Foundations of Probability reading group
Details
Time: Thursdays, 11.00 (from 17/11/2011)
Venue: Room 705, Philosophy Building
Convenor: Michael Ridley
Description
Some questions I hope we can address over the course of the year are:
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Does Bayesianism provide us with the optimal means of doing statistical inference?
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What reasons can one give, other than Dutch Book arguments, for subscribing to probabilism - the view that it is rational to arrange your degrees of belief in accordance with the probability calculus. The theorems of R.T.Cox, for example, may provide a different way to justify this view.
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Is probability theory an extension of classical logic?
We should progress onto subjective/objective interpretations of the meaning of probability, and what kind of things objective probabilities would have to be, were there any. If there is any mathematical content in the papers we read, I will attempt to unravel it for you. We will not be sidestepping the maths.
All readings will be taken from the anthology Philosophy of Probability - Contemporary Readings, edited by Anthony Eagle. The reading for the first two weeks will be Chapter 7 of 'Scientific Inference - The Bayesian Approach', by Howson and Urbach.