Hostname: page-component-6bb9c88b65-fsdjw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-07-20T08:31:56.120Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Joyce's Argument for Probabilism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Patrick Maher
Patrick Maher*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
*
Send requests for reprints to the author, Department of Philosophy, 105 Gregory Hall, 810 South Wright Street, Urbana, IL 61801 p-maher@uiuc.edu.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

James Joyce's ‘Nonpragmatic Vindication of Probabilism’ gives a new argument for the conclusion that a person's credences ought to satisfy the laws of probability. The premises of Joyce's argument include six axioms about what counts as an adequate measure of the distance of a credence function from the truth. This paper shows that (a) Joyce's argument for one of these axioms is invalid, (b) his argument for another axiom has a false premise, (c) neither axiom is plausible, and (d) without these implausible axioms Joyce's vindication of probabilism fails.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 69 , Issue 1 , March 2002 , pp. 73 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Joyce, James M. (1998), “A Nonpragmatic Vindication of Probabilism”, A Nonpragmatic Vindication of Probabilism 65:575–603.Google Scholar
Maher, Patrick (1993), Betting on Theories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar