Talk (Work in Progress): Minkyung Wang (MCMP)

Title:

Credence and Belief: Epistemic Decision Theory Revisited

Abstract:

This paper uses epistemic decision theory to investigate the rationality of bridge principles between credence and belief. Assuming that consistent and logically closed belief can be determined from subjective probability by a binarization method, I develop Hempel and Levi’s epistemic decision theories and critically evaluate Leitgeb’s stability theory of belief and Lin-Kelly’s camera shutter rules: they violate the convexity norm, and thus cannot do the job of expected epistemic utility maximization. Furthermore, I critically discuss Hempel and Levi’s pioneering works incorporating content measure into the utility function and suggest new epistemic utility functions for binary beliefs measuring the informativeness of belief.