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Synchronic Bayesian updating and the Sleeping Beauty problem: reply to Pust

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Abstract

I maintain, in defending “thirdism,” that Sleeping Beauty should do Bayesian updating after assigning the “preliminary probability” 1/4 to the statement S: “Today is Tuesday and the coin flip is heads.” (This preliminary probability obtains relative to a specific proper subset I of her available information.) Pust objects that her preliminary probability for S is really zero, because she could not be in an epistemic situation in which S is true. I reply that the impossibility of being in such an epistemic situation is irrelevant, because relative to I, statement S nonetheless has degree of evidential support 1/4.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 85721-0027, USA

    Terry Horgan

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  1. Terry Horgan
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Correspondence to Terry Horgan.

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Horgan, T. Synchronic Bayesian updating and the Sleeping Beauty problem: reply to Pust. Synthese 160, 155–159 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-006-9121-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-006-9121-1

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