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DESCRIPTION AND THE PROBLEM OF PRIORS

Barrett, Jeffrey A. (2013) DESCRIPTION AND THE PROBLEM OF PRIORS. In: UNSPECIFIED.

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Abstract

Belief-revision models of knowledge describe how to update one's degrees of belief associated with hypotheses as one considers new evidence, but they typically do not say how probabilities become associated with meaningful hypotheses in the first place. Here we consider a variety of Skyrms-Lewis signaling game where simple descriptive language and predictive practice and associated basic expectations coevolve. Rather than assigning prior probabilities to hypotheses in a fixed language then conditioning on new evidence, the agents begin with no meaningful language or expectations then evolve to have expectations conditional on their descriptions as they evolve to have meaningful descriptions for the purpose of successful prediction. The model, then, provides a simple but concrete example of how the process of evolving a descriptive language suitable for inquiry might also provide agents with effective priors.


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Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (UNSPECIFIED)
Creators:
CreatorsEmailORCID
Barrett, Jeffrey A.j.barrett@uci.edu
Keywords: problem of priors, Lewis-Skyrms signaling game, evolutionary game theory
Subjects: General Issues > Confirmation/Induction
Specific Sciences > Probability/Statistics
Depositing User: Jeffrey Barrett
Date Deposited: 15 Jun 2013 16:40
Last Modified: 01 Jun 2016 20:33
Item ID: 9835
Subjects: General Issues > Confirmation/Induction
Specific Sciences > Probability/Statistics
Date: 14 June 2013
URI: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/9835

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