Darren Bradley
Philosophy Department
University of British Columbia
1866 Main Mall E370
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1
Canada
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Darren Bradley Philosophy Department |
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I'm currently a post-doc at UBC. My research is primarily in epistemology, formal epistemology and philosophy of language. Some of my papers are below. Any comments, questions and devastating objections would be very welcome. Published Papers: Multiple Universes and Observation Selection Effects American Philosophical Quarterly 46 (2009), 61-72 The fine-tuning argument can be used to support the Many Universe hypothesis. The Inverse Gambler’s Fallacy objection seeks to undercut the support for the Many Universe hypothesis. The objection is that although the evidence that there is life somewhere confirms Many Universes, the specific evidence that there is life in this universe does not. I will argue that the Inverse Gambler’s Fallacy is not committed by the fine-tuning argument. The key issue is the procedure by which the universe with life is selected for observation. Once we take account of the procedure, we find that the support for the Many Universe hypothesis remains. "Philosophical Perspectives on Decision Theory" (forthcoming) in The Encyclopedia of the Mind, ed. Hal Pashler, Sage When Betting Odds and Credences Come Apart: More Worries for Dutch Book Arguments (with Hannes Leitgeb), Analysis 66.2 (2006), 119–127 [Reprinted in Philosophy of Probability: Contemporary Readings, ed. Anthony Eagle, Routledge, 2009.] We argue that there is a constraint on when being Dutch-booked is a symptom of irrationality that has been over-looked in the literature. The constraint is that the size of the bet mustn't be correlated with the outcome of the event that the bet it on. This undermines Chris Hitchcock's (2004) argument for the 1/3 position in Sleeping Beauty. No Doomsday Argument Without Knowledge of Birth Rank Synthese 144 (2005), 91-100 Brad Monton (2003) tried to construct an a priori Doomsday Argument that could be used without knowledge of your birth rank. This would be an uncomfortable result for Doomsayers. I argue that Monton has failed to construct such an argument, and that the Doomsday Argument requires knowlege of birth rank. Monty Hall, Doomsday and Confirmation (with Branden Fitelson), Analysis 63 (2003), 23-31 We give an analysis of the Monty Hall problem purely in terms of confirmation, without making any lottery assumptions about priors. Along the way, we show the Monty Hall problem is structurally identical to the Doomsday Argument. Sleeping Beauty: A Note on Dorr's Argument for 1/3 Analysis 63 (2003), 266-268 Cian Dorr (2002) gives an argument for the 1/3 position in Sleeping Beauty. I argue this is based on a mistake about Sleeping Beauty's epistemic position.
Works in Progress: In a recent paper, Chris Meacham (forthcoming) exposes a short-coming in David Lewis's theory of belief. The problem is generated by what can be called dynamic beliefs. Meacham offers an extension of Lewis's theory to deal with dynamic beliefs. But in so doing, he exposes a weakness of Lewis's theory. I argue that dynamic beliefs are more satisfactorily handled by the Kaplan/Perry two-tier theory of belief. The two tier theory gives us a natural division between eternal propositions and self-locating beliefs. I argue that these categories have different norms of belief update, and that a theory that respects this division is to be preferred. How Belief Mutation Saves Conditionalization from Self-Locating Information There has been much recent discussion about how to model agents who learn self-locating beliefs. I argue that there are two different ways self-locating beliefs can be learnt. One of these ways - which I call belief mutation - is unique to self-locating beliefs, and presents a challenge to conditionalization. I defend conditionalization from purported violations in the Prisoner and Sleeping Beauty thought experiments, and argue that belief mutation should never change an agent's degree of belief in any non-self-locating proposition. Four Problems about Self-Locating Belief This paper gives a unified treatment of the Doomsday Argument, Sleeping Beauty, the Fine-tuning Argument and confirmation in the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics. All these cases involve self-locating evidence. However, the difficult feature of these cases is not self-location, but observation selection effects. I explain how observation selection effects operate, why they affect the four problem cases, and how they can be incorporated into confirmation theory. I will defend the Doomsday Argument, the halfer position in Sleeping Beauty, the Fine-tuning Argument and the applicability of confirmation theory to the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Here's my dissertation, which was completed at Stanford in July 2007: Bayesianism and Self-Locating Beliefs or Tom Bayes meets John Perry Bayesians usually work with propositions - sentences that are eternally true or eternally false. But philosophers of language have long known that this theory of belief is incomplete. Many of our beliefs contain essential indexicals (Perry 1977). These beliefs change their truth-values over time, violating one of the presuppositions of the Bayesian framework. I argue that Bayesianism can be extended to deal with this challenge. We do not need any new norms of belief change as suggested by Arntzenius (2003) and proposed by Meacham (2007). I show that the Bayesian solution is the correct one for a wide range of problems, and discuss the ways that Bayesianism should be extended in the few cases in which it needs to be.
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