TY - JOUR
T1 - A pragmatist’s guide to epistemic utility
AU - Levinstein, Benjamin Anders
N1 - Received April 2016; revised December 2016. *To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, 1 Seminary Place, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901; e-mail: [email protected]. †Thanks to Seamus Bradley, Catrin Campbell-Moore, Greg Gandenberger, James Joyce, Richard Pettigrew, Patricia Rich, and audiences in Bristol and Munich. I was supported by the European Research Council starting grant Epistemic Utility Theory: Foundations and Applications during some of the work on this article. 1. Recent examples of the epistemic utility approach include Joyce (1998, 2009), Leitgeb and Pettigrew (2010a, 2010b), Pettigrew (2016a), and Konek and Levinstein (2017). 2. Other decision-theoretic norms appealed to include minimizing expected inaccuracy to establish conditionalization (Greaves and Wallace 2006; Leitgeb and Pettigrew 2010b), minimax to establish the principle of indifference (Pettigrew 2016b), Hurwicz criteria
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - We use a theorem from M. J. Schervish to explore the relationship between accuracy and practical success. If an agent is pragmatically rational, she will quantify the expected loss of her credence with a strictly proper scoring rule. Which scoring rule is right for her will depend on the sorts of decisions she expects to face. We relate this pragmatic conception of inaccuracy to the purely epistemic one popular among epistemic utility theorists.
AB - We use a theorem from M. J. Schervish to explore the relationship between accuracy and practical success. If an agent is pragmatically rational, she will quantify the expected loss of her credence with a strictly proper scoring rule. Which scoring rule is right for her will depend on the sorts of decisions she expects to face. We relate this pragmatic conception of inaccuracy to the purely epistemic one popular among epistemic utility theorists.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85029593234
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85029593234#tab=citedBy
U2 - 10.1086/693444
DO - 10.1086/693444
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85029593234
SN - 0031-8248
VL - 84
SP - 613
EP - 638
JO - Philosophy of Science
JF - Philosophy of Science
IS - 4
ER -