Talk: Jack Spencer (MIT)

Prof. Jack Spencer, from MIT, will be visiting on March 24th to present his latest work in the formal epistemology reading group. All are encouraged to attend. There will be free lunch!

“The Forward Principle”

According to David Lewis, an agent should defer to the future chances, so long as the information an agent possesses is admissible with respect to the future chances. I will argue that it is impossible for an agent’s information to be inadmissible with respect to future chances, and hence that Lewis’s restriction is unnecessary. Take any epistemic fantasy you like. Let the agent consult an oracle, or a crystal ball, or an informant from the future. Let the agent be from the future, herself. Whatever information the agent possesses is guaranteed to be futurely admissible. As a result, we get a terrifically user-friendly chance-credence norm, which I call the Forward Principle, and we can lay to rest certain objections to causal decision theory that are predicated on the possibility of agents possessing futurely inadmissible information.