Fundamentals of Bayesian

Epistemology 1 : Introducing
Credences Michael G. Titelbaum
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Fundamentals of Bayesian Epistemology
1
Fundamentals of Bayesian
Epistemology 1

Introducing Credences

M I C H A E L G . T I T E L B AU M
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom
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 to Colleen
without whom nothing is possible
 Contents

Quick Reference
Preface
0.1 What’s in this book
0.2 How to read—and teach—this book
0.3 Acknowledgments

VOLUME 1

I. OUR SUBJECT

1. Beliefs and Degrees of Belief

1.1 Binary beliefs
1.1.1 Classificatory, comparative, quantitative
1.1.2 Shortcomings of binary belief
1.2 From binary to graded
1.2.1 Comparative confidence
1.2.2 Bayesian epistemology
1.2.3 Relating beliefs and credences
1.3 The rest of this book
1.4 Exercises
1.5 Further reading

II. THE BAYESIAN FORMALISM

2. Probability Distributions
 2.1 Propositions and propositional logic
2.1.1 Relations among propositions
2.1.2 State-descriptions
2.1.3 Predicate logic
2.2 The probability axioms
2.2.1 Consequences of the probability axioms
2.2.2 A Bayesian approach to the Lottery scenario
2.2.3 Doxastic possibilities
2.2.4 Probabilities are weird! The Conjunction Fallacy
2.3 Alternative representations of probability
2.3.1 Probabilities in Venn diagrams
2.3.2 Probability tables
2.3.3 Using probability tables
2.3.4 Odds
2.4 What the probability calculus adds
2.5 Exercises
2.6 Further reading
3. Conditional Credences
3.1 Conditional credences and the Ratio Formula
3.1.1 The Ratio Formula
3.1.2 Consequences of the Ratio Formula
3.1.3 Bayes’s Theorem
3.2 Relevance and independence
3.2.1 Conditional independence and screening off
3.2.2 The Gambler’s Fallacy
3.2.3 Probabilities are weird! Simpson’s Paradox
3.2.4 Correlation and causation
3.3 Conditional credences and conditionals
3.4 Exercises
3.5 Further reading
4. Updating by Conditionalization
 4.1 Conditionalization
4.1.1 Consequences of Conditionalization
4.1.2 Probabilities are weird! The Base Rate Fallacy
4.2 Evidence and certainty
4.2.1 Probabilities are weird! Total Evidence and the Monty
Hall Problem
4.3 Priors and standards
4.3.1 Initial priors
4.3.2 Epistemic standards
4.3.3 Hypothetical priors
4.4 Exercises
4.5 Further reading
5. Further Rational Constraints
5.1 Subjective and Objective Bayesianism
5.1.1 Frequencies and propensities
5.1.2 Two distinctions in Bayesianism
5.2 Deference principles
5.2.1 The Principal Principle
5.2.2 Expert principles and Reflection
5.3 The Principle of Indifference
5.4 Credences for infinitely many possibilities
5.5 Jeffrey Conditionalization
5.6 Exercises
5.7 Further reading

Glossary for Volume 1

Bibliography of Volume 1
Index of Names in Volume 1

QUICK REFERENCE
 VOLUME 2

III. APPLICATIONS

6. Confirmation
6.1 Formal features of the confirmation relation
6.1.1 Confirmation is weird! The Paradox of the Ravens
6.1.2 Further adequacy conditions
6.2 Carnap’s theory of confirmation
6.2.1 Confirmation as relevance
6.2.2 Finding the right function
6.3 Grue
6.4 Subjective Bayesian confirmation
6.4.1 Confirmation measures
6.4.2 Subjective Bayesian solutions to the Paradox of the
Ravens
6.5 Exercises
6.6 Further reading
7. Decision Theory
7.1 Calculating expectations
7.1.1 The move to utility
7.2 Expected utility theory
7.2.1 Preference rankings and money pumps
7.2.2 Savage’s expected utility
7.2.3 Jeffrey’s theory
7.2.4 Risk aversion and Allais’ Paradox
7.3 Causal Decision Theory
7.3.1 Newcomb’s Problem
7.3.2 A causal approach
7.3.3 Responses and extensions
 7.4 Exercises
7.5 Further reading

IV. ARGUMENTS FOR BAYESIANISM

8. Representation Theorems
8.1 Ramsey’s four-step process
8.2 Savage’s representation theorem
8.3 Representation theorems and probabilism
8.3.1 Objections to the argument
8.3.2 Reformulating the argument
8.4 Exercises
8.5 Further reading
9. Dutch Book Arguments
9.1 Dutch Books
9.1.1 Dutch Books for probabilism
9.1.2 Further Dutch Books
9.2 The Dutch Book Argument
9.2.1 Dutch Books depragmatized
9.3 Objections to Dutch Book Arguments
9.3.1 The Package Principle
9.3.2 Dutch Strategy objections
9.4 Exercises
9.5 Further reading
10. Accuracy Arguments
10.1 Accuracy as calibration
10.2 The gradational accuracy argument for probabilism
10.2.1 The Brier score
10.2.2 Joyce’s accuracy argument for probabilism
10.3 Objections to the accuracy argument for probabilism
10.3.1 The absolute-value score
 10.3.2 Proper scoring rules
10.3.3 Are improper rules unacceptable?
10.4 Do we really need Finite Additivity?
10.5 An accuracy argument for Conditionalization
10.6 Exercises
10.7 Further reading

V. CHALLENGES AND OBJECTIONS

11. Memory Loss and Self-locating Credences

11.1 Memory loss
11.1.1 The problem
11.1.2 A possible solution
11.1.3 Suppositional Consistency
11.2 Self-locating credences
11.2.1 The problem
11.2.2 The HTM approach
11.2.3 Going forward
11.3 Exercises
11.4 Further reading
12. Old Evidence and Logical Omniscience
12.1 Old evidence
12.1.1 The problem
12.1.2 Solutions to the diachronic problem
12.1.3 Solutions to the synchronic problem
12.1.4 More radical solutions
12.2 Logical omniscience
12.2.1 Clutter avoidance and partial distributions
12.2.2 Logical confirmation and logical learning
12.2.3 Allowing logical uncertainty
12.2.4 Logical omniscience reconsidered
 12.3 Exercises
12.4 Further reading
13. The Problem of the Priors and Alternatives to Bayesianism
13.1 The Problem of the Priors
13.1.1 Understanding the problem
13.1.2 Washing out of priors
13.2 Frequentism
13.2.1 Significance testing
13.2.2 Troubles with significance testing
13.3 Likelihoodism
13.3.1 Troubles with likelihoodism
13.4 Exercises
13.5 Further reading
14. Comparative Confidence, Ranged Credences, and Dempster-
Shafer Theory
14.1 Comparative confidence
14.1.1 de Finetti’s comparative conditions
14.1.2 The Scott Axiom
14.1.3 Extensions and challenges
14.2 Ranged credences
14.2.1 Ranged credences, representation, and evidence
14.2.2 Extensions and challenges
14.3 Dempster-Shafer theory
14.4 Exercises
14.5 Further reading

Glossary for Volumes 1 & 2

Bibliography of Volumes 1 & 2
Index of Names in Volumes 1 & 2
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 ℒ, cr(P) > 0.
Normality: For any tautology T in ℒ, cr(T) = 1.
Finite Additivity: For any mutually exclusive P and Q in ℒ,
cr(P ∨ Q) = cr(P) + cr(Q).
Ratio Formula: For any P and Q in ℒ, if cr(Q) < 0 then
.
Conditionalization: For any time t i and later time t j , if E in ℒ
represents everything the agent learns between t i and t j , and
cr i (E) < 0, then for any H in ℒ, cr j (H) = (H | E).

Consequences of These Rules

Negation: For any P in ℒ, cr(~P) = 1 − cr(P).
Maximality: For any P in ℒ, cr(P) ≤ 1.
Contradiction: For any contradiction F in ℒ, cr(F) = 0.
Entailment: For any P and Q in ℒ, if P ⊨ Q then cr(P) ≤ P(Q).
Equivalence: For any P and Q in ℒ, if P ⊨ Q then cr(P) =
cr(Q).
General Additivity: For any P and Q in ℒ, cr(P ∨ Q) = cr(P) +
cr(Q) − cr(P & Q).
Finite Additivity (Extended): For any finite set of mutually
exclusive propositions {P 1, P 2, …, P n }, cr(P 1 ∨ P 2 ∨ … ∨ P n
) = cr(P 1) + cr(P 2)+ … + cr(P n ).
Decomposition: For any P and Q in ℒ, cr(P) = cr(P & Q) +
cr(P & ~Q).
Partition: For any finite partition of propositions in ℒ, the sum
of their unconditional cr-values is 1.
Law of Total Probability: For any proposition P and finite
partition {Q 1, Q 2, …, Q n } in ℒ,

Bayes’s Theorem: For any H and E in ℒ,

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.
 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 assigning 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 hypotheses. 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 arguments, showing how Bayesian norms help an agent
make her credences as accurate as possible.
Part V treats various challenges and objections to Bayesian
epistemology. 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 book in a semester. The pace is roughly one
chapter per week, with extra time devoted to Chapter 5 (by far the
most overstuffed 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 9, 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. Intuitions 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 probability exercises. Taking apart the guts of the Bayesian
machinery and reassembling 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
intriguing, 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 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 I’ve 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 discussions 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 I’ve 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 victim 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 phenomenal 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.
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 Comesaña, Vincenzo
Crupi, Martin Curd, Lars Dänzer, Glauber De Bona, Finnur Dellséen,
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, Michał Godziszewski, Simon Goldstein,
Daniel Greco, Max Griffin, Alba Guijarro, Alan Hájek, 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 Krämer, 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,
André 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 Stefáansson, 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 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

UR SUBJECT
 1
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 contrasting degree of belief
talk with other doxastic attitude attributions—especially attributions
of “binary” belief that have historically been significant in
epistemology. 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,
comparative, 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
comparison 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 theorizing 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.
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
quantitative attitude ascriptions in epistemology today.

1.1.2 Shortcomings of binary belief

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 friend’s 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 adequacy, 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.
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 friend’s 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 representational 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 I’ve 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 agent’s 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.”

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
earlier 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 agent’s
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 comparisons
between an agent’s 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 agent’s confidence comparisons as aspects of
an overall 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.
Figure 1.1 A confidence ranking

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 I’m more confident in warming than nonwarming
and in a Democratic loss than a win, I may genuinely be incapable of
making a confidence comparison across those two unrelated issues.
In 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 assigning 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 descriptive element; extensive coverage of
Bayesian epistemology’s normative content begins in Chapter 2. 13
I’ve 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
candidate’s. 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 consequences 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 may be an over-attribution in the actual case.
Numerical degree of belief representations also impose complete
commensurability. 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 representation assigns a
numerical credence to some particular proposition, that proposition
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 attitude” 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 possessing 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
sentence’s 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 credence. 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, normatively, 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 problems. 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 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 proposed 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 I’d 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.
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Reform Bills equals that of his Jew Bills, or the volumes of his Biography
of Moore! He seems to think that the story of the Sybilline books was
written expressly for his guidance and conduct, and that he is entitled,
after each successive failure and rebuff, to charge the constitution with an
additional per centage of radicalism by way of penalty. He becomes louder
and broader in his demands whenever they are negatived or postponed,
and seems in the fair way to adopt some of the views of the Chartists.
We do not say this lightly—by way of banter—or in regard of general
political disagreement. We never, at any time, reposed much faith in the
judgment or sagacity of Lord John Russell; and, of late years, our opinion
of him, in these respects, has, we confess, materially declined. We have
been, in our own sphere of action, engaged in most of the political
struggles which have taken place within the memory of the present
generation; and we trust that these have not passed by without some
wholesome lessons. To change of opinion, where honestly induced and
through conviction, every one is bound to be fair and lenient; because,
undeniably, in our own day there has been a great unravelment of social
questions, and mere party prejudice is no longer allowed to be paramount.
Perhaps the only living statesman of eminence, who cleaves to the old
system, and is inveterate in his addiction to party intrigue, and what he
calls “tradition,” is Lord John Russell. Put him into Utopia, and his first
thought would be how he might establish the exclusive supremacy of the
Whigs. He is so much and so inveterately a party man, that he seems to
care little what becomes of the country, provided only that he, and his, sit
at the receipt of customs. He showed that long ago—not in the days of his
hot youth, but in those of his pragmatic manhood. He—the Whig
Constitutionalist—characterised the opinion of the Upper House as “the
whisper of a faction;” and did not disdain the violent and frantic sympathy
of mobs when such demonstrations tended to his own particular purpose,
or aided the ascendancy of his party. Ever since he has pursued the same
course. No man can tell when he is in thorough earnest, or when he is not.
He invited, by word and deed, Papal aggression; and, when the aggression
came, he started up at once, as an indignant Protestant champion, and
flung down his diminutive gauntlet, in name of Great Britain, to the Pope!
And yet, at the bidding of the Irish Roman Catholic phalanx, we find this
second Luther a strenuous supporter of Maynooth, and of the nunneries!
Had his ancestor John, the first Lord Russell—who in 1540, and 1550,
obtained grants from the Crown of the possessions of the Abbey of
Tavistock and the Monastery of Woburn—been equally zealous for the
protection of convents, he probably would have remained, as he was born,
an utterly unacred gentleman.
 The proposed Reform Bill of 1852 did not attract a large share of the
public attention, and that for two reasons. In the first place, the country
was quite apathetic on the subject; and in the second place, it was
introduced at a time when the Whigs were tottering to their fall.
Nevertheless, it is a remarkable document, inasmuch as we may conclude
it to embody the experiences and observation of Lord John Russell upon
the working of our representative system during a period of exactly twenty
years. That there should have been some defects in the machinery of the
engine which he invented in 1832, is not wonderful; nor can we call him
rash for essaying, after so long an interval, to remedy these defects
according to the best of his judgment. His position in 1852 was this:—He
told the House, that he, the mechanist of 1832, was now prepared, from
the results of twenty years’ observation, to introduce certain
improvements which would have the effect, for a long time coming, of
preventing the necessity of any further change. The improvements he
proposed were these:—The qualification in towns was to be reduced from
£10 to £5; and in counties from £50 to £20. Every man paying 40s. a-year
of direct taxes was to be entitled to vote. There was to be no
disfranchisement of boroughs, but the smaller ones were to receive an
infusion of fresh blood by the incorporation of adjoining villages. No
property qualification was to be required for members, and the
parliamentary oaths were to be modified, so as to allow the admission of
Jews and other unbelievers in the Christian faith. Such were the chief
features of the proposed measure of 1852, as laid before the House of
Commons by Lord John Russell, then Prime Minister. Wise or unwise,
they were the conclusions which he had formed as to the change necessary
to be made in the English representative system; and we must assume that
he had not formed them without due thought and matured investigation.
That both the necessity for, and the nature of the change were seriously
considered by him and his colleagues in the Cabinet, it would be unfair
and irrational to doubt; and we must therefore hold that the provisions of
the bill were regarded by them not only as wise and salutary, but as the
very best which their collective wisdom could devise.
If, in 1852, this bill had been rejected by a majority of the House of
Commons, Lord John might either have remodelled it, so as to meet the
more obvious objections, or have again introduced it, without alteration,
for the consideration of another parliament. But it was not rejected by the
House, and its merits were never thoroughly discussed throughout the
country. It was, as we have said, introduced at a time when the Whig
ministry were obviously in the death throes, and in February of that year
they tendered their resignation. The bill accordingly fell to the ground
before judgment could be pronounced upon it. The public at large seemed
to care nothing about it. There was no enthusiasm manifested at its
introduction, and no disappointment expressed at its withdrawal.
The scheme, therefore, of 1852, was not only untried but uncondemned.
Nothing had occurred that could reasonably shake the confidence of the
deviser in its prudence, correctness, or aptitude for the necessities of the
country; unless we are to suppose that he felt somewhat disappointed by
the exceedingly cold and indifferent nature of its reception. That, however,
could not be taken as any distinct criterion of its merits. We are not to
suppose that Lord John Russell, in framing that bill, merely looked to the
popularity which he and his party might attain thereby, or the future
advantages which it might secure to them. We are bound, on the contrary,
to assume that he, being then Premier, and in the very highest responsible
position, was acting in perfectly good faith, and had embodied in the bill
the results of his long experience and observation.
Now, mark what follows. In 1853, he again pledges himself to introduce
a measure for the amendment of the Parliamentary representation; and
redeems his pledge by bringing out, early in 1854, a measure totally
different from that which he recommended in 1852! The great points of
difference are these: By the one, the boroughs were to be preserved, and in
some cases enlarged; by the other, they are to be disfranchised to the
amount of sixty-six members. The bill of 1852 maintained the distinction
between town and county qualification—that of 1854 abolishes such
distinction. The first proceeded upon the plain principle that majorities
alone were to be represented—the second, in special cases, assigns a
member to minorities. In short, the two bills have no kind of family
resemblance. They are not parallel, but entirely antagonistic schemes; and
it is almost impossible, after perusing them both, to believe that they are
the productions of the same statesman.
Nothing, it will be conceded on all hands, has occurred during the last
two years, to justify such an extraordinary change of sentiment. We have
had in the interim a general election, the result of which has been that a
Coalition Ministry, numbering Lord John Russell among its members, is
presently in power. Trade, we are told, is in the highest degree flourishing;
and the prosperity of the country has been made a topic of distinct
congratulation. Search as closely as you please, you will find no external
reason to account for so prodigious a change of opinion. The potato-rot
and famine were the visible reasons assigned for Sir Robert Peel’s change
of opinion on the subject of protective duties—but what reasons can Lord
John Russell propound for this prodigious wrench at the constitution? He
cannot say that the proposals in both his bills are sound, safe, and
judicious. The one belies and utterly condemns the other. If his last idea of
disfranchising and reducing sixty-six English borough constituencies is a
just one, he must have erred grievously in 1852 when he proposed to
retain them. So with the other provisions. If he intends to maintain that he
has now hit upon the true remedy, he must perforce admit that he has
acquired more wisdom in 1853 than was vouchsafed him during the
twenty previous years of his political career. He must admit that he was
totally and egregiously wrong in 1852; and he has no loophole for apology
on the ground of intervening circumstances. Really we do not believe that
there is a parallel instance of a British minister having voluntarily placed
himself in such a predicament. How is it possible that he can expect his
friends, independent of the mere official staff, to support, in 1854, a
measure diametrically opposite to that which was propounded in 1852?
No wonder that Earl Grey and other influential Whigs are most desirous
to have the measure withdrawn without provoking a regular discussion.
Some of them may not have approved of the former bill; but those who did
so, or who were at all events willing to have let it pass, can hardly, if they
wish to be consistent, give their sanction to the present one. It is not Lord
John Russell alone who is compromised; he is compromising the whole of
his party. If they thought him right in 1852, they must think him wrong in
1854; for he cannot point to the smallest intervening fact to justify his
change of principle. And if they think him wrong, how can they possibly
support him? We do not believe that he can reckon on the support of the
high-minded Whigs of England. They have principle and honour and
character to maintain; and we think it exceedingly improbable that they
will allow themselves to be swept into the howling Maëlstrom of
Radicalism. Rather than that, we venture to predict that they will toss the
rash little pilot, whose incapacity and want of knowledge are now self-
confessed, overboard, and trust to the direction of an abler and more
consistent member of the crew.
Be that as it may, we must try if possible to ascertain what cause has
operated to produce this singular and rapid change in the opinions, or
rather convictions, of Lord John Russell on the subject of Parliamentary
Reform. As we have said already, there are no external circumstances,
either apparent or alleged, to account for it. The boroughs have done
nothing to subject them to the penalty of disfranchisement; the counties
have done nothing to entitle them to a considerable addition of members.
To use diplomatic language, the status quo has been rigidly observed.
Well, then, in the absence of any such tangible reason, we must
necessarily fall back upon motives, the first of which is the advice and
representation of confederates.
 We at once acquit Lord Aberdeen and the majority of the Cabinet of any
real participation in the scheme of Lord John Russell. What may be the
mind of Sir James Graham and Sir William Molesworth on the subject, we
cannot tell, but we are tolerably sure that no other minister regards the
bill with favour. Even the members of the Manchester party do not seem
to consider it as an especial boon. Mr Bright knows well enough that a
new reform bill, if carried, cannot be disturbed for a number of years to
come; and as this one does not come up to his expectations, he is ready to
oppose it. Indeed, it seems to satisfy none of the extreme party beyond old
Joseph Hume, who, for some reason or other to us unknown, has of late
years been in the habit of spreading his ægis from the back seats of the
Treasury bench over the head of the noble Lord, the member for London.
The voice of the ten-pounders, as a body, was not favourable in 1852 to
the lowering of the franchise; and we have heard no counter-clamour from
the class who were and are proposed to be admitted to that privilege. The
Whig aristocracy, naturally enough, regard this bill with peculiar
bitterness. Therefore we do not think that the astonishing change of
opinion, or rather of principle exhibited by Lord John Russell, is to be
traced either to the advice of colleagues, or the influence of more matured
democrats. Our own theory is this—that he never had, as regarded
improvements on the form of the constitution or the representation,
anything like a fixed principle—that he was striking just as much at
random in 1852 as in 1854; and that, so far from having any settled or
original ideas of his own, he grasps at any which may be presented to him
with extreme recklessness and avidity.
We are quite aware that it would be, to say the least of it, gross
impertinence to make any such statement, or to express any such opinion,
without reasonable and rational grounds. We should be very sorry to do so
at any time, but more especially at the present, when we wish to see
Ministers disembarrassed of all perplexing questions at home. But it is
their fault, not ours, if we are forced to make the disclosure; and to show
that, in reality, the grand mechanist of 1832 had so forgotten his craft, if
he ever had a due knowledge of it, that after his last abortive effort, in
1852, he was fain to derive new notions from the pages of the Edinburgh
Review. In saying this, we intend anything but an insinuation against the
talents of the author of the articles to which we refer. We can admire the
ingenuity of his arguments, even while we question their soundness. We
have no right to be curious as to what section of politicians he belongs. He
may represent the philosophic Liberals, or he may be the champion of
Manchester in disguise. All we know is, that he has written three plausible
articles, after the manner of Ignatius Loyola, the result of which has been
that poor Lord John Russell has plunged into the marsh, misled by the
ignis fatuus, and is at the present moment very deep in a quagmire.
Some of our readers will doubtless remember that, during the autumn
of 1851, various pompous paragraphs appeared in the Whig newspapers,
announcing that Lord John Russell had withdrawn himself to country
retirement, for the purpose of maturing a grand and comprehensive
scheme of Parliamentary Reform. The task was entirely gratuitous and
self-imposed; for although the venerable Joseph Hume, Sir Joshua
Walmsley, and a few other Saint Bernards of the like calibre, had
attempted to preach up an itinerant crusade, their efforts met with no
response, and their harangues excited no enthusiasm. Nobody wanted a
new Reform Bill. The class which, of all others, was most opposed to
innovation, embraced the bulk of the shopkeepers in towns, who, having
attained considerable political and municipal influence, were very
unwilling to share it with others, and regarded the lowering of the
franchise not only with a jealous but with an absolutely hostile eye. It was
upon the shoulders of that class that the Whigs had been carried into
power; and it really seemed but a paltry return for their support and
devotion, that a Prime Minister, upon whom they had lavished all their
honours, should attempt to swamp their influence without any adequate
reason. It would be absurd or unfair to charge them with selfishness. The
first Reform Bill, acceded to and hailed by the great mass of the people,
had established a certain property qualification for voters; and no one
could allege that popular opinion was not sufficiently represented in the
House of Commons. Nay, many of the Whigs began to think that popular
opinion was too exclusively represented therein, and did not scruple to say
so. Anyhow, the Bill had so worked that there, in 1851, was Lord John
Russell, its parent and promoter, in the office of Premier of Great Britain,
and in the command of a parliamentary majority. Small marvel if the ten-
pounders asked themselves the question, what, in the name of gluttony,
he could covet more?
They were quite entitled to ask that question, not only of themselves,
but of the singular statesman whom they had been content to follow.
Could he state that there was any measure, not revolutionary, but such as
they and other well-disposed subjects of the realm desired, which he was
prevented from introducing by the aristocratic character of the House of
Commons? Certainly not. The triumph of the Free-trade policy was a
distinct proof to the contrary. Was there any discontent in the country at
the present distribution of the franchise? Nothing of the kind. The apathy
was so great that even those entitled to enrolment would hardly prefer
their claims. Even the enrolled cared little about voting—so little, indeed,
that it was sometimes difficult to persuade one-half of a large constituency
to come to the poll. All attempts at public meetings, for the purpose of
agitating a reduction of the franchise, had been failures. The people were
quite contented with things as they stood, and grumbled at the idea of a
change. And yet this was the time, selected by a Prime Minister who had
everything his own way, for getting up a fresh agitation!
Every one, beyond himself, saw the exceeding absurdity of his conduct.
The leading Whigs became positively angry; and from that period we may
date his rapid decadence in their estimation. The real nature of his
scheme, consisting of an arbitrary lowering of the franchise, was quite well
known; and as that could not, by any possibility, be carried even through
the House of Commons, his own friends thought it advisable to put the
noble Lord upon another scent.
There appeared, accordingly, in the Edinburgh Review for January
1852, an article on “The Expected Reform Bill,” which took most people by
surprise on account of its apparently moderate, philosophic, and even
Conservative tone. It would be difficult to analyse it—it is difficult, even
after reading it, to draw any distinct conclusion from its propositions and
argument. But this, at all events, was admitted, that “clearly there is no
call for Parliamentary Reform on the part of any large or influential class.
There is no zeal about it, one way or the other. An extension of the
franchise is wished for by some, and thought proper and desirable by
many; but it is not an actual want largely felt, nor is the deprivation of the
franchise a practical grievance, clear enough, tangible enough, generally
recognised enough, to have given rise to a genuine, spontaneous, exclusive
demand for redress. There is a general languor and want of interest on the
subject, manifested nowhere more plainly than in the tone and character
of the meetings got up by the Reform Association for the sake of arousing
public feeling. The nation, as a whole, is undeniably indifferent; the
agitation is clearly artificial.” Then, again, we are told that “Quieta non
movere is, in political matters, as often a maxim of wisdom as of laziness;”
and a great deal more to the same effect, which could not have had a very
exhilarating effect on the mind of Lord John Russell, supposing, as we do,
that he was in total ignorance of the article in question before it was given
to the public. Certainly, on this occasion, he had but a poor backing from
his friends.
The view of the writer in question seemed to be this—that instead of
arbitrarily lowering the franchise on the footing of a property
qualification, it is important to discover some criterion by means of which
persons morally and educationally qualified, who have not the franchise at
present, may be admitted to that privilege. We are not reviewing or
discussing the article—we are simply pointing out the sources from which
Lord John Russell has derived most of his new ideas. Therefore we shall
simply quote one passage from this article.
Source of Lord John Russell’s new idea of the Savings’ Bank Deposit
qualification.—“Our present system is defective and unjust in this—that it
selects two kinds or forms of property only as conferring the franchise. Let
us continue to maintain a property qualification; but let us not insist that
the property, so favourably and honourably distinguished, must be
invested in one special mode. If a man has accumulated by diligence or
frugality £50 or £100, and spends it either in the purchase of a freehold,
or in removing his residence from an £8 to a £10 house, his realised
property confers upon him the distinction of a vote. But if he invests the
same sum, earned by similar qualities, in the savings’ bank, or in railway
shares or debentures, or in the purchase of a deferred annuity—which
would probably be much wiser modes of disposing of it—it carries with it
no such privilege. This seems neither equitable nor wise. It might easily be
rectified, and such rectification would be at once one of the safest,
simplest, justest, and most desirable extensions of the franchise that could
be suggested. Let the production before the registration courts of a
savings’ bank book, showing a credit of £50, of at least six months’
standing, or of a bona fide certificate of shares to the same value in a valid
railway, or of coupons to the same amount, be held to entitle a man to be
inscribed upon the list of voters for that year.”—Edinburgh Review, Jan.
1852, p. 265.
Adhering to our original intention of not discussing the merits of the
different proposals of this and the other articles in the Edinburgh Review,
we shall not comment upon the unblushing impudence of such a project
as this, which would place the representation of the country principally in
the hands of millionaires and railway directors. It is unparalleledly
impudent. But we notice it now simply as the germ of Lord John Russell’s
£50 savings’ bank qualification.
By the time this article appeared, Lord John Russell’s Bill was prepared;
though no one expected that it would be carried. The Whig party were
conscious that the hour of their doom was approaching, but they wished
to bear with them into opposition a weapon which might be available for
future warfare. Lord John’s ideas had not then penetrated beyond a
lowering of the franchise and the admission to the register of parties who
paid 40s. a-year of direct taxes. These were his deliberate impressions
before the schoolmaster of the Edinburgh Review appeared abroad.
After this, Lord John Russell went out of office; but the Review kept
harping on Reform. The writer had already stated, “that a new measure of
Parliamentary Reform was demanded, rather in the name of theoretical
propriety than of practical advantage.” It seems to us that such an
admission was nearly tantamount to an argument against the policy of
making any change at all; more especially when we were told, nearly in the
same page, that “there was no call for Parliamentary Reform on the part of
any large or influential class.” If that were true, we should like to know
who “demanded” the new measure? But we must not be too critical
regarding the advances of the new Lycurgus.
In October 1852, a second article appeared, the preamble of which was
very moderate—indeed, rather calculated to impress the casual reader
with the idea that the author would have much preferred if “the vexed
question of the franchise” could have been left alone. Nevertheless it
appeared to him that there were “many reasons which make it impossible
either entirely to shelve or long to postpone the question of Parliamentary
Reform;” and, having stated these, he dashes again into his subject. He is,
however, a great deal too knowing to commence with the proposal of
innovations. He treats us to several pages of high Conservativism,
condemnatory of universal suffrage; and having thus established a kind of
confidence—acting on Quintilian’s advice, to frame the introduction so as
“reddere auditores benevolos, attentos, dociles”—he begins to propound
his new ideas. In this article we have:—
Source of Lord John Russell’s new proposal to swamp the Counties by
the admission of £10 occupants.—“The other plan is to extend the £10
qualification to counties, by which means every householder (to the
requisite value) throughout the land would possess a vote; if he resided in
a small town or a village, or an isolated dwelling, he would be upon the
county register. The only objection we can hear of to this plan is, that in
the country districts and in hamlets a £10 occupancy generally includes
some land, and would not, therefore, indicate the same social station as
the living in a £10 house in town, and that it might lead to the creation, for
the sake of augmenting landlord influence, of a numerous and dependent
class of tenant voters. But in the first place, the occupier of a £10 house in
villages and small towns belongs to a decidedly higher social grade than
the occupier of a £10 house in cities; and, in the second place, it would not
be difficult to meet the objection, by requiring that the qualifying
occupancy shall be, in the county register, a house, and not a house and
land, or by fixing a sum which shall, as nearly as can be ascertained, be
generally an equivalent to the £10 occupancy contemplated by the present
law.”—Edinburgh Review, Oct. 1852, p. 472.
That is the second instance of appropriation on the part of the wise,
ripe, deliberate statesman, who for twenty years had been watching the
progress of his own handiwork with the view to introducing repairs.
Before this article in the Edinburgh Review appeared, it had never
occurred to him how convenient it might be to swamp the counties, and
how very simple were the means of doing so! Now for appropriation third:
—
Source of Lord John Russell’s proposal to admit all Graduates of
Universities to Town and County franchise. “It is, of course, desirable,
and is admitted to be so by every party, that all educated men shall be
voters; the difficulty is to name any ostensible qualifications which shall
include them, and them alone. But though we cannot frame a criterion
which shall include all, there is no reason why we should not accept one
which will include a considerable number of whose fitness to possess the
franchise there can be no question. We would propose, therefore, that the
franchise be granted to all graduates of Universities,” &c.—Edinburgh
Review, Oct. 1852, p. 473.
Another hint adopted by Sir Fretful Plagiary! Next we come to a more
serious matter:—
Source of Lord John Russell’s proposal for disfranchising the lesser
English boroughs.—“The great majority of them are notoriously
undeserving of the franchise, and those who know them best are least
disposed to undertake their defence. The plan of combining a number of
them into one constituency would be futile or beneficial according to the
details of each individual case. If a close or a rotten borough were
amalgamated with an open or a manufacturing town, much advantage
might possibly result; if two or three corrupt or manageable constituencies
merely united their iniquities, the evil of the existing things would only be
spread farther and rooted faster. We should propose, therefore, at once to
reduce the 61 boroughs with fewer than 500 electors, and now returning
91 members, to one representative each.”—Edinburgh Review, Oct. 1852,
p. 496.
We shall see presently that this proposal was amended, as not being
sufficiently sweeping. Only thirty seats are here proscribed; but it was
afterwards found expedient to increase the black list to the number of
sixty-six. Pass we to the next instance of palpable cribbage.
Source of Lord John Russell’s proposal that Members accepting office
shall not be obliged to vacate their seats.—“The most desirable man
cannot be appointed Colonial Minister, because his seat, if vacated, might
be irrecoverable. Administrations cannot strengthen themselves by the
alliance of colleagues who possess the confidence of the general public,
because the place for which they sit has been offended by some unpopular
vote or speech. We need add no more on this head: the peculiarity of the
case is, that we have no adverse arguments to meet.”—Edinburgh Review,
Oct. 1852, p. 501.
The writer is decidedly wrong about the non-existence of adverse
arguments; and we shall be happy to convince him of the fact if he will be
kind enough to accord us a meeting. In the mean time, however, he has
humbugged Lord John, which was evidently his special purpose. Even
while we deprecate the morality of his proceeding, we can hardly forbear
expressing our admiration of his skill. We know not his earthly name or
habitation; but he is a clever fellow, for he has led, with equal audacity and
success, the ex-Premier of Great Britain, and the father of Reform, by the
nose!
But we have not yet done. The article last referred to was penned and
published before the new Parliament met, towards the close of 1852, and
before the balance and state of parties could be ascertained. The result of
the election showed that parties were in effect almost equally balanced—so
much so, that, but for the junction of the Peelites with the Liberals, Lord
Derby would have obtained a majority. The election, it will be
remembered, took place under circumstances peculiarly unfavourable to
the Government; and never perhaps was misrepresentation of every kind
more unscrupulously employed than by the Liberal press on that occasion.
Still it became evident that Conservatism was gaining ground in the
country; and it was a natural inference that, after the question of
Protection was finally set at rest, its progress would be still more rapid.
This was not exactly what the writer in the Edinburgh Review had
calculated on. He now saw that it would be necessary, if the Liberal party
was to be maintained in power, to go a good deal further than he at first
proposed; and accordingly, when he appears again before us in October
1853, we find him armed this time, not with a pruning-hook, but with a
formidable axe. We hear no more about “theoretical propriety”—he is
evidently determined upon mischief. Now, then, for his developed views,
as adopted by his docile pupil.
Source of Lord John Russell’s proposal that freemen shall have no
votes.—“There is no doubt in the mind of any man, we imagine, that
incomparably the most openly and universally venal portion of borough
constituencies are the old freemen, so unhappily and weakly retained by
the Reform Act of 1832.... The disfranchisement of the freemen is,
perhaps, of all steps which will be urged upon Parliament, the most clearly
and indisputably right and necessary, and, added to the plan already
suggested for pursuing individual cases of venality, will probably sweep
away the most incurably corrupt class of electors.”—Edinburgh Review,
Oct. 1853, p. 596.
 We have already seen that, in Oct. 1852, the reviewer proposed to
abstract thirty members from the smaller English boroughs. It became
evident, however, that so paltry a massacre of the innocents would not
suffice, more especially as it had become part of the scheme to swamp the
English counties. Accordingly we are told, in an off-hand and easy
manner: “To all that we said on a former occasion as to the theoretical
propriety and justice of the small borough representation, we
unreservedly adhere. But, unfortunately, it is too notorious that these
boroughs are generally in a condition which, for the sake of electoral
purity, imperatively demands their disfranchisement, partial or entire.
Here again it is true that parliamentary statistics do not altogether bear
out our conclusion. Of the seventy-two boroughs convicted of bribery
between 1833 and 1853, only twenty-one can properly be called small—as
having fewer than five hundred electors—while some of the more
constantly and flagrantly impure places number their votes by thousands.”
So, according to the admission of even this writer, there is no case
established, on the ground of corruption, for the wholesale
disfranchisement of the small boroughs. Nevertheless we are to assume
them to be impure, because he says it is notorious that they are so; and by
this short and summary process of assertion he gets rid of the trouble of
investigation. The boroughs are not put upon their trial, for there is no
specific charge against them; but they are condemned at once because the
writer has a low opinion of their morality. This is worse than Jeddart
justice, where the trial took place after the execution. In the case of the
boroughs there is to be no trial at all. The following conclusion is therefore
easily arrived at: “There can be no doubt in the mind of any reformer that,
in some way or other, these small boroughs ought to be suppressed; that
we must have, if possible, no more constituencies under one thousand
electors.” So much for the disfranchisement; now for the redistribution.
Final scheme suggested to Lord John Russell for disfranchising the
small boroughs and swamping the counties.—“The third method
proposed is to merge all these small boroughs into the county
constituencies, by depriving them of their members, and reducing the
county franchise to a £10 occupancy. In this way the class would still be
represented, and the individuals would still retain their votes, and the
electoral lists of counties would be considerably modified and greatly
enriched. This plan would, we think, be far the fairest and most desirable,
inasmuch as it would give us constituencies large in number and varied in
character, and, therefore, to a great extent secure against illicit and undue
influences.”—Edinburgh Review, Oct. 1853, p. 602.
 The next and last point which we shall notice is the representation of
minorities. We do not know to whom the credit of having invented this
notable scheme is really due. There are various claimants in the field. Mr
G. L. Craik, of Queen’s College, Belfast, asserts that he was the original
discoverer, having propounded a plan of this nature so early as 1836.
Ingenious as the idea may be, it will hardly rank in importance with the
discovery of the steam-engine, nor do we think that its originator is
entitled to any exorbitant share of public gratitude or applause. We shall
give it as we find it in the Review.
Source of Lord John Russell’s proposal to give members in certain
cases to minorities.—“The mode by which we propose to insure the
constituent minorities their fair share in the representation—i. e. to make
the majorities and minorities in the House of Commons correspond as
nearly as may be to majorities and minorities in the country, or in the
electoral bodies—is, to give (as now) to each elector as many votes as there
are members to be chosen, and to allow him to divide these votes as he
pleases among the candidates, or to give them all to one. But as at present
most places return two members, it is obvious that, under the proposed
arrangement, wherever the minority exceeded one-third of the total
number of the electors, they would be able to return one member, or to
obtain one-half the representation, which would be more than their fair
share, and would place them on an equality with the majority, which
would never do; while, if they fell short of one-third, they would be, as
now, virtually unrepresented and ignored. To obviate this, it will be
necessary so to arrange our electoral divisions, that as many
constituencies as possible should return three members: one of these a
minority, if at all respectable, could always manage to secure.”—Edin.
Review, Oct. 1853, p. 622.
Here, at all events, is the notion about the representation of majorities,
and the establishment of as many constituencies as possible, returning
three members. Lord John Russell’s method of working this, is to restrict
each elector to two votes.
Thus we see that all the leading features and peculiarities of Lord John
Russell’s new Reform Bill—the disfranchisement of the boroughs, the
swamping of the counties, the ten-pound occupancy clause, the
qualification by deposit in the savings’ bank, the voting of graduates, the
retention of their seats by members accepting office, and the
representation of minorities—are contained in the articles published in
the Edinburgh Review, in 1852 and 1853. This is, to say the least of it, a
very singular coincidence. Of course we do not mean to maintain that
Lord John Russell was debarred from availing himself of any useful hints
which might be offered him, or from adopting the notions of any political
sage, or harum-scarum cobbler of constitutions; we entirely admit his
right to gather wisdom, or its counterfeit, from any source whatever. What
we wish to impress upon the public is this, that, down to 1852, not one of
these notions had occurred to our grand constitutional reformer, who for
twenty years had been sedulously watching the operation of his original
measure! Nay, more than that: two years ago, his ideas on the subject of
Parliamentary Reform were diametrically opposite to those which he has
now promulgated; and that not only in detail, but in absolute essence and
form! Had he come before us this year with a scheme based upon the
principle of 1852, which was a lowering of the franchise, without any
farther disturbance of the constitution of the electoral bodies, it would
have been but a poor criticism to have taunted him with a minor change in
the details. He might have used his discretion in elevating or lowering the
point where the franchise was to begin, without subjecting himself to any
sneer on account of change of principle. But, wonderful as are the changes
which we have seen of late years in the views of public men, this is the
most astounding of them all. Never before, perhaps, did a statesman pass
such a decided censure on his own judgment, or make such an admission
of former recklessness and error. If he is right now, he must have been
utterly wrong before. The constitution of 1852, as he would have made it,
must have been a bad one. One-tenth of the members of the House of
Commons would still have been returned by constituencies which he now
regards as unfit to be constituencies any more. If the maintenance of the
small boroughs is a blot on the constitution, how was it that Lord John
Russell did not discover that blot until 1853, after the articles we have
referred to were published? Did he take his ideas from those articles? If
so, was there ever a more humiliating confession of entire poverty of
mind? If he did not take his ideas from those articles, what was it that
produced so entire a change of opinion?—what eminent political oculist
has removed the film which impeded his vision but two short years ago?
This is, in reality, a very grave matter. We are accustomed in this country
to associate measures with men, and sometimes to accept the former on
account of our belief and confidence in the sagacity of those who propose
them. But what faith can we repose in a man who thus plays fast and loose
upon a question with which he has been occupied all his life? This is not a
case of expediency arising out of unforeseen circumstances. That the
question is of the deepest import no one in his senses can deny. We know
how the constitution, as framed at present, works; but we do not know
how it may work if very materially altered. And yet we find the same
mechanist proposing, within two years, two separate kinds of alteration!
The first was simple enough, and had at least this much in its favour, that
it did not require any violent displacement of the machinery. The second
is so complex that the whole machinery must be re-arranged. It was our
sincere hope that the country had seen the last of sudden conversions of
parties—at no time edifying events, and sometimes attended by disastrous
consequences—but we must, it seems, prepare ourselves for another
conversion on the part of the Whigs, if this bill is to be carried through.
They must, supposing them inclined to support Lord John Russell, either
unsay what they said, or were prepared to have said, in 1852, or be ready
to maintain that they were then greatly in advance of their leader. The
dilemma, we admit, is an unpleasant and an odious one; but there is no
escape from it, if the Whigs are determined, at all hazards, to follow their
erratic leader.
That there is room for certain changes in the national representation we
are by no means disposed to deny. It is impossible to devise any system so
perfect as to preclude the idea of amendment; indeed, we suppose that
there never was a constitution, or phase of a constitution, in the world,
which gave entire and perfect satisfaction to all who lived under its
operation. We may be told that the present system is theoretically wrong,
that its principle is to exalt property and to exclude intelligence, and that
in some parts it is incongruous, inconsistent, and contradictory. Possibly
there may be some truth in such allegations; but then we must never lose
sight of this, that the real test of a constitution is its practical working. It is
undeniable that under the present system the middle classes have gained,
not only power, but preponderance in the state; and accordingly we find
that they are not favourable to a change which would certainly operate to
their disadvantage. The ulterior aims of the men of Manchester may
prompt them to desire a still further infusion of the democratic element,
but neither the members nor the doctrines of that school have found
favour with the British public. If public opinion generally, and the great
interests of the nation, are well and effectively represented in the House of
Commons, it does seem to us a very perilous experiment to disturb that
state of matters. We should like very much to hear from Lord John Russell
a distinct exposition of the results which he anticipates, should this
scheme of his be carried. Is there any real point of interest to the nation
which he is at present debarred from bringing forward by the exclusive
constitution of the House of Commons? What are the existing grievances
which call for so radical an alteration?
“What is there now amiss
That Cæsar and his senate must redress?”
 We apprehend that the noble lord would be greatly puzzled to frame an
intelligible answer to such queries. Well then, we are, perforce, compelled
to fall back upon theory, and to assume that he vindicates his proposal,
not because future measures will be of a better kind, or better discussed
than heretofore, but because it is desirable, for symmetry’s sake, that the
representation should be readjusted.
Be it so. We are content to take that view, albeit a low one, and to
examine his scheme without any partial leaning to the present
constitution of the House of Commons. And first, let us see what regard he
has paid to the principle of equal representation.
It will not, we presume, be denied by any one that the three kingdoms of
England, Scotland, and Ireland, ought to be put upon an equitable footing
as regards one another in this matter of representation. If imperial
measures were all that the House of Commons had to discuss, this relative
equality might be of less importance; but with separate laws and separate
institutions guaranteed to and existing in the three kingdoms, it is proper
that each should be fairly represented in the grand council of the nation.
At present that is not the case. If we take the test of population, Scotland
ought to have 18 more members than are now allotted to her; if we take
the test of taxation and revenue, she ought to have 25 more. Combining
the two, there is a deficit of more than 20 members to Scotland in her
share of the national representation. Now, that is a matter which ought, in
the very first instance, to have occupied the attention of the noble lord,
and would have so occupied it, had he laid down for himself any fixed
principles of action. It is nonsense to talk of inequalities between one
borough and another, or between town and country qualification, before
the first grand inequality is remedied. Apply the double test of population
and revenue, and you will find that Ireland is upon an equality in point of
representation with England, but that Scotland is not; and no reason has
been, or can be, assigned for this anomaly. The quota for Scotland was
fixed by the Act of Union at 45 members. It was increased by the Reform
Act of 1832 to 53, but the number is still insufficient. Lord John Russell
proposes, out of the 66 disfranchised seats, to give three to Scotland, but
he has assigned no reason for doing so. The people of Scotland are not in
the position of men supplicating for a boon. They are demanding that,
when such a change as this is made, their political rights shall be
respected and allowed; and they will not be satisfied with less than a
measure of perfect justice. We think it right to put forward this point
prominently, because it lies at the foundation of the whole question of the
readjustment of the representation.
 The question of the disfranchisement of the boroughs is one which
should be approached with very great caution. In 1852, as we have already
seen, Lord John Russell did not propose to touch them—now he has made
up his mind to lop away 66 members from this branch of the
representation. This is, in our opinion, by far too reckless a proceeding.
We can see no good ground or principle for the entire disfranchisement of
any of the boroughs, a step which we think ought never to be taken, except
in case of absolute and proved corruption. When constituencies are too
small, the proper and natural plan is, to annex and unite, not to abolish;
and we believe that this could be effected with very little difficulty. The
new Schedule A contains a list of 19 boroughs, returning at present 29
members, which are to be wholly disfranchised, on the ground either that
the number of the electors is under 300, or that of the inhabitants under
5000. Therefore the privilege is to be taken from them, and the voters are
to be thrown into the counties. We agree with Lord John Russell, that
some constituencies are too small, but we do not agree with him in his
scheme of disfranchisement, and we utterly object to his proposal of
quartering the electors on the counties. They are borough voters, and so
they ought to remain; and it is a very poor pretext, indeed, to make this
disfranchisement the excuse for altering the county qualification. Let a
union of the boroughs, by all means, take place; let the number of their
members, if necessary, be considerably reduced; but let us have no
disfranchisement, or assimilation between the town and county
qualification, which would quite upset the whole system throughout the
kingdom.
We do not profess to be conversant with local details, so that we cannot
speak with perfect confidence; but it appears to us that some such
arrangement as the following, which would unite the smaller boroughs,
and at the same time diminish the number of members, might be adopted
with advantage:—
 Present Combined Present Future
County. Borough.
Electors. Electors. Members. Members.
Devonshire, Ashburton, 211 1
520 1
„ Dartmouth, 309 1
„ Honiton, 335 2
649 1
„ Totness, 314 2
Dorsetshire, Lyme Regis, 297 1
665 1
Somersetshire, Wells, 368 2
Sussex, Arundel, 208 1
493 1
„ Midhurst, 285 1
Wiltshire, Calne, 151 1
1
„ Marlborough, 254 641 2
„ Wilton, 236 1
Yorkshire, Richmond, 342 2 1
642
„ Northallerton, 303 1
Essex, Harwich, 299 2
506 1
Norfolk, Thetford, 217 2

22 7
Thus, without any disfranchisement, or violent displacement, fifteen
boroughs, at present returning twenty-two members, might be formed
into seven respectable constituencies, returning one member each to
Parliament. There are, however, four others—Knaresborough, Evesham,
Reigate, and Andover—which cannot be so easily thrown together. We
would proceed with these on the same principle, by adding them to
boroughs at present returning two members, but which Lord John Russell
proposes to restrict to one member each. The following is our view:—
Present Combined Present Future
County. Borough.
Electors. Electors. Members. Members.
Yorkshire, Knaresborough, 226 2
583 1
„ Ripon, 357 2
Worcester, Evesham, 396 2
755 2
„ Tewkesbury, 359 2
Surrey, Reigate, 297 1
„ Guildford, 595 1124 2 2
Hampshire, Andover, 232 2

13 5
Here there are twenty-three seats set at liberty, without disfranchisement
in any one instance. In justice to ourselves, we must state that we have
implicitly followed the schedule attached to Lord John Russell’s bill, and
not indulged in speculations of our own. Had the latter been the case, we
might have been tempted to ask why Westbury, with an electorate of 289,
is to be spared, while Wells, with 368, is to be blotted from the list of
boroughs?
Besides these, Lord John Russell proposes that thirty other seats shall
be made vacant, by restricting boroughs now returning two members to
one. (His number is thirty-three, but we have already noticed Ripon,
Tewkesbury, and Guildford.) If it could be shown that there is a really
clamant case for representation elsewhere, the reduction might be
allowed, but only to the extent required. It seems to us perfect madness to
proceed with wholesale disfranchisement, until the necessity of
transferring seats to other places is satisfactorily established. We can very
well understand why some of the smaller boroughs which have now two
members should be restricted to one, in order to satisfy the just
requirements of some rising township which has hitherto been
unrepresented. We have no doubt that Lord John Russell is quite right in
his proposals to give members to Birkenhead, Burnley, and Staleybridge,
and to erect Chelsea and Kensington into a Parliamentary borough to
return two members. We think that two additional members each might
be granted to the West Riding of Yorkshire and to the county of Lancaster
—that Salford should return two members instead of one—and that the
London University should be represented. We think that these are rational
demands, and such as might be accorded; and the necessary number for
these purposes, and for putting Scotland on a fair footing of equality with
England and Ireland, would amount to the vacation of about thirty or
thirty-two existing seats. We have already shown how, without entirely
disfranchising any borough, twenty-three seats may be obtained; and if
nine others are required, it would be no hardship to take from each of the
following boroughs one out of the two members which they presently
return:—

County. Borough. Constituency.

Hampshire, Lymington, 328
Cumberland, Cockermouth, 330
Buckinghamshire, Marlow (Great), 335
Wiltshire, Chippenham, 345
Buckinghamshire, Buckingham, 349
Devonshire, Tavistock, 352
Cornwall, Bodmin, 360
Wiltshire, Devizes, 363
Buckinghamshire, Wycombe (Chipping), 365
This would take out of Schedule B no less than twenty-one seats which are
now included in it; and it would be obviously unwise to exhaust, all at
once, the only source from which new rising constituencies can be
endowed. Lord John Russell seems to think—and we agree with him—that
the present number of the House of Commons (654) is quite large enough;
and although there is no principle to fix numbers, it may be as well to
maintain them as they are. It is but natural to expect that, in future years,
some places will decrease, and others increase, and that partial changes
will be required. For that very reason we deprecate too hasty a reduction
of the boroughs, and an apportionment of their seats to places and
constituencies which do not require them. Suppose that in ten years after
this, new seats of commerce and manufacture, like Birkenhead, Burnley,
and Staleybridge, start into existence—that places like Salford increase
immensely—and that new Chelseas require to be conjoined with new
Kensingtons—where are we to find members for them, without unduly
swelling the bulk of the House of Commons, if all the smaller borough
seats are to be disposed of at the present time? The Legislature may say
just now, with perfect propriety, to the men of Lymington—“Your borough
is the smallest in the country which returns two members to Parliament.
Birkenhead is a place of such importance that it requires a member; and
therefore, as it is not expedient to increase the aggregate number of the
national representatives, we shall take a member from you, and give one
to Birkenhead.” That is quite intelligible; but why disfranchise boroughs
when you do not know what to do with the vacancies? It is true that Lord
John Russell tells us what he means to do with them; but we entirely
demur to every proposal of his beyond those which we have already
noticed. He proposes, we observe, to give three members instead of two to
the following cities and boroughs whose constituencies we have noted:—

Towns. Constituencies.
Birmingham, 8,780
Bristol, 10,958
Bradford, 2,723
Leeds, 6,400
Liverpool, 15,382
Manchester, 17,826
Sheffield, 5,612
Wolverhampton, 3,499

It must strike every one that there can be no principle in this. The
constituencies both of Manchester and Liverpool are more than five times