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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Avoiding Certain Frustration, Reflection, And The Cable Guy Paradox, Brian Kierland, Bradley Monton, Samuel Ruhmkorff
Avoiding Certain Frustration, Reflection, And The Cable Guy Paradox, Brian Kierland, Bradley Monton, Samuel Ruhmkorff
Brian Kierland
We discuss the cable guy paradox, both as an object of interest in its own right and as something which can be used to illuminate certain issues in the theories of rational choice and belief. We argue that a crucial principle—The Avoid Certain Frustration (ACF) principle—which is used in stating the paradox is false, thus resolving the paradox. We also explain how the paradox gives us new insight into issues related to the Reflection principle. Our general thesis is that principles that base your current opinions on your current opinions about your future opinions need not make reference to the …
Presentism And The Objection From Being-Supervenience, Brian Kierland, Bradley Monton
Presentism And The Objection From Being-Supervenience, Brian Kierland, Bradley Monton
Brian Kierland
In this paper, we show that presentism—the view that the way things are is the way things presently are—is not undermined by the objection from being-supervenience. This objection claims, roughly, that presentism has trouble accounting for the truth-value of past-tense claims. Our demonstration amounts to the articulation and defence of a novel version of presentism. This is brute past presentism, according to which the truth-value of past-tense claims is determined by the past understood as a fundamental aspect of reality different from things and how things are.
Cooperation, ‘Ought Morally’, And Principles Of Moral Harmony, Brian Kierland
Cooperation, ‘Ought Morally’, And Principles Of Moral Harmony, Brian Kierland
Brian Kierland
There is a theory that one ought morally to do the best one can, when ‘best’ is suitably interpreted. There are also some examples in which, although every agent involved does the best she can, the group composed of them does not. Some philosophers think that these examples show the theory to be wrong. In particular, they think that such examples motivate a view which incorporates a requirement of cooperativeness in a particular way, though they disagree as to the exact nature of this requirement. This paper will argue both that such views are problematic and that the examples do …
How To Predict Future Duration From Present Age, Bradley Monton, Brian Kierland
How To Predict Future Duration From Present Age, Bradley Monton, Brian Kierland
Brian Kierland
The physicist J. Richard Gott has given an argument which, if good, allows one to make accurate predictions for the future longevity of a process, based solely on its present age. We show that there are problems with some of the details of Gott's argument, but we defend the core thesis: in many circumstances, the greater the present age of a process, the more likely a longer future duration.
Minimizing Inaccuracy For Self-Locating Beliefs, Brian Kierland, Bradley Monton
Minimizing Inaccuracy For Self-Locating Beliefs, Brian Kierland, Bradley Monton
Brian Kierland
One's inaccuracy for a proposition is defined as the squared difference between the truth value (1 or 0) of the proposition and the credence (or subjective probability, or degree of belief) assigned to the proposition. One should have the epistemic goal of minimizing the expected inaccuracies of one's credences. We show that the method of minimizing expected inaccuracy can be used to solve certain probability problems involving information loss and self-locating beliefs (where a self-locating belief of a temporal part of an individual is a belief about where or when that temporal part is located). We analyze the Sleeping Beauty …
Supererogatory Superluminality, Bradley Monton, Brian Kierland
Supererogatory Superluminality, Bradley Monton, Brian Kierland
Brian Kierland
We argue that any superluminal theory T is empirically equivalent to a nonsuperluminal theory T∗, with the following constraints on T∗: T∗ preserves the spacetime intervals between events as entailed by T , T∗ is naturalistic (as long as T is), and all the events which have causes according to T also have causes according to T∗. Tim Maudlin (1996) defines standard interpretations of quantum mechanics as interpretations ‘according to which there was a unique set of outcomes in Aspect’s laboratory, which outcomes occurred at spacelike separation’, and Maudlin claims that standard …