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Pragmatic Considerations on Comparative Probability

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Thomas F. Icard III
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Abstract

While pragmatic arguments for numerical probability axioms have received much attention, justifications for axioms of qualitative probability have been less discussed. We offer an argument for the requirement that an agent’s qualitative (comparative) judgments be probabilistically representable, inspired by, but importantly different from, the Money Pump argument for transitivity of preference and Dutch book arguments for quantitative coherence. The argument is supported by a theorem, to the effect that a subject is systematically susceptible to dominance given her preferred acts, if and only if the subject’s comparative judgments preclude representation by a standard probability measure (or set of such measures).

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 83 , Issue 3 , July 2016 , pp. 348 - 370
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I would like to acknowledge the journal reviewers for helpful and attentive remarks and questions. Thanks also to Wes Holliday and Shane Steinert-Threlkeld for useful comments on an earlier version and to audiences at Indiana University and University of Maryland. Finally, thanks especially to Teddy Seidenfeld for formative discussions during the writing of this article, including the valuable suggestion to invoke Pearce’s lemma in service of the main result.

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