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The Fine-Tuning Argument and the Requirement of Total Evidence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Peter Fisher Epstein
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Abstract

According to the Fine-Tuning Argument (FTA), the existence of life in our universe confirms the Multiverse Hypothesis (HM). A standard objection to FTA is that it violates the Requirement of Total Evidence (RTE). I argue that RTE should be rejected in favor of the Predesignation Requirement, according to which, in assessing the outcome of a probabilistic process, we should only use evidence characterizable in a manner available before observing the outcome. This produces the right verdicts in some simple cases in which RTE leads us astray, and, when applied to FTA, it shows that our evidence does confirm HM.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 84 , Issue 4 , October 2017 , pp. 639 - 658
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I would like to thank Lara Buchak, Wes Holliday, Alex Kerr, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and Umrao Sethi for extensive discussion of earlier drafts of this article. Research for the article was supported in part by a fellowship from the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fund.

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