Pragmatic Considerations on Comparative Probability

While pragmatic arguments for numerical probability axioms have received much attention, justifications for axioms of qualitative probability have been less discussed. We offer an argument for the requirement that an agent’s qualitative (comparative) judgments be probabilistically representable, ins...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Philosophy of science 2016-07, Vol.83 (3), p.348-370
Main Author: Icard, Thomas F.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Comparative analysis
Judgment
Numerical analysis
Philosophy of science
Probability
Theorems
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Summary:While pragmatic arguments for numerical probability axioms have received much attention, justifications for axioms of qualitative probability have been less discussed. We offer an argument for the requirement that an agent’s qualitative (comparative) judgments be probabilistically representable, inspired by, but importantly different from, the Money Pump argument for transitivity of preference and Dutch book arguments for quantitative coherence. The argument is supported by a theorem, to the effect that a subject is systematically susceptible to dominance given her preferred acts, if and only if the subject’s comparative judgments preclude representation by a standard probability measure (or set of such measures).
ISSN:0031-8248
1539-767X
DOI:10.1086/685742