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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
    See Original
    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Pascal's equiprobability argument does not speak to those in his audience who do not assign probability 1/2 to God's existence.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Some members of Pascal's audience assign a probability other than 1/2 to God's existence.
      ?

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    • 2.An argument premised on equiprobability only applies to agents who accept that assignment.
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Pascal's Wager in the Pensées explicitly invokes a coin-toss analogy, grounding its formal structure in a 50/50 prior over God's existence.
      ?

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    • 2.Arguments are valid only relative to the premises they assume; an argument assuming equiprobability is formally inapplicable to agents holding asymmetric priors.
      ?

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    • 3.Bayesian decision theory, as developed by Savage and Jeffrey, requires that expected utility calculations respect the agent's actual credence function, not a stipulated one.
      ?

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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Ian Hacking's canonical analysis of the Wager identifies equiprobability as a load-bearing assumption, not a rhetorical flourish, making it structurally essential.
      ?

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    • 2.An agent assigning probability 0.01 to God's existence faces a different dominance or expectation calculation than one assigning 0.5, yielding potentially different rational prescriptions.
      ?

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