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Updating on the Credences of Others: Disagreement, Agreement and Synergy

Easwaran, K; Fenton-Glynn, L; Hitchcock, C; Velasco, JD; (2016) Updating on the Credences of Others: Disagreement, Agreement and Synergy. Philosophers' Imprint , 16 (11) pp. 1-39. Green open access

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Abstract

We introduce a family of rules for adjusting one's credences in response to learning the credences of others. These rules have a number of desirable features. 1. They yield the posterior credences that would result from updating by standard Bayesian conditionalization on one's peers' reported credences if one's likelihood function takes a particular simple form. 2. In the simplest form, they are symmetric among the agents in the group. 3. They map neatly onto the familiar Condorcet voting results. 4. They preserve shared agreement about independence in a wide range of cases. 5. They commute with conditionalization and with multiple peer updates. Importantly, these rules have a surprising property that we call synergy - peer testimony of credences can provide mutually supporting evidence raising an individual's credence higher than any peer's initial prior report. At first, this may seem to be a strike against them. We argue, however, that synergy is actually a desirable feature and the failure of other updating rules to yield synergy is a strike against them.

Type: Article
Title: Updating on the Credences of Others: Disagreement, Agreement and Synergy
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
Publisher version: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3521354.0016.011
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © 2016 The Authors. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).
Keywords: Bayesian Epistemology, Formal Epistemology, Peer Disagreement, Credence
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Philosophy
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1478125
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