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On the Formal Consistency of the Principal Principle
Author(s) -
Gergei Bana
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
philosophy of science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.04
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1539-767X
pISSN - 0031-8248
DOI - 10.1086/687932
Subject(s) - principal (computer security) , consistency (knowledge bases) , extension (predicate logic) , event (particle physics) , value (mathematics) , mathematics , algebra over a field , mathematical economics , epistemology , computer science , pure mathematics , discrete mathematics , philosophy , statistics , physics , programming language , quantum mechanics , operating system
Rédei and Gyenis suggest that Lewis’s Principal Principle is meaningful only if it satisfies certain consistency conditions: starting from any assignment of credences to some algebra of events, we must always be able to extend our algebra with events as “the value of the objective chance of event E is p” and assign credences to such events in a consistent manner. I show that this extension is possible. However, I also argue that this requirement is unnecessary: the Principal Principle concerns subjective beliefs about objective chance; hence, events concerning those probabilities are meant to be in the algebra initially.

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