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Blurring Out Cosmic Puzzles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Yann Benétreau-Dupin
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Abstract

The Doomsday argument and anthropic reasoning are two puzzling examples of probabilistic confirmation. In both cases, a lack of knowledge apparently yields surprising conclusions. Since they are formulated within a Bayesian framework, they constitute a challenge to Bayesianism. Several attempts, some successful, have been made in a Bayesian framework that represents credal states by single credence functions to avoid these conclusions, but none of them can do so for all versions of the Doomsday argument. I show that adopting an imprecise framework of probabilistic reasoning allows for a more adequate representation of ignorance and explains away these puzzles.

Type
Confirmation Theory
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 82 , Issue 5 , December 2015 , pp. 879 - 891
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

This article stems from discussions at the UCSC-Rutgers Institute for the Philosophy of Cosmology in summer 2013. I am grateful to Chris Smeenk and Wayne Myrvold for discussions and comments on earlier drafts. For helpful discussions, I thank participants at the Imprecise Probabilities in Statistics and Philosophy workshop at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy in June 2014 and at the Graduate Colloquium series at Western University. I used excerpts and results from this article in a subsequent paper: “The Bayesian Who Knew Too Much.”

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