Open    Access



Contemporary Analytic Philosophy and Bayesian Subjectivism: Why Both Are Incoherent



Author(s)

Tom Vinci

Full-Text PDF XML     919 Views

DOI:10.17265/2159-5313/2016.10.002

My purpose in this paper is to argue for two separate, but related theses. The first is that contemporary analytic philosophy is incoherent. This is so, I argue, because its methods contain as an essential constituent a non-classical conception of intuition that cannot be rendered consistent with a key tenet of analytic philosophy unless we allow a Bayesian-subjectivist epistemology. I argue for this within a discussion of two theories of intuition: a classical account as proposed by Descartes and a modern reliabilist account as proposed by Kornblith, maintaining that reliabilist accounts require a commitment to Bayesian subjectivism about probability. However, and this is the second thesis, Bayesian subjectivism is itself logically incoherent given three simple assumptions: (1) some empirical propositions are known, (2) any proposition that is known is assigned a degree of subjective credence of 1, and (3) every empirical proposition is evidentially relevant to at least one other proposition. I establish this using a formal reductio proof. I argue for the first thesis in section 1 and for the second in section 2. The final section contains a summary and conclusion.

intuitions, Bayesianism, probability, subjectivism, rationality, analytic philosophy, evidence, reliabilism