What is a Probability?
There is always a more fundamental question. Kenny Easwaran at
Antimetea has written a
response to my post
What Does Bayesian Epistemology Have to Do With Probabilities? In his post, he raises the question, just what
is a probability? I want to take a look at my own assumptions about what a probability is, and what he has to say, and see if this has any relevance for our discussion of Bayesian epistemology.
I will not attempt here to develop a philosophy of probability, like Bayesianism, or frequentism, or anything of that sort. These are accounts of what probabilities
mean, but not of what probabilities
are...
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What Does Bayesian Epistemology Have To Do With Probabilities?
The answer to the question in the title of this post may seem obvious (after all, isn't Bayesianism
all about probabilities?), but I think that the long discussion that followed
Lauren's post on van Fraassen's objection to Bayesianism from quantum mechanics shows that it isn't clear at all - or at least, that it wasn't clear to either of us as we were discussing the issue. I think that I now understand why. In this post, I'm going to give three answers to this question, which I will call The Primitivist Account (P), The Kripkean Possible Worlds Account (KPW), and the Lewisian Possible Worlds Account (LPW). This post will discuss...
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