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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 Probabilistic versions of abduction are either redundant or probabilistically incoherent, and therefore irrational to follow.

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

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Probabilistic abduction rules must either amount to Bayes' rule or be at variance with it.
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    • 2.If a probabilistic abduction rule amounts to Bayes' rule, it is redundant.
      ?

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    • 3.If a probabilistic abduction rule is at variance with Bayes' rule, then by Lewis' dynamic Dutch book argument it is probabilistically incoherent.
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Van Fraassen's 'best of a bad lot' objection shows IBE selects explanatorily best hypotheses only from those considered, not from all possible hypotheses.
      ?

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    • 2.Any probabilistic rule encoding 'explanatory virtue' as a likelihood boost must assign higher posteriors to hypotheses independent of their prior probability mass, violating the probability calculus.
      ?

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    • 3.Since no principled mapping exists from qualitative explanatory virtues to precise numerical likelihoods, probabilistic IBE introduces arbitrary parameters that Bayes' rule cannot absorb without distortion.
      ?

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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Howson and Urbach's formal Bayesian epistemology demonstrates that coherent belief revision is fully characterized by conditionalization, leaving no formal role for explanatory considerations as independent update triggers.
      ?

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    • 2.Any attempt by Lipton or Lycan to treat 'loveliness' as a probability-boosting factor beyond likelihood ratios generates violations of the ratio formula for conditional probability, as Salmon's confirmation theory makes explicit.
      ?

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    Strongest counterpoint
    Explore the most compelling reason on the other side.