UNIVERSITY SEMINAR ON LOGIC, PROBABILITY, AND GAMES
Learning Conditionals and the Problem of Old Evidence
Stephan Hartmann (Ludwig Maximilians-Universität München)
4:10 pm, February 13, 2015
Faculty House, Columbia University
Abstract. The following are abstracts of two papers on which this talk is based.
The Problem of Old Evidence has troubled Bayesians ever since Clark Glymour first presented it in 1980. Several solutions have been proposed, but all of them have drawbacks and none of them is considered to be the definite solution. In this article, I propose a new solution which combines several old ideas with a new one. It circumvents the crucial omniscience problem in an elegant way and leads to a considerable confirmation of the hypothesis in question.
Modeling how to learn an indicative conditional has been a major challenge for formal epistemologists. One proposal to meet this challenge is to construct the posterior probability distribution by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the posterior probability distribution and the prior probability distribution, taking the learned information as a constraint (expressed as a conditional probability statement) into account. This proposal has been criticized in the literature based on several clever examples. In this article, we revisit four of these examples and show that one obtains intuitively correct results for the posterior probability distribution if the underlying probabilistic models reflect the causal structure of the scenarios in question.
Formal Philosophy 