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Notes
Note that I’m not assuming that Beauty’s memories are erased in other cases. This makes the particular version of the case I’m discussing a little different to the version popularised in Elga (2000). This shouldn’t make any difference to most analyses of the puzzle, but it helps to clarify some issues.
See, for instance, Titlebaum (2008) and the references therein.
Including by me. See Egan (2005)
Stalnaker thinks we have independent reason to treat these structured entities as simply worlds. The main point of the last few sentences was that we can adopt Stalnaker’s model while staying neutral on this metaphysical question.
Perhaps it would be better to say that individuals and times have haecceities, rather than saying centers do. I have little idea what could tell between these options, or even if there is a substantive issue here.
Of course worlds are considerably more detailed than this, but the extra detail is an unnecessary confusion for the current storyline.
The standard response is to say that the agent shouldn’t just conditionalise on the content of the experimenter’s utterance, but on the fact that the experimenter is making just that utterance. We’ll return to this idea below.
The idea that we should update by conditionalisation on our evidence, even when we don’t know what the evidence is, has an amusing consequence in the Monty Hall problem. The agent guesses that she’s in s i , and comes to know she’s not in s j , where i ≠ j. If she only comes to know that she’s not in s j , and not something stronger, such as knowing that she knows she’s not in s j , then she really should conditionalise on this, and her credence that her guess was correct will go up. This is the ‘mistaken’ response to the puzzle that is frequently deprecated in the literature. But since the orthodox solutions to the puzzle rely on the agent reflecting on how she came to know \({\neg}s_j\), it seems that it is the right solution if she doesn’t know that she knows \({\neg}s_j\).
Stalnaker notes that this is a reason for thinking Beauty does learn something when she wakes up, and so there’s a reason her credence in H changes.
Compare this argument for giving nothing to charity. There are thousands of worthwhile charities, and I have no reason to give more to one than any of the others. But I can’t afford to give large equal amounts to each, and if I gave small equal amounts to each, the administrative costs would mean my donation has no effect. So I should treat each equally, and the only sensible practical way to do this is to give none to each. Note that you really don’t have to think one charity is more worthy than the others to think this is a bad argument; sometimes we just have to make arbitrary choices.
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Acknowledgment
Thanks to Adam Elga, Elizabeth Harman, Ishani Maitra, Ted Sider, Robert Stanlaker and Seth Yelcin for comments on an earlier, and mistake-riddled, draft.
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Weatherson, B. Stalnaker on sleeping beauty. Philos Stud 155, 445–456 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9613-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9613-1