Talk: Casper Storm Hansen (Chinese Academy of Science / MCMP)

Title:

Sleeping Beauty at the limit of probabilistic rationality

Abstract:

Jacob Ross (Phil Review 119, 411-447) has argued that his "Sleeping Beauty in St. Petersburg" scenario shows that even an ideally rational agent may find herself in an epistemic dilemma, i.e., a situation where she has an epistemic obligation to do contradictory things. Specifically, he claims that Beauty must satisfy both a generalization of the principle that leads to the "thirder" position in the original Sleeping Beauty scenario and the principle of countable additivity. I will show that this conclusion can be avoided by disambiguation. If we consider an accuracy norm, a pragmatic norm, and a frequency norm for the rationality of credences separately, we reach different conclusions, but none that are internally inconsistent. However, each of those conclusions will turn out to be surprising in its own right, and perhaps just as disturbing as a genuine dilemma would be.