Blurring Out Cosmic Puzzles

Abstract

The Doomsday argument and anthropic reasoning are two puzzling examples of probabilistic confirmation. In both cases, a lack of knowledge apparently yields surprising conclusions. Since they are formulated within a Bayesian framework, they constitute a challenge to Bayesianism. Several attempts, some successful, have been made to avoid these conclusions, but some versions of these arguments cannot be dissolved within the framework of orthodox Bayesianism. I show that adopting an imprecise framework of probabilistic reasoning allows for a more adequate representation of ignorance in Bayesian reasoning and explains away these puzzles.

15 pages, 1 figure. To appear in Philosophy of Science (PSA 2014)

References in corpus (5)

• Decision making under uncertainty using imprecise probabilities
• Are We Typical?
• Puzzles of Anthropic Reasoning Resolved Using Full Non-indexical Conditioning
• Anthropics and Myopics: Conditional Probabilities and the Cosmological Constant
• The Bayesian Who Knew Too Much

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Copernicanism and the Typicality in Time
• The Noonday Argument: Fine-Graining, Indexicals, and the Nature of Copernican Reasoning
• Review of Geraint F. Lewis and Luke A. Barnes, A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos