This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
Such ‘knows only’ (or ‘believes only’) scenarios, common in the literature on decision theory, are more troublesome than they first appear. It is difficult to specify what precisely we are to assume that the agent knows (or believes) in any given case. (Here, for example, I want you to assume that the agent isn’t familiar with rolls of similar objects, e.g., other regular dice, but is familiar with elementary mathematics.)
For example, it was certainly not, in my view, part of a probabilistic ‘dark ages’ (24)!
There are also several well-known problems with the Dutch book argument, which Williamson does not do justice to. For example, a bettor might rationally select a betting quotient of zero for an event that she is sure will occur; see Rowbottom (2007a). Similar problems have been discussed in considerable depth elsewhere, e.g. by Seidenfeld et al. (1990) and Hájek (2005). This does not raise an insurmountable obstacle for the objective Bayesian project, however, because Williamson could instead have appealed to De Finetti’s notion of a forecast, and appropriate scoring rules, as explained by Schervish et al. (2009).
References
Bertrand, J. 1889. Calcul des probabilités. New York: Chelsea (3rd edn., c.1960).
Eriksson, L., and A. Hájek. 2007. What are degrees of belief? Studia Logica 86: 183–213.
Hájek, A. 2005. Scotching Dutch books. Philosophical Perspectives 19: 139–151.
Jaynes, E.T. 1957. Information theory and statistical mechanics. Physical Review 106: 620–630.
Jaynes, E.T. 1973. The well posed problem. Foundations of Physics 4: 477–492.
Keynes, J.M. 1921. A treatise on probability. London: Macmillan.
Rowbottom, D.P. 2007a. The insufficiency of the Dutch book argument. Studia Logica 87: 65–71.
Rowbottom, D.P. 2007b. In-between believing and degrees of belief. Teorema 26: 131–137.
Rowbottom, D.P. 2008. On the proximity of the logical and ‘objective Bayesian’ interpretations of probability. Erkenntnis 69: 335–349.
Schervish, M.J., T. Seidenfeld, and J.B. Kadane. 2009. Proper scoring rules, dominated forecasts, and coherence. Decision Analysis 6: 202–221.
Schwitzgebel, E. 2001. In-between believing. Philosophical Quarterly 51: 76–82.
Seidenfeld, T., Schervish, M. J., and Kadane, J. B. 1990. When fair betting odds are not degrees of belief, PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, pp. 517–524.
Shackel, N. 2007. Bertrand’s paradox and the principle of indifference. Philosophy of Science 74: 150–175.
Williamson, J.O.D. 2005. Bayesian nets and causality: Philosophical and computational foundations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Rowbottom, D.P. Objective Bayesianism defended?. Metascience 21, 193–196 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11016-011-9536-2
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11016-011-9536-2