WiP - Jacob Lettie / Induction, empiricism, and dogmatic optimism
WiP - Jacob Lettie / Induction, empiricism, and dogmatic optimism
Wednesday October 21, our new instructor Jacob Lettie cracks that WiP, sharing his work in philosophy of science and metaphysics, with a talk on "Induction, empiricism, and dogmatic optimism," abstracted below.
In the Bayesian setting, a coherent reasoner who is not an inductive skeptic must have induction-friendly priors. I pose objections to the Bayesian rationalist who seeks an a priori justification of induction-friendly priors, and show that the Bayesian setting enables an appealingly moderate dogmatic response to inductive skepticism. I show how a strategy of conditionalizing on known regularities can place limits on how much a non-skeptic’s priors must be biased towards induction-friendly scenarios. I also show that this strategy of conditionalizing on known regularities does not have the side effect of producing high posterior credences in strong metaphysical claims. Throughout, I avoid relying on strong principles that subjective Bayesians would not accept.