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Another Attempt to Put Sleeping Beauty to Rest1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Extract

Sleeping Beauty has become like Newcomb's problem used to be: a puzzle where both intuitions and arguments cluster around two competing responses. In both cases, the real interest is in the frameworks that are constructed to treat the problem: causal vs. evidential decision theory in the case of Newcomb's problem, and different accounts of essentially indexical or self-locating belief in the case of Sleeping Beauty. Many of the arguments about Sleeping Beauty have been carried out in a common framework for representing self-locating belief, with alternative responses agreeing about the presuppositions of that framework. I want to question some of these presuppositions and to set the problem up in a way that is only subtly different from the standard formulation, but different in a way that I think is important.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2009

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Footnotes

1

I have discussed the Sleeping Beauty problem in three previous publications: Stalnaker (2008; 2010a; and 2010b), and since I don't believe I have succeeded in putting the problem to rest in this paper, I will probably do so again. For discussion and comments, I thank Sarah Moss, Mike Titelbaum, Seth Yalin, Dilip Ninan, Rachael Briggs and David Hunter.

References

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Stalnaker, R. 2008. Our Knowledge of the Internal World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Stalnaker, R. 2010b. “The Essential Contextual.” In Assertion: New Philosophical Essays, eds. Brown, J. and Cappelen, H., 137-50. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar