Synthese

, Volume 191, Issue 14, pp 3159–3172 | Cite as

Sleeping beauty should be imprecise

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Abstract

The traditional solutions to the Sleeping Beauty problem say that Beauty should have either a sharp 1/3 or sharp 1/2 credence that the coin flip was heads when she wakes. But Beauty’s evidence is incomplete so that it doesn’t warrant a precise credence, I claim. Instead, Beauty ought to have a properly imprecise credence when she wakes. In particular, her representor ought to assign \(R(H\!eads)=[0,1/2]\). I show, perhaps surprisingly, that this solution can account for the many of the intuitions that motivate the traditional solutions. I also offer a new objection to Elga’s restricted version of the principle of indifference, which an opponent may try to use to collapse the imprecision.

Keywords

Epistemology Formal epistemology Sleeping Beauty   Imprecise bayesianism Bayesianism 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

The kernel of the idea developed here was discovered during conversations with J. Dmitri Gallow and Jason Konek. I am also very grateful to many people who helped to develop my thoughts on this topic including Marie Barnett, Daniel Greco, Alan Hájek, Tristram McPherson, Sarah Moss, Daniel Nolan, Joel Pust, Alex Silk, W. Robert Thomas, members of the University of Michigan Formal Epistemology Working Group, and particularly James M. Joyce.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Assistant Professor of PhilosophyUniversity of PennsylvaniaPhiladelphiaUSA

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