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Expert deference as a belief revision schema

Roussos, Joe (2020) Expert deference as a belief revision schema. [Preprint]

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Abstract

When an agent learns of an expert's credence in a proposition about which they are an expert, the agent should defer to the expert and adopt that credence as their own. This is a popular thought about how agents ought to respond to (ideal) experts. In a Bayesian framework, it is often modelled by endowing the agent with a set of priors that achieves this result. But this model faces a number of challenges, especially when applied to non-ideal agents (who nevertheless interact with ideal experts). I outline these problems, and use them as desiderata for the development of a new model. Taking inspiration from Richard Jeffrey's development of Jeffrey conditioning, I develop a model in which expert reports are taken as exogenous constraints on the agent's posterior probabilities. I show how this model can handle a much wider class of expert reports (for example reports of conditional probabilities), and can be naturally extended to cover propositions for which the agent has no prior.


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Item Type: Preprint
Creators:
CreatorsEmailORCID
Roussos, Joejoe.roussos@iffs.se0000-0002-7663-8057
Keywords: belief revision; expert deference; expert disagreement; awareness
Subjects: General Issues > Decision Theory
Depositing User: Mr Joe Roussos
Date Deposited: 31 Oct 2020 13:33
Last Modified: 31 Oct 2020 13:33
Item ID: 18334
Subjects: General Issues > Decision Theory
Date: 2020
URI: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/18334

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