Justifying the Norms of Inductive Inference

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Bayesian inference is limited in scope because it cannot be applied in idealized contexts where none of the hypotheses under consideration is true and because it is committed to always using the likelihood as a measure of evidential favouring, even when that is inappropriate. The purpose of this article is to study inductive inference in a very general setting where finding the truth is not necessarily the goal and where the measure of evidential favouring is not necessarily the likelihood. I use an accuracy argument to argue for probabilism and I develop a new kind of argument to argue for two general updating rules, both of which are reasonable in different contexts. One of the updating rules has standard Bayesian updating, Bissiri et al.’s ([2016]) general Bayesian updating, Douven’s ([2016]) IBE-based updating, and my (Vassend ([forthcoming]) quasi-Bayesian updating as special cases. The other updating rule is novel. 1Introduction2Why Crediblity Functions Should Be Probabilistic3Deriving the Updating Rules3.1The combination step3.2The normalization step3.3Characterizations of inferential and predictive updating4Discussion of Inferential and Predictive Updating4.1The difference between inferential updating and predictive updating4.2The relationship between inferential updating and other updating procedures5ConclusionAppendix</jats:p>

On the Ecological and Internal Rationality of Bayesian Conditionalization and Other Belief Updating Strategies

“…In the philosophical literature, Douven (2013Douven ( , 2016 and Douven and Wenmackers (2017) argue that an updating method based on Inference to the Best Explanation is often better than Bayesian conditionalization, given certain aims agents may have. Vassend (2019) attempts to give a general framework that subsumes the framework in Bissiri et al (2016) as well as other non-Bayesian updating rules, such as updating based on Inference to the Best Explanation. The rest of this section is in the spirit of this recent work.…”