P. Dempster (1966). New Methods for Reasoning Towards Posterior

Distributions Based on Sample Data. Annals ofMathematical Statistics 37,
pp. 355-74
Paper in which Dempster first introduced what came to be known as belief

and plausibility functions. (Though as I pointed out in note 65, he somewhat
confusingly referred to them as “lower probabilities” and “upper probabilities”
at the time.)
Glenn Shafer (1976). A Mathematical Theory of Evidence. Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press
Greatly developed Dempster s formalism and its interpretation, and made the
framework a go-to for a myriad of applications.
Extended Discussion
Terrence L. Fine (1973). Theories ofProbability: An Examination ofFounda

tions. New York, London: Academic Press
Comprehensive, insightful discussion of every aspect of comparative confi

dence, with many original results along the way.
sipta.org
Website of the Society for Imprecise Probability: Theories and Applications.

Contains resources and tutorials related to sets of probability distributions,
including references to new works and announcements of upcoming events.
Notes
1. We have now repurposed the and ‘W” symbols that were used in Chapter 7 to
indicate an agent’s preferences among acts. It would be nice to have different symbols for
the act preference relation and the comparative confidence relation, but these symbols
notes 543
are used almost universally in the literature for both purposes. So Γve chosen to follow
the literature here.
2. For recent discussions of this possibility, see Stefansson (2017) and Haverkamp and
Schulz (2012, p. 395).
3. Most authors who formalize comparative confidence don’t mention a Comparative
Equivalence rule. This isn’t because those authors are fine with an agent’s being more
confident in one logical equivalent than another! It’s because most authors define their
rankings over a Boolean algebra rather than a full language of propositions £. As
we’ll discuss in Section 14.3, a Boolean algebra is a proper subset of £> in which no
two distinct propositions are logically equivalent. Since a Boolean algebra contains no
distinct, nonequivalent propositions, authors working with Boolean algebras have no
need for a rule about comparing such propositions. But since we’re working with a full
propositional language £, I will include Comparative Equivalence among all the axiom
systems for comparative confidence we consider.
4. If you’ve run into technical talk about “orders” or “orderings”, you might wonder what
the difference is between a total preorder and a total ordering. For ≥ to be an ordering,
it would have to satisfy an antisymmetry condition: P ~ Q only if P =11= Q. If we
made ≥ antisymmetric but not complete, it would be a “partial ordering”; adding
completeness to a partial ordering would make it a “total ordering”. But for many
of the applications in which we’re interested, being equally confident in two logically
nonequivalent propositions is perfectly rational—consider the proposition that a fair
die roll came up three and the proposition that it came up four. So we will not treat
antisymmetry as a rational requirement, and will continue to assume only that ≥ is a
preorder.
(Thanks to Catrin Campbell-Moore, Kenny Easwaran, Jason Konek, Ben Levinstein,
and David McCarthy for helping me sort all this out and explain it clearly.)
5. Savage explains the intuition in a betting context. Suppose there is a partition of events
{A, B,C,D, ...}, and an agent gets to choose whether the occurrence of B or C will
win him a huge prize. Presumably the agent will choose B over C only if B ≥ C. Savage
writes, “It may be helpful to remark that [Comparative Additivity] says, in effect, that it
will not affect the person’s guess to offer him a consolation prize in case neither B nor C
obtains, but D happens to” (1954, §3.2), In other words, the agent should assign B>C
just in case he assigns B V D ≥ C V D.
6. I realize that Comparative Additivity was framed in terms of ≥, while this is an example
ofbeing strictly more confident in one destination than another. Yet given our definition
of > in terms of ≥, you should be able to prove from Comparative Additivity a similar
condition in which the “>”s have all been replaced by “>”s.
7. Notice that given our definition of > in terms of ≥, Comparative Matching implies that
P > Q just in case cr(P) > cr(Q). This will matter in examples later on.
8. Perhaps for this reason, Savage (1954, §3.2) referred to any ranking satisfying those six
conditions as a “qualitative probability”. While this label has lingered in the literature,
we’ll see in a moment that it’s somewhat unfortunate.
9. Here I follow the presentation in Fine (1973, p. 22). For explanations of how Kraft et al.
constructed their ingenious counterexample and how it works, see Krantz et al. (1971,
§5.2.2) and Suppes (2002, pp. 228-9).
10. For more pragmatic arguments supporting various comparative constraints as rational
requirements, see Savage (1954), Fishburn (1986), Halpern (2003), and Icard III (2016).
For accuracy-based arguments for and against comparative constraints, see Fitelson and
McCarthy (ms).
11. Just for illustration, here’s a quick argument for Comparative Transitivity from the
Scott Axiom, adapted from Suppes (2002, p. 230). Suppose our A-sequence is {P, Q, R},
and our B-sequence is {Q, R, P}. Since these equinumerous sequences contain the same
propositions, they have the same number of truths in each possible world. We pair the
members of the sequences in the order in which Γve listed them. Now suppose the
agent assigns P≥ Q, Q>R, and R> P. This ranking is forbidden by the Scott Axiom,
since the agent is strictly more confident of the last member of the A-sequence than its
paired member of the B-sequence, but is not strictly more confident of any member of
the B-sequence than its paired member of the A-sequence. So according to the Scott
Axiom, this kind of ranking is forbidden—if P > Q and Q > R, we can’t have R>P.
Given Comparative Completeness, it follows that P ≥ R, which is what Comparative
Transitivity requires in such a case.
12. I’ve endeavored to make it even easier to understand by rewriting the then part of
the Scott Axiom. In the context of Comparative Completeness, the then condition I’ve
presented is the contrapositive of the condition in Scott’s original formulation.
13. Suppes proves this highly nonobvious fact immediately after introducing the Continu
ity condition at Suppes (1969, p. 6).
14. Much like Suppes’s Continuity condition, these confidence conditions over infinite
languages work by stipulating that the agent has—or lacks—propositions available with
particular comparative profiles. For example, suppose the agent entertains propositions
about fair lotteries of every finite size. Then we can pin down the first digit of her
credence in any proposition P by establishing, say, that she is more confident in P than
in the proposition that one of the first three tickets in a fair ten-ticket lottery will win,
but less confident in P than the proposition that one of the firstfour tickets will win. If
we want to establish the first two digits of her credence in P, we can use a fair 100-ticket
lottery; and so on. Given the agent’s rich set of confidence comparisons, this method
determines a numerical credence matching the agent’s confidence in P to as many digits
as we like.
On the other hand, moving to an infinite language introduces new problems.
Depending on how one manages various issues around Countable Additivity (Section
5.4), it might be rational for an agent to be more confident in some contingent
proposition than in a contradiction, yet still assign each of them credence 0. This would
interfere with Comparative Matching. (Compare Savage 1954, §3.3.)
15. The Comparative Matching principle I’ve presented is a biconditional. Andre Neiva
points out to me that a credence distribution (partial or full) could model the present
example of incommensurability if we weakened Comparative Matching to “P ≥ Q only
if cr(P) ≥ cr(Q).” Essentially, we would be saying that while all aspects of the confidence
ranking must be recognized in the credence distribution, not all aspects of the credence
distribution must be realized in the confidence ranking. (Presumably some extra formal
feature would indicate which inequalities among the credences were to be treated as
“real”.)
notes 545
Another Bayesian approach to modeling incommensurability replaces individual

credence distributions with sets of distributions; we’ll consider that option in
Section 14.2.
16. This approach parallels the approach to rational assessment of partial credence distri
butions we saw in Section 12.2.1.
17. Compare Hawthorne (2016, p. 289, emphases in original): “Any [comparative] relation
for which there cannot possibly be a complete extension must already contain a kind of
looming syntactic inconsistency, owing to the forms of its definite... comparisons. It
manages to stave off explicit formal inconsistency only by forcing at least some... pairs
to remain incomparable.”
18. For an interesting discussion of representing confidence-ratio claims in the framework
of unconditional comparative confidence rankings, see Stefansson (2018).
19. This approach can be compared to the conditional-credences-first approach to proba
bilistic credence that I described in Section 5.4.
20. Though see Fine (1973, §IIF) for the suggestion that independence might be underde
termined by confidence comparisons, and so might have to be formally represented by
an additional relation grafted on top of the agents confidence ranking.
21. Again, the comparison to utilities is instructive: Unlike rational credences, rational
utilities need have no “top” or “bottom” outcome. If you like, a rational agents utility
dial need not have a maximum (or minimum). And even if we found two agents whose
utility dials each had a maximum, there’s no reason to suppose those maxima should
occur in the same place on the dials.
22. Ellsberg is perhaps more widely known to the general public for being the individual
who released the Pentagon Papers.
23. The El]sberg Paradox is most frequently cited as a risk-aversion counterexample to
Savage’s decision theory, along the lines of the Allais Paradox (Section 7.2.4). But while
Ellsberg does make the connection to decision theory, his (1961) is centered around
the assessment of conditions for rational comparative confidence.
24. Notice that the Zynda scale yields distributions that violate Finite Additivity. For
example, if we take the credence distribution from Equation (14.14) and apply the
relevant affine transformation, B receives a value of 7 and N gets a 4. These values add
up to more than the value of a tautology (10) on Zynda’s scale, so (given that we defined
B and N to be mutually exclusive) Zynda’s scale is subadditive.
25. The details get a bit subtle here. Given the Revised Representation Theorem of Section
8.3.2, credence distributions that are positive affine but not scalar transformations
of each other may yield different preferences when inputted with the same utility
distribution into a traditional decision-theoretic valuation function. This returns us
to the questions about confidence rankings and confidence ratios that I raised in the
discussion of conditional comparisons above.
26. For another example, return to our old friends Mr. Prob, Mr. Bold, and Mr. Weak,
who have the same comparative confidence rankings but differ substantially on relative
credence-gap sizes.
27. Harrison-Trainor, Holliday, and Icard III (2016) examine the axioms a comparative
confidence ranking must satisfy to be representable by a set of probability distributions.
28. To whittle the candidate distributions for the representor down to only these two would
take far more information than just the fact that Γm more confident in A than ~A
and R than ~R. Moreover, we’ll see later that some theorists think it’s impossible for a
rational representor to contain exactly two distributions. The representor in Figure 14.1
is offered as a simple early example to help us get the basics down—no realistic context
would give rise to a representor this sparse.
29. A few decades back it was customary to refer to non-point-valued ranged credences as
“numerically indeterminate credences”. This locution indicated that no single number
could properly be associated with the doxastic attitude in question. Nowadays, how
ever, the terminology is often shortened to “indeterminate credence” or “imprecise
credence”. I avoid these labels because they suggest that the doxastic attitude under
discussion is itself imprecise or indeterminate.
30. As a historical note, representors’ ability to convey probabilistic relevance judgments
was not an advantage Levi touted over mere numerical ranges. Using representors in
that way would have conflicted with Levi’s position on Convexity, which we’ll discuss
in Section 14.2.2. Most of the advantages Levi described in his (1974) concerned the
interaction of representors with decision theory.
31. See, for example, the discussion at Weatherson (2015, pp. 535ff.)
32. Compare Zynda (2000, n. 10).
33. Walley (1991, pp. 84ff.) offers a comprehensive list of mathematical properties of upper
and lower probabilities that follow from requiring the individual distributions in a
representor to be probabilistic.
34. Could we capture these four conditions with a comparative confidence ranking? To
get the incommensurability we’d have to use a partial preorder, and to represent the
independence condition we’d need conditional comparisons. But at a first pass, it
seems doable. Yet there are other ways in which representors outstrip comparative
confidence rankings as a representational tool. As we saw in Section 14.1.3, comparative
rankings typically underdetermine relative gap sizes between propositions, unless the
ranking satisfies a strong condition like Suppes Continuity. And gap size information
is important for such applications as decision theory. A representor, on the other
hand, may easily convey precise gap-size information (when the distributions in the
representor agree on various gap size facts).
35. Scott Sturgeon (2010, p. 133) discusses the possibility of ranged credences with impre
cise, “fuzzy” boundaries. But if we go that route, presumably whatever tools we use to
understand the fuzzy upper and lower probabilities of a ranged credence could equally
be applied to generate “fuzzy” point-valued credences. So Sturgeon’s suggestion confers
no particular advantage on ranged credences over point-valued.
36. Compare also Jeffrey (1983, §12.5).
37. Kaplan (1996, pp. 27-8, n. 27) criticizes this point-valued approach to representing
weight on the grounds that facts about the weight of an agent’s evidence concerning
a proposition should be reflected in the agent’s attitude toward that very proposition.
Suppose I go from having a 5-5 sample of the balls in the urn to having a 500-500
sample. Perhaps this change in the weight of my evidence should be reflected not just
in the credences I assign to various chance propositions, but also in the attitude I assign
directly to the proposition that Raj’s draw will come up black. If that’s right, then point
valued distributions lack the representational capacity to properly reflect evidential
weight, and we need a formal tool like a representor to do the job.
notes 547
38. Of course, we can also address these evidential features with ranged credences. For
example, when an agent has scant evidence, her representor might contain a variety
of flattish distributions over the available chance values. When her evidence increases,
this added weight will be reflected in representor distributions that are more peaked,
and therefore more resilient. The point is just that while balance and weight may be
reflected in either point-valued credences or ranged, we have yet to see a feature of
evidence that demands ranged representation.
39. While the risk/uncertainty distinction was introduced by Knight, it is often associated
with Keynes, and was indeed popularized by him (for instance in his 1937).
40. Just to emphasize that the weight of evidence is distinct from its specificity: Compare
the evidence you have after the stranger pulls the three objects out of his bag to the
evidence you had before he showed you any of its contents. The weight of your evidence
about whether the fourth object will be toothpaste clearly increases once you see the
first three items. Yet it’s not clear that your evidence becomes any more specific.
41. Joyce (2010), for instance, embraces this Objectivist approach.
42. Thanks to Jason Konek for helping me understand many of the issues in this section.
43. Here’s why: Suppose we have a representor containing two distributions Prx and Pry,
assigning proposition P values x and y respectively. Now let z be the average of x and y.
The Interval Requirement demands that that representor also include some distribution
Prz with Prz(P) = z. Yet the Interval Requirement doesn’t dictate what values Prz assigns
to other propositions. Convexity, on the other hand, requires that the representor
contain a single distribution Prz assigning every proposition in £ the average of the
values assigned by Prx and Pty. (That is, a distribution with a = 0.5.) There are many
ways to satisfy the Interval Requirement without including such a distribution in the
representor.
44. Does the Interval Requirement have a similar problem? Is it possible in every case
to supply a set of probability distributions that agree on the independence of two
propositions while also satisfying the Interval Requirement? While I don’t know
any formal results on this question, I think the answer depends on what additional
constraints on the representor we allow such cases to stipulate. For instance, Jeffrey’s
example (described in Exercise 14.8) supplies two distributions Pty and Prr that agree
on the independence of propositions A and B, but also agree on the probability ofA&~B
and on the probability of ~A&B. If we demand that every distribution in the representor
agree with Pty and Prr on those two values, while also making A and B independent,
then it’s not going to be possible to satisfy the Interval Requirement. (For instance,
there’s no probabilistic distribution that satisfies those requirements while assigning
a probability to A & B halfway between Pty (A & B) and Prr(A & B).)
45. The way I’ve been approaching things, the range associated with a representor for a
proposition is the tightest interval containing every real number assigned by some
distribution in that representor to that proposition. Then I’ve explained the lower
probability as the first of the two numbers specifying that interval, and the upper
probability as the second number. It follows that the ranges (0,1) and [0,1] have the
same upper probability, 1. In each case, 1 is the lowest real number such that every
distribution in the representor assigns a value equal to or below it. (Similarly, each range
has the same lower probability of 0.) It’s convenient to think of the upper probability
of a proposition as the highest value any distribution in the representor assigns to that
proposition. But that isn’t quite right; a representor that assigns black the range (0,1)
has an upper probability of 1 for black despite the fact that no distribution in that
representor assigns black that value. (In mathematical terms, an upper probability is
a supremum rather than a maximum, while a lower probability is an infimum rather
than a minimum.)
46. Note that we aren’t dealing here with the kind of infinitistic situation that moved us to
reconsider the meanings of extreme probability values in Section 5.4.
47. This objection to the closed interval would not bother Kaplan, because he denies (on
independent grounds) that one should always update by Conditionalization.
48. The somewhat herky-jerky structure of this example—in which your range narrows
from (0,1) to (1/100,99/100) and then stays at that value—occurs because you enter
tain a finite number of hypotheses about the possible contents of the urn. If in the
example you didn’t know how many balls were in the urn, and entertained literally
every positive integer as a possibility for the total count, then your range would
stay at (0,1) throughout. A similar effect often occurs when hypotheses concern the
possible settings of a continuous parameter, as with a coin of unknown bias. Thus
one finds many examples in the literature of the range (0,1) remaining “sticky” across
conditionalizations.
49. Pedersen and Wheeler (2014) say that proposition Q is “epistemically irrelevant” to
proposition P for an agent when conditionalizing on Q changes neither the agent’s
upper probability nor her lower probability for P. They say that Q is “stochastically
independent” of P for an agent when every distribution in the agent’s representor
treats P and Q as probabilistically independent. In those terms, the point of the present
example is that two propositions can be epistemically irrelevant to each other without
being stochastically independent.
(For what it’s worth, while I think Pedersen and Wheeler’s distinction here is
important, Γm not thrilled with the “epistemically irrelevant” terminology. That makes
it sound like any information that doesn’t change an agent’s upper or lower probabilities
doesn’t change anything about her doxastic state. But as I’ve been emphasizing, upper
and lower probabilities don’t capture all there is to say about an agent’s doxastic state.)
50. Here’s a somewhat silly analogy: Suppose you have a giant number line with at least one
person standing on each of the integers. I want the people bunched up close to 0, so I
tell you to have each of them cut the distance between themselves and 0 in half. Then I
go away for a while while you arrange things. When I return, I complain that there are
still people arbitrarily far away from 0! My complaint is ill-lodged; the trouble isn’t with
your execution of my order; it’s with what I expected that order to produce.
51. Some authors define dilation as applying strictly to cases in which the prior range is a
proper subset of the posterior range. While that makes a difference to the mathematical
conditions required for dilation to occur, I don’t see how it makes a difference to the
philosophical significance or plausibility of the phenomenon. So I have adopted a more
inclusive definition here.
52. For example, while setting up his critique of dilation Sturgeon at one point describes a
batch of evidence as meriting a ranged credence because it’s “rough”, then later in the
same sentence says the evidence requires a range because it’s “meagre”. These are distinct
NOTES 549
evidential features: evidence may be rough and copious, or evidence may be sharp and
meagre (Sturgeon 2010, p. 131).
53. Compare Joyce (2010, p. 300).
54. Here Γm ignoring various complications we discussed in Chapter 7, such as risk
aversion and the distinction between evidential and causal decision theory. General
izing decision theory to ranged credences is complicated enough without those extra
wrinkles.
55. Quick proof: If every probabilistic distribution in your representor finds all of the bets
in a set acceptable, then at least one probabilistic distribution finds all of those bets
acceptable. By the Converse Dutch Book Theorems described in Section 9.2, any set of
bets found acceptable by a probabilistic distribution cannot constitute a Dutch Book.
56. This possibility arises as soon as we go from a formalism in which each agent assigns
exactly one credence distribution to a formalism that represents an agents doxastic state
with multiple distributions. But the problem also arises if you go from a formalism in
which each agent assigns exactly one utility distribution to a formalism on which sets of
utility distributions are allowed. Many authors have been concerned about that version
of the problem as well.
57. Note that Γm using the term “global strategy” in a different way than Elga does in his
typology of ranged-credence decision theories.
58. Notice that Elga’s pair of bets is subtly different from the sort of “Czech Book”
described in Section 9.2. Elga’s bets are offered sequentially, at different times. If they
were offered at once, as a package, then every distribution in your representor would
evaluate that package positively. So every decision theory for ranged credences we’re
considering (global, local, or otherwise) would direct you to purchase the package and
take advantage of the guaranteed gain.
59. While this section touches on the interaction between Dutch Books and ranged cre
dences, you might wonder how ranged credences interact with representation theorems
and accuracy arguments. The classic representation theorem for ranged credences
appears in Jeffrey (1965); Jeffrey attributes the crucial mathematics to Ethan Bolker. As
for the proper way to measure the accuracy of ranged credences, this is also an unsettled
matter in the current literature. Miriam Schoenfield (2017) has even argued that on any
plausible measure of accuracy, adopting a ranged credence rather than a point-valued
credence can never be justified on accuracy grounds!
60. Strictly speaking, the mass function will assign 0.8 to some proposition in the Boolean
algebra equivalent to By Y∙,BV Y itself may not be in the algebra. I’ll take this caveat as
understood in what follows.
61. Throughout this section we will be working only with examples in which the agent
entertains a finite number of doxastic possibilities (possible worlds). In that context,
Bel-functions may simply be defined in terms of m-functions, as I did in the previous
paragraph. For contexts in which the agent entertains an infinite number of possibili
ties, we need a more general definition of belief functions, and it turns out that some
functions satisfying this definition cannot be generated from any mass function. For
more details, see Halpern (2003, pp. 33ff.)
62. In this discussion I always start with a mass function and generate a belief function
from it—largely because I find that direction most intuitive. If one wanted to work the
other way, one could think of the mass assigned to a particular proposition X as the
amount of belief assigned to X that isn’t inherited from belief in any proposition that
entails it. In the present Swahili example, BvY inherits some of its belief-value from B
(which has a Bel of 0.25). Yet there’s an extra 0.25 of Bel assigned to B V Y that doesn’t
come from any proposition that entails it, so m(B V Y) = 0.25.
63. This is a good example of a mass function that generates an additive belief function.
64. If you’re wondering how belief functions relate to comparative confidence rankings,
Wong et al. (1991) analyzes the conditions under which a confidence preorder is
representable by a belief function. (See also Capotorti and Vantaggi 2000.)
65. In Dempster’s early work, he referred to belief functions as “lower probabilities”
and plausibility functions as “upper probabilities”. But that terminology eventually
became associated most closely with the ranged credence view, and since the lower and
upper probabilities associated with representors can’t always be mapped to belief and
plausibility functions, Dempster-Shafer theorists agreed to employ other terminology.
66. How could two fair coin flips have their outcomes correlated (or anti-correlated)? Well,
suppose you took two fair coins, laid them edge-to-edge so that their heads sides were
both up, then glued them together. Flipping the joined coins would then yield two coin
flip outcomes, each fair, but perfectly correlated. (Gluing them together with one heads
up and one tails up would yield perfect anti-correlation.)
67. This problem is adapted from Krantz et al. (1971, p. 244).
68. I learned about this theorem from a manuscript by Richard Pettigrew, which says the
result is “in the background” in Laddaga (1977) and Lehrer and Wagner (1983).
69. For more on Speedy and the White/Sturgeon objections, see Hart and Titelbaum (2015).
Glossary for Volumes 1 & 2
accuracy A doxastic attitude adopted toward a particular proposition is accurate to the

extent that it appropriately reflects the truth-value of that proposition. 338
accuracy domination Given distributions cr and cr' over the same set of propositions,
cr' accuracy-dominates cr just in case cr' is less inaccurate than cr in each and every
logically possible world. 347
Accuracy Updating Theorem For any proper scoring rule, probabilistic distribution
cri, and evidential partition in £, an agent’s ti expected inaccuracy for updating
by Conditionalization will be lower than that of any updating plan that diverges
from it. 367
act In a decision problem, an agent must choose exactly one of the available acts.
Depending on the state of the world, that act will produce one of a number of
outcomes, to which the agent may assign varying utilities. 251
actual world The possible world in which we live. Events that actually happen happen
in the actual world. 26
admissible evidence Evidence that, if it has any effect on an agent’s credence in an

outcome of an event, does so by way of affecting the agent’s credences about the
outcome’s objective chance. 135
affine transformation Two measurement scales are related by an affine transformation

when values on one scale can be obtained by multiplying values on the other scale
by a particular constant, then adding another specified constant. The Fahrenheit and
Celsius scales for temperature provide one example. 294
Allais’ Paradox A set of gambles for which subjects’ intuitions often fail to satisfy the
Sure-Thing Principle; proposed by Maurice Allais as a counterexample to standard
decision theory. 262
analogical effects A cluster of effects involving analogical reasoning, such as: the
degree to which evidence that one object has a property confirms that another object
has that property should increase in light of information that the objects have other
properties in common. 214
analyst expert Expert to whom one defers because of her skill at forming attitudes on
the basis of evidence. 142
antecedent In a conditional of the form “If P, then Q,” P is the antecedent. 26

552 GLOSSARY FOR VOLUMES 1 & 2
atomic proposition A proposition in language £ that does not contain any con
nectives or quantifiers. An atomic proposition is usually represented either as a
single capital letter (P, Q, R, etc.) or as a predicate applied to some constants (Fa,
Lab, etc.). 26
balance The balance of a body of evidence relative to a particular proposition

indicates which way that evidence leans on that proposition, and how far it
leans. 513
Base Rate Fallacy Assigning a posterior credence to a hypothesis that overemphasizes

the likelihoods associated with one’s evidence and underemphasizes one’s prior in the
hypothesis. 97
Bayes factor For a given piece of evidence, the ratio of the likelihood of the hypothesis
to the likelihood of the catchall. An update by Conditionalization multiplies your
odds for the hypothesis by the Bayes factor of your evidence. 98
Bayes Net A diagram of causal relations among variables developed from information
about probabilistic dependencies among them. 75
Bayes’s Theorem For any H and E in £, cr(H ∣ E) = cr(E ∣ H^) ■ cr(H)∕cr(E). 61
Belief Closure If some subset of the propositions an agent believes entails a fur
ther proposition, rationality requires the agent to believe that further proposition
as well. 6
Belief Consistency Rationality requires the set of propositions an agent believes to be

logically consistent. 6
belief function Distribution used in Dempster-Shafer theory to represent a doxastic

state. 528
Bertrand’s Paradox When asked how probable it is that a chord of a circle is longer
than the side of an inscribed equilateral triangle, the Principle of Indifference
produces different answers depending on how the chord is specified. 147
Boolean algebra For purposes of this book, a set containing 22" logically nonequiv
alent propositions constructed from n atomic propositions using propositional
connectives. (The term has a broader, more abstract meaning in general mathe
matics). 528
Brier score A scoring rule that measures the inaccuracy of a distribution by its
Euclidean distance from the truth. 345
calibration A credence distribution over a finite set of propositions is perfectly cal

ibrated when, for any real x, out of all the propositions to which the distribution
assigns x, the fraction that turn out to be true is x. 340
catchall The proposition that the hypothesis H under consideration is false (in other
words, the proposition ~H). 64
GLOSSARY FOR VOLUMES 1 & 2 553
Causal Decision Theory Decision theory in which expected utility depends on an act’s
causal tendency to promote various outcomes. 267
center Picks out a particular time, location, and individual within an uncentered
possible world. 394
centered possible world An ordered pair of a traditional (uncentered) possible world

and a center within it. 394
centered proposition A proposition whose associated set contains centered possible

worlds. Centered propositions are capable of providing self-locating information. 394
classical probability The number of favorable event outcomes divided by the total
number of outcomes possible. 124
classificatory concept Places an entity in one of a small number of kinds. 4
closed interval An interval that includes its endpoints. For instance, if the range of
values assigned to a proposition by a particular representor is a closed interval, then
there will be a distribution in the representor that assigns that proposition its upper
probability, and a distribution that assigns the proposition its lower probability. 519
Clutter Avoidance principle Gilbert Harman’s famous principle that “one should not
clutter one’s mind with trivialities”. 429
coherent de Finetti (1937/1964) defined a coherent credence distribution as one not

susceptible to Dutch Books. Other Bayesians define coherence as satisfying Kol
mogorov’s probability axioms. And others simply take coherence to be synonymous
with rational consistency, whatever that requires. 335
common cause A single event that causally influences at least two other events. 73
commutative Updating by Conditionalization is commutative in the sense that updat
ing first on E then on E' has the same effect as updating in the opposite order. 94
Comparative Additivity For any propositions P, Q, and R in £, if P and Q are each
mutually exclusive with R, then the agent is at least as confident in P as Q just in case
the agent is at least as confident in P V R as Q V R. 487
Comparative Completeness For any propositions P and Q in 23, the agent is at least as
confident in P as Q or at least as confident in Q as P (or both!). 487
comparative concept Places one entity in order with respect to another. 4
Comparative Entailment For propositions P and Q, if P 1= Q then rationality requires
an agent to be at least as confident of Q as P. 11
Comparative Equivalence For any propositions P and Q in 23, if P =11= Q, then
P ~ Q. 486
Comparative Matching An agent is at least as confident in P as Q just in case her

credence in P is at least as great as her credence in Q. That is, for any P and Q in
23, P > Q just in case cr(P) ≥ cr(Q). 489
Comparative Non-Negativity For any proposition P and contradiction F in £, the

agent is at least as confident of P as F. 487
Comparative Non-Triviality For any tautology T and contradiction F in £, the agent
is more confident in T than F. 487
Comparative Transitivity For any propositions P, Q, and R in £, if the agent is at least
as confident in P as Q, and at least as confident in Q as R, then the agent is at least as
confident in P as R. 486
condition In a conditional credence, the proposition the agent supposes. 56
conditional bet A conditional bet on P given Q wins or loses money for the agent
only if Q is true; if Q is false the bet is called off. An agent’s fair betting price for
a conditional bet that pays $1 on P (given Q) is typically cr(P ∣ Q). 316
Conditional Comparative Matching For any propositions P, Q, R, and S in £, P ∣ R >
Q ∣ S just in case cr(P ∣ R) ≥ cr(Q ∣ S). 500
conditional credence A degree of belief assigned to an ordered pair of propositions,
indicating how confident the agent is that the first proposition is true on the
supposition that the second is. 56
conditional independence When cr(Q & R) > 0, P is probabilistically independent of
Q conditional on R just in case cr(P ∣ Q & R) = cr(P ∣ R). 68
Conditionalization For any time ti and later time tj, if proposition E in £ represents
everything the agent learns between ti and tj, and crz∙(E) > 0, then for any H in £,
cry∙(H) = cri(H ∣ E) (Bayesians, traditional updating rule). 91
confirmation Evidence confirms a hypothesis just in case the evidence supports that
hypothesis (to any degree). 195
Confirmation and Increase principle Evidence E confirms hypothesis H for a rational
agent if and only if any experience that increased her confidence in E would also
increase her confidence in H. 424
Confirmation and Learning principle Evidence E confirms hypothesis H for a ratio
nal agent if and only if learning E would increase the agent’s confidence in H. 414
Confirmation and Probability principle Evidence E confirms hypothesis H relative to
probability distribution Pr if and only if Pr(H ∣ E~) > Pr(H). 414
confirmation measure A numerical measure of the degree to which evidence E con
firms hypothesis H relative to probability distribution Pr. 225
Confirmation Transitivity For any A, B,C, and K in 23, if A confirms B relative to K
and B confirms C relative to K, then A confirms C relative to K. 201
Conglomerability For each proposition P and partition {Q1, Q2, Q3, ...} in £>, cr(P)
is no greater than the largest cr(P ∣ Qi) and no less than the least cr(P ∣ Qi). 153
conjunction P & Q is a conjunction; P and Q are its conjuncts. 26
Conjunction Fallacy Being more confident in a conjunction than you are in one of its
conjuncts. 39
Consequence Condition If E in £ confirms every member of a set of propositions

relative to K and that set jointly entails H' relative to K, then E confirms H, relative
to K. 203
consequent In a conditional of the form “If P, then Q,” Q is the consequent. 26
Consistency Condition For any E and K in 23, the set of all hypotheses confirmed by
E relative to K is logically consistent with E&K. 205
consistent The propositions in a set are consistent when at least one possible world
makes all the propositions true. 28
constant A lower-case letter in language £ representing an object in the universe of

discourse. 30
constant act A decision-theoretic act that produces the same outcome for an agent
regardless of which state of the world obtains. 288
contingent A proposition that is neither a tautology nor a contradiction. 28
contradiction A proposition that is false in every possible world. 28
Contradiction For any contradiction F in 23, cr(F) = 0. 34
Converse Consequence Condition For any E, H, H,, and K in 23 (with H' consistent
with K), if E confirms H relative to K and Hf & K 1= H, then E confirms Hf relative
to K. 205
Converse Dutch Book Theorem A theorem showing that if an agent satisfies partic
ular constraints on her credences, she will not be susceptible to a particular kind of
Dutch Book. 319
Converse Entailment Condition For any consistent E, H, and K^ in 23, if H & K 1= E

but K ≠ E, then E confirms H relative to K. 206
Convexity A convex representor that contains two distributions will also contain every
linear combination of those distributions. 518
Countable Additivity For any countable set {Q1,Q2,Q3, ...} of mutually exclu
sive propositions in 23, cr(Q1 V Q2 V Q3 V ...) = cr(Q1) + cr(Q2) +
cr(Q3) + ... 152
credence Degree of belief. 3
credence elicitation Structuring incentives so that rational agents will report the truth
about the credence values they assign. 342
cumulative Updating by Conditionalization is cumulative in the sense that updating

first on evidence E and then on evidence E, has the same net effect as updating once,
on the conjunction E & E'. 94
Czech Book A set of bets, each placed with an agent at her fair betting price (or better),
that together guarantee her a sure gain come what may. 319
database expert Expert to whom one defers because her evidence includes one’s own,
and more. 142
de dicto proposition Uncentered proposition. 410
de se proposition Centered proposition. 410
decision problem A situation in which an agent must choose exactly one out of
a partition of available acts, in hopes of attaining particular outcomes. Decision
problems are the targets of analysis in decision theory. 251
decision theory Searches for rational principles to evaluate the acts available to an
agent in a decision problem. 246
Decomposition For any propositions P and Q in £, cr(P) = cr(P & Q) + cr(P &
~Q). 34
decreasing marginal utility When a quantity has decreasing marginal utility, less
utility is derived from each additional unit of that quantity the more units you already
have. Economists often suggest that money has decreasing marginal utility for the
typical agent. 251
defeat in expectation Given distributions cr and cr' over the same set of propositions,
cr' defeats cr in expectation if cr calculates a lower expected inaccuracy for cr' than
it does for cr. 355
deference principle Any principle directing an agent to align her current credences
with some other distribution (such as objective chances, credences of an expert, or
credences of her future self). 141
Dempster-Shafer function Another name for a belief function. 527
dilation A ranged credence dilates when conditionalizing it on new evidence widens

the gap between its upper and lower probabilities. 522
direct inference Determining how likely one is to obtain a particular experimental

result from probabilistic hypotheses about the setup. 61
Disconfirmation Duality For any E, H, and K in £, E confirms H relative to K just in

case E disconfirms ~H relative to K. 207
disjunction P V Q is a disjunction; P and Q are its disjuncts. 26
disjunctive normal form The disjunctive normal form of a non-contradictory

proposition is the disjunction of state-descriptions that is equivalent to that pro
position. 30
distribution An assignment of real numbers to each proposition in language £.31

Dominance Principle If act A produces a higher-utility outcome than act B in each

possible state of the world, then A is preferred to B. 256
doxastic attitude A belief-like representational propositional attitude. 3
doxastically possible worlds The subset of possible worlds that a given agent enter
tains. 37
Dutch Book A set of bets, each placed with an agent at her fair betting price (or better),
that together guarantee her a sure loss come what may. 313
Dutch Book Theorem If an agent’s credence distribution violates at least one of the
probability axioms (Non-Negativity, Normality, or Finite Additivity), then a Dutch
Book can be constructed against her. 314
Dutch Strategy A strategy for placing different sets of bets with an agent over a period
of time, depending on what the agent learns during that period of time. If the strategy
is implemented correctly, the bets placed will guarantee the agent a sure loss come
what may. 318
Ellsberg Paradox A set of gambles proposed by Daniel Ellsberg, in which risk-averse

agents’ behavior seems to violate both standard constraints on confidence compar
isons and standard principles of decision theory. 503
entailment P entails Q (P f= Q) just in case there is no possible world in which P
is true and Q is false. On a Venn diagram, the P-region is wholly contained in the
Q-region. 28
Entailment Condition For any consistent E, H, and KinZ},ifE&KI=ff but K ≠ H,
then E confirms H relative to K. 201
Entailment For any propositions P and Q in E, if P 1= Q then cr(P) ≤ cr(Q). 34
epistemic standards Applying an agent’s ultimate epistemic standards to her total
evidence at a given time yields her doxastic attitudes at that time. Bayesians represent
ultimate epistemic standards as hypothetical priors. 107
epistemic utility A numerical measure of the epistemic value of a set of doxastic
attitudes. 346
Equivalence Condition For any H, H',E, E',K and K, in E, suppose H =11= H', E =11=
E', and K =11= K,. Then E confirms (∕disconfirms) H relative to background K just in
case E' confirms (∕disconfirms) H' relative to background K'. 200
Equivalence For any propositions P and Q in E, if P =11= Q then cr(P) = cr(Q). 34
equivalent Equivalent propositions are associated with the same set of possible
worlds. 28
ethically neutral A proposition P is ethically neutral for an agent if the agent is
indifferent between any two gambles whose outcomes differ only in replacing P with
~P. 287
Evidential Decision Theory Decision theory in which expected utility is calculated

using an agent’s credences in states conditional on the available acts. 266
evidential probability The degree to which a body of evidence probabilities a hypoth

esis, understood as independent of any particular agent’s attitudes. 131
evidentialism The position that what attitudes are rationally permissible for an agent
supervenes on her evidence. 130
exhaustive The propositions in a set are jointly exhaustive if each possible world makes
at least one of the propositions in the set true. 28
expectation An agent’s expectation for the value of a particular quantity is a weighted

average of the values that quantity might take, with weights provided by the agent’s
credences across those possible values. 247
extendable A partial credence distribution is extendable to a probabilistic complete

distribution just in case there exists at least one complete distribution satisfying the
probability axioms that assigns the same value as the partial credence distribution to
every proposition toward which the latter adopts an attitude. A non-total preorder is
extendable to a total preorder satisfying some set of norms just in case there is some
way to add comparative relations into the preorder so as to make it a total preorder
satisfying those norms. 432
Extensional Equivalence If two betting arrangements have the same payoff as one
another in each possible world, a rational agent will value them equally. 328
fair price An agent’s break-even point for a bet or investment. She will pay anything
up to that amount of money for the bet/investment. 248
falsification A piece of evidence falsifies a hypothesis if it refutes that hypothesis

relative to one’s background assumptions. 67
Finite Additivity For any mutually exclusive propositions P and Q in 23, cr(P V Q) =
cr(P) + cr(Q) (one of the three probability axioms). 32
Finite Additivity (Extended) For any finite set of mutually exclusive propositions
{Pυ P2, ∙ ∙., Pn}, cr(P1 V P2 V ... V Pn) = cr(P1) + cr(P2) + ... + cr(Pπ). 34
firmness concept of confirmation E confirms H relative to K just in case a probability

distribution built on background K makes the probability of H on E high. 208
frequency theory An interpretation of probability according to which the probability

is x that event A will have outcome B just in case fraction x of events like A have
outcomes like B. 125
frequentism A cluster of traditional statistical tools, promoted on the grounds that,

were they repeatedly applied, they would yield verdicts with a particular desirable
feature fairly frequently (or an undesirable feature fairly infrequently). 459
Gambler’s Fallacy Expecting later outcomes of an experiment to “compensate” for

unexpected previous results despite the probabilistic independence of future results
from those in the past. 68
General Additivity For any propositions P and Q in E, cr(P V Q) = cr(P) + cr(Q) —

cr(P & Q). 34
Gradational Accuracy Theorem Given a credence distribution cr over a finite set of

propositions {X1,X2,... ,Xn}, if we use the Brier score Ibr(cγ, ω) to measure inaccu
racy then: (1) If cr does not satisfy the probability axioms, there exists a probabilistic
distribution cr' over the same propositions such that Ibr(cγ', ω) < Ibr(cγ, ω) in every
logically possible world co; and (2) If cr does satisfy the probability axioms, no such
cr' exists. 347
higher-order credences An agent’s credences about her own current credences.

Includes both her credences about what her current credence-values are and her
credences about what those values should be. 171
HTM approach Formal system for updating self-locating credences inspired by the
work of Joseph Y. Halpern, Mark Tuttle, and Christopher ∫.G. Meacham. 397
Humphreys’s Paradox Difficulty for the propensity interpretation of probability that

when the probability of E given H can be understood in terms of propensities it is
often difficult to interpret the probability of H given E as a propensity as well. 168
Hypothesis Symmetry For all H and E in £ and every probabilistic Pr, the degree to
which E confirms H is the opposite of the degree to which E confirms ~H. 229
hypothetical frequency theory Interpretation of probability that looks not at the pro
portion of actual events producing a particular outcome but instead at the proportion
of such events that would produce that outcome in the limit. 127
hypothetical prior distribution A regular, probabilistic distribution used to represent

an agent’s ultimate epistemic standards. The agent’s credence distribution at a given
time can be recovered by conditionalizing her hypothetical prior on her total evi
dence at that time. 110
Hypothetical Priors Theorem Given any finite series of credence distributions

{cr1, cr2, ..., crfl} each of which satisfies the probability axioms and Ratio Formula,
let Ei be a conjunction of the agent’s total evidence at ti. If each cη is related to cri+1
as specified by Conditionalization, then there exists at least one regular probability
distribution PrH such that for all 1 ≤ i ≤ n, cr1(∙) = Pγh(∙ ∣ E,∙). 110
Hypothetical Representability Given any finite series of credence distributions

{cr1, cr2,..., crn} that the agent assigns over time, there exists at least one regular
probability distribution P⅛ such that for all 1 ≤ i ≤ n, cri(∙) = P⅛(∙ ∣ Ei) (where Ei
is the conjunction of the agent’s total evidence at ti). 386
hypothetico-deductivism Theory of confirmation on which E confirms H relative to

background corpus K just in case H & K⅛= E and K ≠ E. 242
ideally rational agent An agent who perfectly satisfies all the requirements of ratio
nality. 382
IID trials Independent, identically distributed probabilistic events. Trials are IID if the
probabilities associated with a given trial are unaffected by the outcomes of other
trials (independence), and if each trial has the same probability of producing a given
outcome (identically distributed). 87
immodest An immodest credence distribution is not defeated in accuracy expectation

by any distribution. 356
imprecise credence Alternative terminology for ranged credence. 546
inconsistent The propositions in a set are inconsistent when there is no possible world
in which all of them are true. 28
increase in firmness concept of confirmation E confirms H relative to K just in case

a probability distribution built on K makes the posterior of H on E higher than the
prior of H. 208
independence When cr(Q) > 0, proposition P is probabilistically independent of

proposition Q relative to cr just in case cr(P ∣ Q) = cr(P). 65
infinitesimal A number that is greater than zero but less than any positive real
number. 155
initial prior distribution Credence distribution assigned by an agent before she pos
sessed any contingent evidence. 106
interference effect Any effect of placing the initial bets in a Dutch Book that makes
an agent unwilling to accept the remaining bets (which she otherwise would have
regarded as fair). 326
interpretations of probability Philosophical theories about the nature of probability

and the meanings of linguistic probability expressions. 124
Interval Requirement If a representor contains distributions assigning a particular

proposition the distinct values x and y, then for any value z between x and y,
the representor must also contain a distribution assigning that proposition the
value z. 517
inverse inference Determining how likely a probabilistic hypothesis is on the basis of

a particular run of experimental data. 62
irrelevant Probabilistically independent. 65
Jeffrey Conditionalization Proposed by Richard C. Jeffrey as an alternative updating

rule to Conditionalization, holds that for any t1∙ and t7∙ with i < j, any A in £, and a
finite partition {B1, B2, . ..,Bn} in £ whose members each have nonzero cη, cry(A) =
crz(A ∣ Bi) ■ cry(B1) + cη∙(A ∣ B2) ■ cry(B2) + ... + cη(A ∣ Bn) ■ crj(Bn). 157
Judy Benjamin Problem An example proposed by Bas van Fraassen in which an
agent’s experience directly alters some of her conditional credence values, van
Fraassen argued that this example could not be addressed by traditional Condition-
alization or by Jeffrey Conditionalization. 161
just in case If and only if. 26
Kolmogorov’s axioms The three axioms (Non-Negativity, Normality, and Finite Addi
tivity) that provide necessary and sufficient conditions for a probability distri
bution. 32
language dependence A theory is language dependent when the properties it ascribes

to propositions vary depending on the language in which those propositions are
expressed. 218
law of large numbers Any one of a number of mathematical results indicating roughly
the following: the probability is 1 that as the number of trials approaches the limit,
the average value of a quantity will approach its expected value. 247
Law of Likelihood Evidence E favors hypothesis H1 over H2 just in case Pr(E ∣ Hγ) >
Pr(E ∣ H2)∙ In that case, the degree to which E favors H1 over H2 is measured by the
likelihood ratio Pr(E ∣ H1)∕Pr(E ∣ H2). 467
Law of Total Probability For any proposition P and finite partition {Q1, Q2,..., Q„} in
£, cr(P) = cr(P ∣ Q1) ∙ cr(Q1) + cr(P ∣ Q2) ■ cr(Q2) + ... + cr(P ∣ Qn) ■ cr(Qn). 59
likelihood The probability of some particular piece of evidence on the supposition of
a particular hypothesis—cr(E ∣ H). 62
likelihood principle Likehoodist principle explaining when two distinct experimental
observations should be taken to have the same evidential significance. 482
likelihood ratio Ratio of the likelihood of the evidence on one hypothesis to the
likelihood of that evidence on another. That is, cr(E ∣ H1)∕cr(E ∣ H2). 453
likelihoodism Position in statistics and philosophy of probability that endorses Hack
ing’s Law of Likelihood as our best tool for understanding evidential favoring. 467
linear combination When applied to three numerical variables, z is a linear combi
nation of x and y just in case there exist constants a and b such that z = ax + by.
For instance, Finite Additivity requires cr(X V Y) = cr(X) + cr(Y), making the
credence in a disjunction a linear combination of the credences in its mutually
exclusive disjuncts (with the two constants a and b each set to 1). When applied to
probability distributions, distribution Prz over language £ is a linear combination of
distributions Prx and Pry over £ just in case there exists some 0 ≤ α ≤ 1 such that
for every proposition P ∈ £, Prz(P) = a ∙ Prx(P) + (1 — α) ∙ Pry(P). 54
Lockean thesis Connects believing a proposition with having a degree of confidence
in that proposition above a numerical threshold. 15
logical omniscience requirement Requirement that an agent be certain of all logical

truths. 429
logical probability The degree to which a body of evidence probabilities a hypothesis,

understood as a logical relation similar to deductive entailment. 131
Logicality All entailments receive the same degree of confirmation, and have a higher
degree of confirmation than any non-entailing confirmations. 229
logically possible A world is logically possible when it violates no laws of logic. So, for
instance, a world with no gravity is physically impossible because it violates the laws
of physics, but it is logically possible. 37
Lottery Paradox Paradox for requirements of logical belief consistency and closure
involving a lottery with a large number of tickets. 8
lower probability The lower numerical bound of a ranged credence. 506
mass function In Dempster-Shafer theory, a non-negative real-valued distribution

over a Boolean algebra that: (1) assigns 0 to the contradiction; and (2) has values
summing to 1. Among other things, used to represent the significance of a particular
piece of evidence for the propositions in the algebra. 528
material biconditional A material biconditional P ≡ Q is true just in case P and Q are

both true or P and Q are both false. 26
material conditional A material conditional P D Qis false just in case its antecedent
P is true and its consequent Q is false. 26
Maximality For any proposition P in £, cr(P) ≤ 1. 34
maximin rule Decision rule that prefers the act with the highest minimum payoff. 252
Maximum Entropy Principle Given any partition of the space of possibilities, and
any set of constraints on allowable credence distributions over that partition, the
Maximum Entropy Principle selects the allowable distribution with the highest
entropy. 147
money pump A situation in which an agent’s preferences endorse her making a series
of decisions, the net effect of which is to cost her some utility but otherwise leave her
exactly where she began. Money pumps are used to argue that preferences violating
Preference Transitivity or Preference Asymmetry are irrational. 254
monotonicity If a property is monotonic, then whenever proposition E bears

the property, every conjunction containing E as a conjunct bears the property
as well. 101
Monty Hall Problem A famous probabilistic puzzle case, demonstrating the impor
tance of taking an agent’s total evidence into account. 102
Multiplication When P and Q have nonextreme cr-values, P and Q are probabilistically

independent relative to cr if and only if cr(P & Q) = cr(P) ∙ cr(Q). 65
mutually exclusive The propositions in a set are mutually exclusive when there is no
possible world in which more than one of the propositions is true. 28
negation ~P is the negation of P. 26
Negation For any proposition P in 23, cr(~P) = 1 — cr(P). 33
negative instance Fa & ~Ga is a negative instance of the universal generalization

(∀x)(Fx ⊃ Gx). 197
negative relevance When cr(Q) > 0, Q is negatively relevant to P relative to cr just in

case cr(P ∣ Q) < cr(P). 66
Newcomb’s Problem A puzzle that prompted the development of Causal Decision

Theory. Introduced to philosophy by Robert Nozick, who attributed its construction
to William Newcomb. 263
Nicod’s Criterion For any predicates F and G and constant a of 23, (∀%)(F% D Gx) is
confirmed by Fa & Ga and disconfirmed by Fa & ~Ga. 196
Non-Negativity For any proposition P in 23, cr(P) ≥ 0 (one of the three probability
axioms). 32
nonmonotonicity Probabilistic relations are nonmonotonic in the sense that even if H

is highly probable given E, H might be improbable given the conjunction of E with
some E'. 102
Normality For any tautology T in 23, cr(T) = 1 (one of the three probability
axioms). 32
normalization factor In an update by Conditionalization, state-descriptions inconsis

tent with E (the evidence learned) have their unconditional credences sent to zero.
The remaining state-descriptions all have their unconditional credences multiplied
by the same normalization factor, equal to the reciprocal of B’s prior. 119
normative distinction The normative distinction between Subjective and Objective

Bayesians concerns the strength of rationality’s requirements. Distinguished this
way, Objective Bayesians hold that there is exactly one rationally permissible set
of epistemic standards (/hypothetical priors), so that any body of total evidence
gives rise to a unique rational attitude toward any particular proposition. Subjective
Bayesians deny that rational requirements are strong enough to mandate a unique
attitude in every case. 129
null hypothesis Hypothesis assessed by a significance test. We typically select as our

null a hypothesis that explains the results of a given statistical trial (or the statistical
variation from one trial to another) entirely in terms of the chanciness of the process
generating the data. 460
objective chance A type of physical probability that can be applied to the single
case. 128
observation selection effect Effect on the appropriate conclusions to draw from a

piece of evidence introduced by the manner in which that evidence was obtained
(for example, the method by which a sample was drawn). 102
odds If an agent’s unconditional credence in P is cr(P), her odds for P are cr(P) :
cr(~P), and her odds against P are cr(~P) : cr(P). 45
open interval An interval that does not include its endpoints. For instance, if the range
of values assigned to a proposition by a particular representor is an open interval,
then there will be no distribution in the representor assigning that proposition its
upper probability, and no distribution assigning its lower probability. 520
ordering An antisymmetric preorder. 543
outcome The result of an agent’s performing a particular act with the world in a
particular state. Agents assign utilities to outcomes. 254
p-value In a significance test, the p-value of a particular hypothesis reports how

probable it would be, were that hypothesis true, that a sample would yield at least
as extreme an outcome as the one that’s been observed. 460
Package Principle A rational agent’s value for a package of bets equals the sum of her
values for the individual bets it contains. 328
Paradox of the Ravens Counterintuitive consequence of many formal theories of con

firmation that the proposition that a particular object is a non-black non-raven
confirms the hypothesis that all ravens are black. 197
partial distribution An assignment of real numbers to some—but not all—of the

propositions in language £. 430
partial preorder A preorder that does not satisfy Comparative Completeness. 497
partition A mutually exclusive, jointly exhaustive set of propositions. On a Venn

diagram, the regions representing propositions in a partition combine to fill the entire
rectangle without overlapping at any point. 29
Partition For any finite partition of propositions in £, the sum of their unconditional
cr-values is 1. 34
permissive case An example in which two agents with identical total evidence
assign different credences without either agent’s thereby being irrational. Objective
Bayesians in the normative sense deny the existence of permissive cases. 131
plausibility function In Dempster-Shafer theory, a real-valued distribution over a

Boolean algebra indicating how plausible each proposition is in light of the agent’s
evidence. 530
positive instance Fa & Gα is a positive instance of the universal generalization

(∀x)(Fx D Gx). 197
positive relevance When cr(Q) > 0, Q is positively relevant to P relative to cr just in

case cr(P ∣ Q) > cr(P). 66
possible worlds Different ways the world might have come out. Possible worlds are
maximally specified—for any event and any possible world that event either does or
does not occur in that world—and the possible worlds are plentiful enough such that
for any combination of events that could happen, there is a possible world in which
that combination of events does happen. 26
posterior The probability of some hypothesis on the supposition of a particular piece

of evidence—P(H ∣ E~). 63
practical rationality Concerns the connections between attitudes and actions. 7
predicate A capital letter representing a property or relation in language £. 30
Preface Paradox Paradox for requirements of logical belief consistency and closure in
which the preface to a nonfiction book asserts that at least one of the claims in the
book is false. 8
Preference Asymmetry There do not exist acts A and B such that the agent both prefers
A to B and prefers B to A. 253
preference axioms Formal constraints we assume a rational agents preferences satisfy

in order to apply a representation theorem. 292
Preference Completeness For any acts A and B, exactly one of the following is true:
the agent prefers A to B, the agent prefers B to A, or the agent is indifferent between
the two. 253
Preference Transitivity For any acts A, B, and C, if the agent prefers A to B and B to C,
then the agent prefers A to C. 252
preorder ≥ introduces a preorder on the members of £ if it satisfies Comparative

Equivalence and Transitivity. 486
Principal Principle David Lewis’s proposal for how rational credences concerning an
event incorporate suppositions about the objective chances of that event’s possible
outcomes. 136
Principle of Indifference If an agent has no evidence favoring any proposition in a

partition over any other, she should spread her credence equally over the members
of the partition. 146
Principle of the Common Cause When event outcomes are probabilistically corre
lated, either one causes the other or they have a common cause. 73
Principle of Total Evidence A rational agent’s credence distribution takes into account
all of the evidence she possesses. 102
prior An unconditional probability; the probability of a proposition before anything

has been supposed. For example, an agent’s prior credence in a particular hypothesis
Hiscr(H). 63
probabilism The thesis that rationality requires an agent’s credences to satisfy the
probability axioms. 33
probabilistic representability A total preorder ≥ over language XI is probabilistically
representable just in case there exists a probabilistic distribution Pr over £> such that
for any propositions P and Q in £, P ≥ Q if and only if Pr(P) ≥ Pr(Q). 489
probabilistically independent When cr(Q) > 0, P is probabilistically independent of
Q relative to cr just in case cr(P ∣ Q) = cr(P). 65
probability axioms Kolmogorov’s axioms. 32
probability distribution Any distribution satisfying Kolmogorov’s probability
axioms. 32
probability kinematics What Richard C. Jeffrey, its inventor, called the updating rule
now generally known as “Jeffrey Conditionalization”. 157
probability table A table that assigns unconditional credences to each member in a
partition. To satisfy the probability axioms, the values in each row must be non
negative and all the values must sum to 1. When the partition members are state
descriptions of a language £, the values in the probability table suffice to specify all
of the agent’s credences over £.41
problem of irrelevant conjunction Counterintuitive consequence of many formal
theories of confirmation that whenever evidence E confirms hypothesis H it will also
confirm H & X for various Xs irrelevant to E and H. 206
problem of new theories Traditional Bayesian updating schemes seem unable to
account for how an agent’s credences change when she comes to entertain previously
unconsidered possibilities. 418
Problem of Old Evidence On the standard Bayesian account of confirmation, evi
dence already part of an agent’s background corpus cannot confirm any hypothesis
for that agent. 416
Problem of the Priors Problem for Bayesian epistemology of how agents are to set the
priors that influence the outcomes of a Bayesian update. 447
problem of the single case The challenge of interpreting probability such that single
(and perhaps non-repeatable) events may receive nonextreme probabilities. 127
propensity theory Interpretation of probability identifying probability with a physical
arrangement’s quantifiable tendency to produce outcomes of a particular kind. 127
Proper Scoring Rule A scoring rule is proper just in case any agent with a probabilistic
credence distribution who uses that rule assigns her own credences a lower expected
inaccuracy than any other distribution over the same set of propositions. 358
proposition An abstract entity expressible by a declarative sentence and capable of

having a truth-value. 3
propositional attitude An attitude adopted by an agent toward a proposition or set of

propositions. 3
propositional connective One of five truth-functional symbols (~, &, V, D, ≡) used

to construct larger propositions from atomic propositions. 26
qualitative probability Any comparative confidence ranking ≥ that satisfies the Com
parative Equivalence, Transitivity, Completeness, Non-Negativity, Non-Triviality,
and Additivity conditions. Note that being a qualitative probability does not suffice
for probabilistic representability. 543
quantitative concept Characterizes an entity by ascribing it a numerical value. 4
ranged credence A doxastic attitude better represented by a range of real numbers

than by a single point value. 506
ratifiability Decision-theoretic requirement that an act is rationally permissible only

if the agent assigns it the highest expected utility conditional on the supposition that
she chooses to perform it. 271
Ratio Formula For any P and Q in 23, if cr(Q) > 0 then cr(P ∣ Q) = cr(P & Q)∕cr(Q).
The Bayesian rational constraint relating an agent’s conditional credences to her
unconditional credences. 57
reference class problem When considering a particular event and one of its possible
outcomes, the frequency with which this type of event produces that type of outcome
depends on which reference class (event-type) we choose out of the many to which
the event belongs. 126
Reflection Principle For any proposition A in 23, real number x, and times ti and t7∙
with) > i, rationality requires cri(A ∣ cry∙(A) = x) = x. 143
refutation P refutes Q just in case P entails ~Q. When P refutes Q, every world that
makes P true makes Q false. 28
regular A distribution that does not assign the value 0 to any logically contingent
propositions. 99
Regularity Principle In a rational credence distribution, no logically contingent

proposition receives unconditional credence 0. 99
relevance measure A confirmation measure that indicates confirmation just in case E

is positively relevant to H on Pr; disconfirmation just in case E is negatively relevant
to H on Pr; and neither just in case E in independent of H on Pr. 227
Relevance-Limiting Thesis If an update does not eliminate any uncentered possible

worlds, then it does not change the agent’s credence distribution over uncentered
propositions. 400
relevant Not probabilistically independent. 66
Representation Theorem If an agent’s preferences satisfy certain constraints, then

there exists a unique probabilistic credence distribution and unique utility distri
bution (up to positive affine transformation) that yield those preferences when the
agent maximizes expected utility. 291
representor A set of probability distributions used to represent an agent’s doxastic

state, especially a state containing ranged credences. 507
resilience A measure of how much an agent’s credence in a particular proposition is

apt to move in light of future courses of evidence. 515
Rigidity condition For any A in £ and any Bm in the finite partition {B1, B2, ...,Bn},
crj(A ∣ Bm) = crl(A ∣ Bm). This condition obtains between ti and tj just in case the
agent Jeffrey Conditionalizes across {B1,B2, ..., Bn}. 159
risk aversion Preferring an act with lesser expected value because it offers a surer
payout. 260
rule of succession Laplace’s rule directing an agent who has witnessed h heads on n
independent flips of a coin to set credence (h +1)∕(n + 2) that the next flip will come
up heads. 169
scalar transformation Two measurement scales are related by a scalar transformation

when values on one scale can be converted to values on the other by multiplying
by a specified constant. The pound and kilogram scales for mass provide one
example. 293
scoring rule A quantitative measure of the accuracy (or inaccuracy) of distri

butions. 341
Scott Axiom For any two equinumerous, finite sequences of propositions drawn from
^,{A1,A2, ..., An}and{B1,B2, .. .,Bn}∙. if in each ofthe agent’s doxastically possible
worlds, the A-sequence contains the same number of truths as the B-sequence; then
if there exists some i such that the agent is strictly more confident of Ai than Bi, there
must also exist some) such that the agent is strictly more confident of Bj than Ay∙. 492
screening off R screens off P from Q when P is unconditionally relevant to Q but not
relevant to Q conditional on either R or ~R. 68
self-locating information Information about what time it is, or where the agent is
located spatially, or who that agent is. 393
semantic distinction When classified according to the semantic distinction, Sub

jective Bayesians take “probability” talk to reveal the credences of agents, while
Objective Bayesians assign “probability” assertions truth-conditions independent of
the attitudes of particular agents or groups of agents. 129
separable A separable scoring rule measures how far a distribution is from the truth
one proposition at a time, then sums the results. 345
sigma algebra A set of sets closed under union, intersection, and complementation.
A probability distribution can be assigned over a sigma algebra containing sets of
possible worlds instead of over a language containing propositions. 52
significance level In a significance test, anyp-value below the pre-selected significance

level α suffices to reject a hypothesis. 460
Simple Binarist A made-up character who describes agents’ doxastic propositional

attitudes exclusively in terms of belief, disbelief, and suspension of judgment. 5
Simpson’s Paradox Two propositions may be correlated conditional on each member

of a partition yet anti-correlated unconditionally. 70
Special Consequence Condition For any E, H, H,, and K in £, if E confirms H relative

to K and H&,Kt= H', then E confirms H' relative to K. 203
specificity Specific evidence about a proposition provides unambiguous information

about that proposition’s probability, rationalizing the assignment of a narrow ranged
credence—or even a point-valued credence—to the proposition. 515
state In decision theory, an arrangement of the world (usually represented as a

proposition). Which state obtains affects which outcome will be generated by the
agent’s performing a particular act. 254
state-description A conjunction of language £ in which (1) each conjunct is either an

atomic proposition of £ or its negation; and (2) each atomic proposition of £ appears
exactly once. 29
straight rule Reichenbach’s name for the norm setting an agent’s credence that the next
event of type A will produce an outcome of type B exactly equal to the observed
frequency of B-outcomes in past A-events. 169
strict Conditionalization Another name for the Conditionalization updating rule.

The “strict” is usually used to emphasize a contrast with Jeffrey Conditionali
zation. 160
structure-description Given a specific language, a structure-description says how

many objects possess each of the available property profiles, but doesn’t say which
particular objects have which profiles. 213
subadditive In a subadditive distribution, there exist mutually exclusive P and Q in £

such that cr(P V Q) < cr(P) + cr(Q). 51
substitution instance A substitution instance of a quantified sentence is produced by

removing the quantifier and replacing its variable throughout what remains with the
same constant. 31
superadditive In a superadditive distribution, there exist mutually exclusive P and Q

in £ such that cr(P V Q) > cr(P) + cr(Q). 47
supervenience A-properties supervene on B-properties just in case any two objects

that differ in their A-properties also differ in their B-properties. For example, one’s
score on a test supervenes on the answers one provides; if two students got different
scores on the same test, their answers must have differed. 58
Suppes Continuity For any propositions P and Q in £ such that the agent is at least as
confident of P as Q, there exists a proposition R in £ such that the agent is equally
confident in P as she is in the disjunction of Q and R. 495
Suppositional Consistency Stipulate that c⅛(Y) represents the credence in Y that
a particular set of epistemic standards dictates relative to total evidence X, and
crx(Y^∣Z) = crx(Y & Z)∣cxx(Z). Then Suppositional Consistency requires of a set
of standards that for any propositions A, B, C in £, crA&c(B) = cγa(B ∣ C). 390
Sure-Thing Principle If two acts yield the same outcome on a particular state, any
preference between them remains the same if that outcome is changed. 261
tautological background A background corpus containing no contingent informa

tion, logically equivalent to a tautology?. 198
tautology A proposition that is true in every possible world. 28
theoretical rationality Evaluates representational attitudes in their capacity as repre
sentations, without considering how they influence action. 7
total ordering A complete ordering—that is, an ordering in which every pair of items
in the set gets compared. For an ordering to be total, it must satisfy equivalence,
antisymmetry, transitivity, and completeness. 543
total preorder ≥ introduces a total preorder on the members of £ if it satisfies
Comparative Equivalence, Transitivity, and Completeness. 487
Truth-Directedness If an inaccuracy score is truth-directed, altering a distribution by
moving some of its values closer to the truth and none of its values farther from the
truth will decrease that distribution’s inaccuracy. 351
Truth-Functional Bayesianism A Bayesianism that requires certainty in truth
functional truths, but not other kinds of logical truths. 434
truth-functional truth A proposition that is true by virtue of its truth-functional
form—by virtue of the arrangement of truth-functional connectives within it. 434
truth-value True and false are truth-values. We assume propositions are capable of
having truth-values. 3
uncentered possible world A traditional possible world, which maximally specifies

what events occur but is not centered on a particular individual or spatio-temporal
location. 394
uncentered proposition A special type of centered proposition: For any uncentered
proposition and any uncentered possible world, the set associated with the
uncentered proposition either contains all of the centered worlds indexed to
that uncentered world, or none of them. An uncentered proposition tells you

something about what the world is like, without telling you anything about where
you are in it. 394
unconditional credence An agent’s degree of belief in a proposition, without making

any suppositions beyond her current background information. 32
Uniqueness Thesis Given any proposition and body of total evidence, there is exactly
one attitude it is rationally permissible for agents with that body of total evidence to
adopt toward that proposition. 129
universe of discourse The set of objects under discussion. 30
upper probability The upper numerical bound of a ranged credence. 506
ur-prior Alternate name for a hypothetical prior distribution. 106
util A single unit of utility. 250
utility A numerical measure of the degree to which an agent values a particular

proposition’s being true. 250
valuation function In a decision problem, the agent’s valuation function combines her
credences and utilities to assign each available act a numerical score. The agent then
prefers the act with the highest score. 252
Venn Diagram Diagram in which an agent’s doxastically possible worlds are repre
sented as points in a rectangle. Propositions are represented by regions containing
those points, with the area of a region often representing the agent’s credence in an
associated proposition. 26
washing out of priors Bayesian convergence results guarantee that as evidence accu
mulates, conditionalizing agents’ credences will be more and more dictated by that
evidence and less influenced by the particular values of their priors. 455
weight The weight of a body of evidence relative to a particular proposition captures

how much information about that proposition the evidence provides. 513
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Index of Names in Volumes 1 & 2
Achinstein, Peter 215 Callahan, Laura 121

Adams, Ernest 79, 318 Campbell, Louise Firth 170
Alchourron, Carlos E. 22, 421 Campbell-Moore, Catrin 89,121, 377, 543
Allais, Maurice 262 Capotorti, Andrea 550
Allen, Woody 456 Cariani, Fabrizio 89
Amrhein,Valentin 481 Carnap, Rudolf xxiii, 4, 22, 54,102, 118,
Armendt, Brad 318, 322 121,131,195, 208-222, 229, 239, 240,
Arntzenius, Frank 86, 383-384, 410, 422
408 Carr, Jennifer 373
Arrow, Kenneth J. 308 Cartwright, Nancy 88
Carver, Ronald P. 480
Baird, Davis 460, 463 Chandler, Jake 470, 482, 483
Bandyopadhyay, Prasanta S. 478,479 Cherniak, Christopher 435
Barnett, Jeffrey A. 527 Chihara, Charles 231,234
Barshad, Amos 21 Christensen, David 16, 20, 299, 306,
Bartha, Paul 122, 442 323-324, 332, 335, 337, 416, 425,
Bayes, Reverend Thomas 61 437,442
Bell, Elizabeth 22 Clatterbuck, Hayley 87
Bengson, John 20 Colyvan, Mark 377
Berger, James O. 482 Comesana, Juan 241
Bergmann, Merrie 51 Cournot, Antoine Augustin 463
Berker, Selim 373 Cox, Richard T. 377
Bernoulli, Daniel 250 Craig, Bruce A. 480
Bernoulli, Jacob 125 Cramer, Gabriel 250
Bernoulli, Nicolas 279 Cresswell, Max 443
Berry, Donald A. 482 Cromwell, Oliver 120
Bertrand, Joseph 147 Cronin, Patrick 120
Bickel, P.J. 71 Crupi, Vincenzo 230, 234, 237, 240
Birnbaum, Allan 482
Bjerring, Jens Christian 435 Dalkey, Norman 277
Bolker, Ethan 549 Davidson, Donald 21, 277
Bolzano, Bernard 131 de Bona, Glauber 89
Bovens, Luc 194 de Finetti, Bruno 111, 132,165, 285, 299,
Bradley, Darren xxi, 120,241,412 310, 314, 321, 335, 336, 347, 372, 438,
Bramley-Moore, L. 88 457, 466,489-491
Bratman, Michael E. 479 Debowsky, Maria xxiii
Brier, George 375 DeGroot, Morris H. 496
Briggs, R.A. 378,399 Dempster, Arthur P. 527-533, 542
Broome, John 443 Descartes, Rene 205
Buchak, Lara 262, 276, 308 Dickson, Michael 460,463
Buchanan, B. 244 Domotor, Zoltan 501
592 INDEX OF NAMES IN VOLUMES 1 & 2
Earman, John xxi, 415,421,424,440, Hajek, Alan 85, 86, 87,121,165,167,168,

455,476 239, 283, 298, 307, 319-320, 377
Easwaran, Kenny 167,295, 339, 373, 543 Hacking, Ian xxi, 51,118,169, 336,441,
Eddington, A. 102 444,467, 477
Edwards, A.W.E 477 Hall, Monty 102
Eells, Ellery 234, 239, 244, 278, 279, 416, Hall, Ned 142
441,442, 444 Halpern, Joseph Y. 377, 396-403, 527,
Efron, B. 478 540, 544, 549
Egan, Andy 169, 270,407 Hammel, E.A. 71
Elga, Adam 165, 392,407,409, 512, 526 Harman, Gilbert 429-432,436
Ellenberg, Jordan 120, 249 Harper, William 270,279
Ellis, Robert Leslie 125 Harrison-Trainor, Matthew 545
Ellsberg, Daniel 278, 503 Hart, Casey 122, 550
Hartmann, Stephan 194
Feldman, Richard 129, 202 Haverkamp, Nick 543
Feller, William TΠ Hawthorne, James 232, 234, 245, 477, 545
Fermat, Pierre 248, 296 Hedden, Brian 336
Fine, Terrence L. 243, 377, 505, 542, Hempel, Carl G. xxiii, 195-207, 215, 228,
543, 545 230, 240, 243
Fischoff, B. 374 Hesse, Mary 215
Fishburn, Peter C. 308,494, 501, 503, Heukelom, Floris 278
540, 544 Hintikka, Jaakko 443
Fisher, R.A. 87,459-466,477 Hitchcock, Christopher R. 85,122,
Fitelson, Branden 22, 52, 87,89, 232, 234, 399,442
241, 244, 245, 442, 470, 481, 483, 544 Holliday, Wesley H. 545
Foley, Richard 15, 20,121 Holton, Richard 22
Folz, William 21 Hooker, C.A. 243
Forster, Malcolm R. 478,479 Hosiasson-Lindenbaum, Janina 152,239
Frigerio, Roberta 279 Howson, Colin xxi, 120,166,167, 318,
323,415, 421,449, 478, 479
Gardenfors, Peter 22,421 Huber, Franz 530
Gaifman, Haim 435,443,455 Hume, David 20, 243
Galavotti, Maria Carla xxi, 53, 87, 111, Humphreys, Paul 168
164,169, 243
Gallo, Valentina 279 Icard III, Thomas E 544, 545
Gandenberger, Greg 470,482
Garber, Daniel 416, 429,441, 444 Jackson, Elizabeth G. 19
Gibbard, Allan 270, 279 Jaynes, E.T. 147,166,173,450
Gillies, Donald 165 Jeffrey, Richard C. xxiii, 99,132,156-161,
Glass, David H. 244 168, 256-267, 271, 276, 286, 306, 376,
Glymour, Clark 204, 221,414-417,441 384,438,519, 536, 546, 549
Godziszewski, Michal Tomasz 336 Jeffreys, Harold 166
Gonzalez, Michel 230, 237 Johnson, WE. 243
Good, LJ. 22,121,199, 241,482, 506, 525 Joyce, James M. 88,172, 239, 277, 279,
Goodman, Nelson 215-221,240 286, 327, 341, 346-361, 372, 373, 374,
Greaves, Hilary 366, 372, 373, 375, 512-516, 527, 547, 549
376, 388
Greenland, Sander 481 Kadane, J.B. 172, 377,409,444
Griffin, Max 481 Kahneman, Daniel 38, 50, 97, 234, 262
INDEX OF NAMES IN VOLUMES 1 & 2 593
Kaplan, Mark 306, 519, 525, MacFarlane, John 411

546, 548 Maher, Patrick 243, 306, 307, 309, 354,
Kelley, Mikayla 375 421, 422
Kemeny, John G. 244, 318, 319 Makinson, David C. 8, 20, 22, 172,
Keynes, John Maynard 131,146,166, 278, 421
456, 513, 547 Mayo, Deborah 478,482
Kierland, Brian 399,412 Mayo-Wilson, Conor 479,481
Kim, Jaegwon 21 Mazurkiewicz, Stefan 53
Kim, Namjoong 395 McCabe, George P. 480
Knight, Frank Hyneman 516 McCarthy, David 543, 544
Koehler, Derek J. 282 McCartney, Mark 244
Kolmogorov, Andrey 32, 51 McKinsey, J.C.C. 277
Konek, Jason 376, 543, 547 McShane, Blake 481
Kornblith, Hilary 21 Meacham, Christopher J.G. 119,170, 307,
Kotzen, Matt 412 308, 396-403, 412, 442
Kraft, Charles H. 490-495, 541 Mellor, D.H. 442,452
Krantz, D.H. 496, 501, 543, 550 Monroe, Randall 481
Kuhn, Thomas S. 108 Monton, Bradley 399,412
Kvanvig, Jonathan 243 Moon, Andrew 22
Kyburg Jr., Henry E. 8, 20, 506 Moor, James 51
Moore, David S. 480
Laddaga, R. 550 Moore, G.E. 204, 356
Lance, Mark Norris 22 Morgenstern, Oskar 285
Lange, Alexandra 22 Moss, Sarah 20, 22, 88, 122,173, 337, 402,
Lange, Marc 173 526
Laplace, Pierre-Simon xiii, 87,124, Murphy, Allan H. 340, 374
169, 478
Lazar, Nicole A. 461 Neal, Radford M. 412
le Verrier, Urbain 442 Neiva, Andre 544
Leblanc, H. 53,152 Nelson, Jack 51
Lee, A. 88 Neth, Sven Moritz Silvester
Lehman, R. Sherman 319 245
Lehrer, K. 550 Newcomb, William 263
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von 131 Neyman, Jerzy 458,466,477
Leitgeb, Hannes 373, 378 Nicod, Jean 196
Lele, Subhash R. 479 Nozick, Robert 263
Levi, Isaac 101,118,121,408, 409, 410,
506,510,511,518, 527, 546 O’Connell, J.W. 71
Levinstein, Benjamin A. 376, 377, 543 Oppenheim, Paul 244
Lewis, C.I. 100,156 Osherson, Daniel 481
Lewis, David 78, 86,107,119,128,
133-141, 165, 224, 241, 270, 279, 317, Papineau, David 167
342, 356, 394-396, 408 Paris, J.B. 377
Lichtenstein, S. 374 Pascal, Blaise 7, 248, 296
Lindley, Dennis V. 120, 361-365, 373 Pearson, Egon 458,466,477
Liu, Liping 532, 541 Pearson, K. 88
Locke, John 15 Pedersen, Arthur Paul 548
Lubliner, Irving 89 Peirce, Charles Sanders 128, 442
Lynch, Kevin 22 Peterson, Martin 276
594 INDEX OF NAMES IN VOLUMES 1 & 2
Pettigrew, Richard 166, 336, 339, 371,372, Shimony, Abner 318,340,372

373, 378, 541, 550 Shogenji, Tomoji 226,241
Phillips, L. 374 Shope, R.K. 442
Piccione, Michele 410 Shortliffe, E. 244
Pollock, John L. 22 Simpson, E.H. 88
Popper, Karl R. 53,128, 152,169, 225, Skipper, Mattias 435
242, 483 Skyrms, Brian xxi, 51,171, 266, 308, 318,
Pratt, John W. 490-495, 541 322, 327,442,514
Predd, J. 359 Smith, C.A.B. 506
Price, Richard 87 Smithies, Declan 438
Pryor, James 241 Snir, M. 455
Sober, Elliott 449,471-474,476
Quinn, Warren S. 277 Spohn, Wolfgang 22
Sprenger, Jan 449,479,482
Ramsey, F.P. 76, 89,132, 285-291, 298, Staffel, Julia 54,122, 321,441,444
299, 306, 308, 309, 314, 322, 327, 335, Stalnaker, Robert C. 279,410,411
336, 374,442 Stefansson, H. Orri 502, 543, 545
Rees, Martin 479 Stephenson, Todd A. 85
Reichenbach, Hans 62, 72, 84, 85,169 Stern, Reuben 88
Reiss, Julian 449,479,482 Strevens, Michael xxi
Renyi, Alfred 152 Sturgeon, Scott 537, 546, 548
Resnik, Michael D. 276, 297 Suppes, Patrick 277, 292, 452, 486, 495,
Roche, William 241 543, 544
Roeper, P. 53,152
Rosenkrantz, Roger 347 Tal,Eyal 241
Rosenthal, Jeffrey S. 412 Talbott, William J. xxi, 382-383,
Royall, Richard M. 458, 468-470,473,477 407,428
Rubinstein, Ariel 410 Teller, Paul 118,335,336
Russo, Selena 240 Tennant, Neil 443
Tentori, Katya 230, 234, 237, 240
Salmon, Wesley 172, 235 Thomason, Richard 120
Savage, Leonard J. 246, 254-262, 276, Titelbaum, Michael G. xxiii, 88,121,122,
291-295, 306, 308, 376, 428,441,450, 166.172, 240, 243, 308, 402,403,407,
454-457,477, 489, 543, 544, 545 408,410, 411,412, 438, 443,444, 550
Schervish, M.J. 172, 377, 409,444 Turing, Alan 482
Schick, Frederic 329, 335 Tuttle, Mark 396
Schoenfield, Miriam 549 Tversky, Amos 38, 50, 97, 234, 262, 282
Schulz, Moritz 543
Schwarz, Wolfgang 88,410 Urbach, Peter xxi, 166,323,415,421,449,
Scott, Dana 491-496 478,479
Seelig, C. 421
Seidenberg, A. 490-495, 541 van Enk, Steven J. 483
Seidenfeld, Teddy 167,172, 377, 409,412, van Fraassen, Bas 86,142-145,148,
444, 523, 541 161.165.172, 318, 331, 340, 372,408,
Selvin, Steve 102 507, 523
Seuss, Dr. 277 Van Horn, Kevin S. 377
Shafer, Glenn 527-533, 542 Vantaggi, Barbara 550
Shakespeare, William 278 Vassend, Olav 442
Shapiro, Amram 170 Velasco, Joel xxiii, 22,119
INDEX OF NAMES IN VOLUMES 1 & 2 595
Venn, John 26,125,172, 243 Wheeler, Gregory 548

Vineberg, Susan 121, 334 White, Roger 129, 242, 451, 537
von Mises, Richard 125 Williams, J. Robert G. 52, 378
von Neumann, John 285 Williams, Jerome 88
Vranas, Peter B.M. 245 Williamson, Timothy 167,427
Winkler, Robert L. 374
Wagner, C. 550 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 53, 242, 308
Wainer, Howard 120 Wong, S.M. 550
Wald, Abraham 120 Woolston, Chris 481
Wallace, David 366, 372, 375, 388 Wright, Rosalind 170
Walley, Peter 527, 531, 539, Wronski, Leszek 336
541, 546
Wasserman, Larry 523, 541 Yager, Ronald R. 532, 541
Wasserstein, Ronald L. 461 Yalcin, Seth 89
Weatherson, Brian xxi, 169,172, 279, 411, Yule,G.U. 88
523, 546
Weintraub, Ruth 20 Zhao, Shimin 374
Weirich, Paul 256, 266 Zuboff, Arnold 410
Weisberg, Jonathan xxi, 166, 307, 308, Zynda, Lyle 307, 308,416,444,
517, 541 504,546

Fundamentals of Bayesian Epistemology Vol 1 and 2 - 2022

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Fundamentals of Bayesian Epistemology 1

Fundamentals of Bayesian Epistemology 2

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

1. Beliefs and Degrees of Belief 3

II. THE BAYESIAN FORMALISM

2.3.3 Using probability tables 43

5. Further Rational Constraints 123

Glossary for Volume 1 175

7. Decision Theory 246

IV. ARGUMENTS FOR BAYESIANISM

8. Representation Theorems 285

8.4 Exercises 304

9. Dutch Book Arguments 310

10. Accuracy Arguments 338

V. CHALLENGES AND OBJECTIONS

11. Memory Loss and Self-locating Credences 381

12. Old Evidence and Logical Omniscience 413

12.1.2 Solutions to the diachronic problem 417

13. The Problem of the Priors and Alternatives to Bayesianism 445

14. Comparative Confidence, Ranged Credences,

Glossary for Volumes 1 & 2 551

The Core Bayesian Rules

Non-Negativity: For any P in £, cr(P) ≥ 0.

Consequences of These Rules

Negation: For any P in £, cr(~P) = 1 — cr(P).

cr(P) = cr(P∣ Q1) ∙ cr(Q1) + cr(P∣ Q2) ∙ cr(Q2) +

Bayes’s Theorem: For any Hand Pin

Multiplication: P and Q with nonextreme cr-values are independent relative to cr if

0.1 What,s in this book

1. Agents have doxastic attitudes that can usefully be represented by assign­

Chapter 1 explains why it’s helpful to include numerical degrees of belief

0.2 How to read—and teach—this book

recommend that instructors try solving exercises themselves before assigning

Below Γve acknowledged everyone I can remember who provided advice on

Most of epistemology concerns propositional attitudes. A propositional

attributions of “binary” belief that have historically been significant in epis­

1.1 Binary beliefs

1.1.1 Classificatory, comparative, quantitative

In his (1950), Rudolf Carnap helpfully distinguishes classificatory, compara­

In Carnap’s famous example, describing the air in a room as warm or cold

Until the last few decades, much of epistemology revolved around

1.1.2 Shortcomings of binary b elief

disbeliefs, and suspensions—can make out no difference between my friends

Belief Consistency: Rationality requires the set of propositions an agent

Belief Consistency and Belief Closure are proposed as necessary conditions

1.2 From binary to graded

1.2.1 Comparative confidence

The previous section articulated both descriptive and normative difficulties

propositions quite differently when it comes to action. The second descriptive

D and not D IV and not IV

Figure 1.1 A confidence ranking

other words, I may view warming propositions and election propositions as

Comparative Entailment is intuitively plausible. For example, it would be

1.2.2 Bayesian epistemology

There is no single Bayesian epistemology; instead, there are many Bayesian

1. Agents have doxastic attitudes that can usefully be represented by assign­

The first of these principles is descriptive, while the second is normative—

Epistemologists sometimes complain that working with numerical

1.2.3 Relating beliefs and credences

attitude” means something like “variety of belief On this approach, binary

Now suppose some philosopher asserts a particular connection between

Foley presents the first sentence—identifying belief with sufficiently high

1.3 The rest of this book

There is a great deal of disagreement among Bayesians about exactly what

1. Agents have doxastic attitudes that can usefully be represented by assign

attributions of “binary” belief that have historically been significant in epis

In his (1950), Rudolf Carnap helpfully distinguishes classificatory, compara

1. Agents have doxastic attitudes that can usefully be represented by assign

Together, Non-Negativity and Maximality establish the bounds of our cre

Besides being represented visually in a Venn diagram, a probability distribu