Ramsey and Joyce on deliberation and prediction
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Ramsey and Joyce on deliberation and prediction Yang Liu1
· Huw Price1
Received: 3 March 2018 / Accepted: 30 August 2018 © The Author(s) 2018
Abstract Can an agent deliberating about an action A hold a meaningful credence that she will do A? ‘No’, say some authors, for ‘deliberation crowds out prediction’ (DCOP). Others disagree, but we argue here that such disagreements are often terminological. We explain why DCOP holds in a Ramseyian operationalist model of credence, but show that it is trivial to extend this model so that DCOP fails. We then discuss a model due to Joyce, and show that Joyce’s rejection of DCOP rests on terminological choices about terms such as ‘intention’, ‘prediction’, and ‘belief’. Once these choices are in view, they reveal underlying agreement between Joyce and the DCOP-favouring tradition that descends from Ramsey. Joyce’s Evidential Autonomy Thesis is effectively DCOP, in different terminological clothing. Both principles rest on the so-called ‘transparency’ of first-person present-tensed reflection on one’s own mental states. Keywords Act credence · Deliberation · Prediction · Ramsey · Joyce · Agency · Transparency
1 Introduction Can an agent hold a meaningful credence about a contemplated action, as she deliberates? Can she believe that it is, say, 70% probable that she will do A, while she chooses whether to do A? Following Spohn (1977) and Levi (1989, 1996), some writers claim that such ‘act credences’ are problematic, or even incoherent—deliberation crowds out prediction (DCOP), as Levi puts it. Some writers take DCOP to be almost a platitude;1 others (e.g., Ahmed 2014; Joyce 2002; Rabinowicz 2002) think that the case for it is weak, or that it is clearly false. Another recent critic of DCOP is Hájek (2016). In Liu and Price (2018), we argue, contra Hájek, that DCOP is a special case of the so-called ‘transparency’ of first-person 1 “Probably anyone will find it absurd to assume that someone has subjective probabilities for things which are under his control and which he can actualize as he pleases” (Spohn 1977, 115).
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Yang Liu [email protected] Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge CB3 9DA, UK
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present-tensed reflection on one’s own mental state. If someone asks me whether I believed yesterday that it would rain today, I consider my evidence (e.g., from memory) about what I believed yesterday. If someone asks me whether I believe that it is raining now, I don’t consider my present state of belief at all, or at least not directly. I simply consider whether it is raining. My enquiry ‘looks through’ the question about belief, to a question about what the belief in question is itself about. This ‘looking through’ is transparency. Moran (2001) explains transparency in terms of a distinction between two paths to knowledge of one’s own mental state—a theoretical path, which is the one I use to discover what I believed yesterday (or what another person believes); and a deliberative path, where I learn that I now believe that it is ra
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