Anna Mahtani (LSE): “Knowledge and the Sure Thing Principle”

Abstract: Suppose that you were to discover that there is some piece of evidence E that you don’t currently know, and that E is evidence in favour of some proposition P. Should you increase your credence in P in the light of this piece of information? I argue that this suggestion seems compelling, but it cannot always be rational to adjust your credence in this way: thus here our intuition seems to go wrong. To clarify what is happening here, I disambiguate two senses of ‘knows’: on one reading, the suggestion is correct, but on the other it is not. I apply the discussion to Savage’s Sure Thing Principle, and van Fraassen’s Reflection Principle.

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