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A Conflict between Indexical Credal Transparency and Relevance Confirmation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Joel Pust
Joel Pust*
Affiliation:
To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Delaware; e-mail: jpust@udel.edu.
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Abstract

According to the probabilistic relevance account of confirmation, E confirms H relative to background knowledge K just in case P(H/K&E)>P(H/K). This requires an inequality between the rational degree of belief in H determined relative to two bodies of total knowledge that are such that one (K&E) includes the other (K) as a proper part. In this article, I argue that it is quite plausible that there are no two possible bodies of total knowledge for ideally rational agents meeting this requirement. Hence, the positive relevance account may have to be rejected.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 88 , Issue 3 , July 2021 , pp. 385 - 397
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

For helpful comments on previous drafts of this article, I thank Julia Staffel, Konstantin Genin, Aaron Bronfman, Kevin Dorst, Paul Draper, Kaila Draper, two anonymous referees, and audience members at the 2017 Central Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association and the 2019 Meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy.

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