Deliberation, Judgement and the Nature of Evidence §1 Deliberation and Judgement
نویسنده
چکیده
One kind of deliberation involves an individual reassessing the strengths of her beliefs in the light of new evidence. Bayesian epistemology measures the strength to which one ought to believe a proposition by its probability relative to all available evidence, and thus provides a normative account of individual deliberation. This can be extended to an account of individual judgement by treating the act of judgement as a decision problem, amenable to the tools of decision theory. A normative account of public deliberation and judgement can be provided by merging the evidence of the individuals in question and calculating appropriate Bayesian probabilities and judgement thresholds relative to this merged evidence. But this formal epistemology for deliberation and judgement lacks substance without an account of how evidence can be merged. And in order to provide such an account, we need in turn an account of what the evidence is that grounds Bayesian probabilities. This paper attempts to tackle these two concerns. After finding fault with several views on the nature of evidence (the views that evidence is knowledge; that evidence is whatever is fully believed; that evidence is observationally set credence; that evidence is information), it is argued that evidence is whatever is rationally taken for granted. This view has consequences for an account of merging, and it is shown that standard axioms for merging need to be altered somewhat.
منابع مشابه
? Deliberation , Judgement and the Nature of Evidence ?
One kind of deliberation involves an individual reassessing the strengths of her beliefs in the light of new evidence. Bayesian epistemology measures the strength to which one ought to believe a proposition by its probability relative to all available evidence, and thus provides a normative account of individual deliberation. This can be extended to an account of individual judgement by treatin...
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