Accuracy and epistemic deference

一枚硬币即将被抛出。你知道这是一枚公平的硬币。也就是说，你知道它有50%的可能性会落在头上。但这就是你所知道的一切。你应该有多大的信心相信它会落到头上？肯定是50%。也就是说，你应该把它落地的机会视为一种专家，你在形成自己的意见时，会听从他的意见。这就是所谓的主要原则。另一种你在形成当前观点时似乎应该听从其意见的专家是你未来的自己。如果你知道你未来的自己会对某个特定的结果有70%的信心，你自己也应该有70%的信心，至少在正常情况下是这样。毕竟，你未来的自我通常比你更了解情况，而且有更长的时间来权衡证据。这就是众所周知的反射原理。本研究的核心问题是：为什么要遵循主体原则和反思原则？如果我们违反了它们中的任何一个，我们会在什么方面犯错误？上面，我通过诉诸我们关于如何形成自己观点的某些直觉来推动这些原则。但是，直觉是出了名的不可靠，而且往往根据它们是如何产生的而有所不同。因此，理想情况下，我们希望为这些规范提供更可靠、更严格的理由。这样的辩解在哲学文献中是相当缺乏的。在这个项目中，我将调查是否有可能通过诉诸一种在回答相关问题时已经非常有效的新策略来给出更严格的理由。这种想法是这样的：假设世界是这样的，一定程度的信心比其他水平的人更好。例如，对所有真理的信心很高、对所有错误的信心很低的人，比那些对虚假的信心高、对真理的信心低的人有更好的意见。受此启发，一些哲学家试图定义一种衡量特定观点对世界可能的特定方式有多好的衡量标准。有了这样的措施，我们可以从以下几个方面对主体原则和反映原则给予更严格的辩护。假设这样的情况，当你有一些违反主要原则的意见时，那么就会有一些你可能拥有的、比你的实际意见(根据意见的好坏程度)更好的满足它的意见，因为世界可能是这样的。那么，似乎这就证明了主要原则是正确的。毕竟，无论世界变成什么样子，你都应该做这条原则规定的事情，这会更好。因此，这种为主要原则辩护的方式承诺，如果它奏效，就会有严格的理由。我们可能希望对反射原理也有类似的论点。它管用吗？我的初步研究表明，它确实提供了关于客观机会和未来自我的某些详细的哲学主张。这一研究项目试图提供使这一论点有效所需的哲学基础。

A coin is about to be tossed. You know that it is a fair coin. That is, you know that there is a 50% chance that it will land heads. But this is all you know. How confident should you be that it will land heads? 50%, surely. That is, you should treat the chance of it landing heads as a sort of expert to whose opinion you defer when forming your own. This is known as the Principal Principle. Another sort of expert to whose opinion it seems you should defer when forming your current opinion is your future self. If you know that your future self will be 70% confident in a particular outcome, you should have 70% confidence yourself, at least in normal circumstances. After all, your future self is typically better informed than you are, and has had longer to weigh the evidence. This is known as the Reflection Principle. The central question of this research project is this: Why should we obey the Principal Principle and the Reflection Principle? In what way do we err if we violate either of them?Above, I motivated these principles by appealing to certain intuitions we have about how we should form our opinion. But intuitions are notoriously unreliable and often vary depending on how they are elicited. So ideally we would like a more reliable, rigorous justification for these norms. Such justifications have been rather lacking in the philosophical literature. In this project, I will investigate the possibility of giving a more rigorous justification by appealing to a new strategy that has been used to great effect in answering related questions. The idea is this: Given a way that the world might be, certain levels of confidence are better than others. For instance, someone who has a very high degree of confidence in all truths and a very low degree of confidence in all falsehoods has better opinions than someone who has high confidence in falsehoods and low in truths. Inspired by this, some philosophers have tried to define a measure of how good a given opinion is for a particular way the world might be. With this sort of measure in hand, we might give a more rigorous justification of the Principal Principle and the Reflection Principle in the following way. Suppose it were the case that, whenever you had some opinions that violate the Principal Principle, then there were some opinions that satisfy it that you might have instead and that are better than your actual opinions (according to the measure of goodness of opinions) given any possible way the world could be. Then, it seems, this would justify the Principal Principle. After all, it would be better to do what that principle says you should do however the world turns out to be. So this way of arguing for the Principal Principle promises a rigorous justification if it works. And we might hope for a similar argument for the Reflection Principle.Does it work? My initial research shows that it does providing certain detailed philosophical claims about objective chances and future selves can be established. This research project seeks to provide the philosophical underpinnings required to make this argument work.