How Simplicity Helps You Find the Truth without Pointing at it

Kelly, Kevin T.

doi:10.1007/978-1-4020-6127-1_4

Cited by 16 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…The learning-theoretic analysis presented above is just a "baby version" for the sake of illustration. It is adapted from Genin and Kelly (2018) and Kelly, Genin, and Lin (2016), which build on Schulte (1999) and Kelly (2007). More generally, a belief revision theory can be constructed by considering the learning performances of belief revision strategies in possible scenarios.…”

Section: Learning-theoretic Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Rational Choice Using Imprecise Probabilities and Utilities

Weirich

2021

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Suppose I am deliberating whether I should live on a boat and sail the Caribbean for a year. This is a decision not to be taken lightly. Many factors will matter for my decision. Several of these depend on uncertain states of the world. Will I be able to make a living? Is my boat really seaworthy? Will I miss my friends? How bad will the next winter be in my home town?1 I understand decision-making under 'uncertainty' here to refer to any case where an agent is not certain what the consequences of her actions will be, or what state will come about. A distinction is sometimes made between risk, uncertainty, ignorance and ambiguity, where 'risk' refers to the case where objective probabilities are known, 'uncertainty' refers to the case where an agent can make a subjective judgement about probabilities, an agent is in a state of 'ignorance' if she cannot make such probability assignments, and 'ambiguity' occurs when an agent can make probability assignments for some states, but not others.12 Risk aversion is further discussed in Section 5.3. Also see Mas-Colell, Whinston, and Green (1995), chapter 6 for more detail on expected utility theory's treatment of risk aversion. 13 This is why von Neumann and Morgenstern's theory is sometimes referred to as a theory of decision-making under risk, and Savage's is referred to as a theory of decision-making under uncertainty. In the former, probabilities are already known, in the latter, subjective probabilities can be assigned by the agent. However, note that, as we pointed out above, von Neumann and Morgenstern's theory can also be applied when probabilities are subjective.49 See, for instance, Wakker (1988). 50 See McClennen (1990) for a characterisation of different dynamic choice rules.

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Section: Learning-theoretic Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Rational Choice Using Imprecise Probabilities and Utilities

Weirich

2021

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“…'"Prefer the simple" checks the temptation to resist theoretical upheaval' (Fischer 2017, 69). For a formal argument that the principle of parsimony is always the most efficient way at arriving at the truth, even though the truth may be arbitrarily complex see Kelly (2006Kelly ( , 2007. 30 For further discussion of my general pessimism about hypostatizations see Westerhoff (2020, 58-63).…”

Section: Why Should We Believe the Premisses?mentioning

confidence: 99%

An argument for ontological nihilism

Westerhoff

2021

Inquiry

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This paper has two main aims. I first argue that ontological nihilism, that is, the view that there are no things is a consistent position. Second, I discuss an argument for the view that nihilism is not just possible but actually true, that is that there actually are no things (This paper is not meant as an addition to the considerable literature on the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Of course, any attempt to answer this question would have to presuppose the conclusion of the first section, that is, that nihilism is a consistent position. But if the argument in the second section goes through the question we would then have to answer is not why there is something rather than nothing, but why there is nothing rather than something). My argument is based on two main premisses, eliminativism ('only the fundamental exists') and non-foundationalism ('it's dependence all the way down') which jointly entail ontological nihilism. I conclude with some reflections on the consequences of the nihilist position for the project of constructing a fundamental metaphysical theory.

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“…However, this should be no more worrisome here than in the traditional scientific case, where Ockham's Razor already requires simplifications of various sorts. Philosophers have given various rationalizations for why this practice is justified in general (e.g., Kelly, ), and UC provides one additional rationalization—to the extent that understanding is valuable, a simpler representation will be more compressed and hence more understanding‐producing. Of course, if it turns out the only reason understanding is valuable is because it is truth‐tracking, then this response really would be question‐begging.…”

Section: Moral Understandingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moral understanding and moral illusions

Wilkenfeld

2020

Thought: A Journal of Philosophy

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The central claim of this paper is that people who ignore recherche cases might actually understand ethics better than those who focus on them. In order to establish this claim, I employ a relatively new account of understanding, to the effect that one understands to the extent that one has a representation/process pair that allows one to efficiently compress and decode useful information. I argue that people who ignore odd cases have compressed better, understand better, and so can be just as ethical (if not more so) as those who focus on such cases. The general idea is that our intuitive moral judgments only imprecisely track the moral truth—the function that maps possible decisions onto moral valuations—and when we try to specify the function precisely we end up overfitting what is basically a straightforward function to accommodate irrelevant data points.

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How Simplicity Helps You Find the Truth without Pointing at it

Cited by 16 publications

References 12 publications

Rational Choice Using Imprecise Probabilities and Utilities

Rational Choice Using Imprecise Probabilities and Utilities

An argument for ontological nihilism

Moral understanding and moral illusions

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