2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

PSA Abstracts
sets of data by appealing to the specific processes used to generate those data
sets. I then consider a variation on the Ravens Paradox that seems to resist any
principled Bayesian resolution, and draw out some implications of this result
for the prospects of Bayesianism as a general philosophy of science.
Henry␣ E. Kyburg Jr. University of Rochester and The Institute for Human
and Machine Intelligence
The Dutch Book Argument and Rational Belief
The Dutch Book Argument is the argument that if one’s degrees of belief fail
to satisfy the probability axioms, then a clever bookie can propose a set of
bets that one will find acceptable, but which entail a sure loss. It has been used
to support the claim that rational degrees of belief must be probabilities. It is
argued here that the acceptability of a set of bets may be quite different from
the acceptability of a single bet, that if this difficulty is corrected by demanding
that the agent be willing to accept any combination of bets that he is willing to
accept singly, then the sanctions supporting that demand undermine the cogency
of the argument, that the requirement that “degrees” of belief be measured by
real numbers between 0 and 1 is epistemologically unreasonable, and that
even if the Dutch Book Argument is applied to intervals of belief, and the
necessary sanctions taken account of, the conclusion will concern posted odds
only (rather than belief), and will require that these not be probabilities. What
we can conclude (with additional premises) is that rational belief should
conform to probability (in a sense to be specified), and that decisions should
be governed by expectations. This is a far weaker conclusion than that the
Dutch Book Argument is ordinarily taken to support.
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Marc Lange University of Washington
The Apparent Superiority of Prediction To Accommodation as a Side Effect:
A Reply to Maher
Maher (1988, 1990, 1993) has offered a lovely example to motivate the intuition
that a successful prediction has a kind of confirmatory significance that an
accommodation lacks. This paper scrutinizes Maher’s example. It argues that
once the example is tweaked, the intuitive difference between prediction and
accommodation disappears. This suggests that the apparent superiority of
prediction to accommodation is actually a side effect of an important difference
between our judgements of the hypotheses that tend to arise in each case.
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