In-Progress
“Guessing without Modesty”
Imprecise credences are a powerful tool for capturing cases in which our evidence is not specific enough to warrant a precise degree of confidence. But it is notoriously difficult to incorporate imprecise credences within an accuracy-first approach to epistemology. One of the foundational assumptions in the accuracy-first literature is that rational agents must be strictly immodest: they must think their own credences are more accurate than any other particular credence function. Advocates of epistemic utility theory and the guessing approach to accuracy agree that agents with imprecise credences cannot be strictly immodest, which suggests that they are not rational (Seidenfeld et al. 2012; Builes et al. 2020). I argue that this is incorrect. Using the guessing approach to accuracy, I show that we can build an account of accuracy that is compatible with it being rationally permissible or rationally required that agents have imprecise credences.“Guessing on Principal”
I show that agents make more true guesses in expectation if they are more confident in proposition P than Q whenever the chance of P is greater than the chance of Q. The result suggests that if the chance of P is greater than the chance of Q, we ought to be more confident in P. I then use a representation theorem to argue that rational agents ought to be representable as having a credence function that matches the chance function precisely. But the argument faces a circularity concern. By looking at how many true guesses are made in expectation, I presuppose that agents already care about certain chance estimates. I argue that the circularity is not confined to the guessing approach, and that it is less vicious than a similar circularity admitted by epistemic utility theory.““Epistemic Decision Theory with Imprecise Credences” co-authored work with Adrian Liu
Greaves (2013) presents a challenge to accuracy-first epistemic decision theory: how should the theory accommodate cases of causal entanglement between credal states and worldly conditions? In response to the challenge, Joyce (2018) and Konek and Levinstein (2019) have proposed modifications to standard epistemic decision theory. We argue that the proposed modifications fail on three counts: they do not give a complete analysis of the agent's prior that adequately respects their evidence, they do not give us a well-defined distinction between prior and posterior credences, and they cannot accommodate the thought that epistemic rationality is about reflecting rather than changing the world. We instead propose a framework for epistemic decision theory with imprecise credences, and show that our framework solves all three problems.“Fundamental Laws and the Methodology of Science” co-authored work with Travis McKenna
We show that the term 'fundamental law' is not used coextensively in metaphysics and science. The mismatch is significant, because the fundamental laws of nature are often regarded as those that tell us about the fundamental nature of reality. We appeal to examples from Newtonian mechanics, continuum mechanics, and electrodynamics to show that the use of 'fundamental law' in science is gerrymandered and fails to pick out laws that are suitable for telling us about fundamental reality. “Wavefunction Realism and Fundamentality” co-authored work with Nina Emery
Our paper challenges the common assumption that if the quantum wavefunction is best represented as a field, then it must be a fundamental field in a high-dimensional configuration space. We introduce an alternative view, wavefunction non-fundamentalism, that says the quantum wavefunction represents a non-fundamental field in the high-dimensional configuration space. We argue that whether it's best to think of the wavefunction field as fundamental or non-fundamental will turn on nuanced questions about the nature of grounding, the importance of separability and locality, and the role of explanation in metaphysics and physics.