Philosophy 290-8

Description: Bayesianism is a simple and powerful theory of epistemic rationality . Roughly, the view consists of two claims: (i) ideally rational agents have degrees of belief that are probabilistically coherent, and (ii) they revise their degrees of belief by conditionalizing on their total evidence. In this course, we will make precise what these two claims mean and subject them to critical scrutiny. Topics that we will discuss include: (1) arguments for Bayesianism (e.g. the Dutch book argument, the accuracy argument) and their respective limitations; (2) how/whether the Bayesian framework can be generalized to accommodate perceptual learning, updating on conditional information, self-locating evidence and higher-order evidence, and awareness growth; (3) alternative models of partial belief; (4) non-classical Bayesianism; (5) the relationship between credence and categorical belief.