WiP - Leo Yang / Relevant alternatives in guessing
WiP - Leo Yang / Relevant alternatives in guessing
September 30, we finish off the first month of the semester with our fourth WiP meeting, led by Leo Yang, who will discuss his work on guessing, abstracted below, to be presented in two weeks at FARM2.
This paper explores the role of relevant alternatives in guessing. I make two claims. First, guessing is sensitive to relevant alternatives, though all the existing accounts fail to recognize that. Second, given a plausible account of relevant alternatives, we can account for all existing observations about permissibility of guesses purely in terms of probability and relevant alternatives. My argument, if established, suggests that in a theory of what guesses are permissible, we do not need any notion of informativity, which is prevalent in the existing accounts.