Can rational choice guide us to correct de se beliefs?
Significant controversy remains about what constitute correct self-locating beliefs in scenarios such as the Sleeping Beauty problem, with proponents on both the “halfer” and “thirder” sides. To attempt to settle the issue, one natural approach consists in creating decision variants of the problem, determining what actions the various candidate beliefs prescribe, and assessing whether these actions are reasonable when we step back. Dutch book arguments are a special case of this approach, but other Sleeping Beauty games have also been constructed to make similar points. Building on a recent article (Shaw, Synthese 190(3):491–508, 2013), I show that in general we should be wary of such arguments, because unintuitive actions may result for reasons that are unrelated to the beliefs. On the other hand, I show that, when we restrict our attention to additive games, then a thirder will necessarily maximize her ex ante expected payout, but a halfer in some cases will not (assuming causal decision theory). I conclude that this does not necessarily settle the issue and speculate about what might.
Duke Scholars
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- 0801 Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing
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Published In
DOI
EISSN
ISSN
Publication Date
Volume
Issue
Start / End Page
Related Subject Headings
- Philosophy
- 5003 Philosophy
- 5002 History and philosophy of specific fields
- 2203 Philosophy
- 2202 History and Philosophy of Specific Fields
- 0801 Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing