TL;DRAbstract
In this chapter we examine the evidential decision theory developed by Richard Jeffrey in The Logic of Decision. Jeffrey's theory has a number of significant advantages over Savage's. For example, it is able to account for the effects of an agent's actions on the probabilities of states of the world, and it provides a neat solution to the problem of small worlds. Even more important is the fact that the theory can be underwritten by a beautiful representation result, proved by the mathematician Ethan Bolker, that has almost none of the defects associated with Savage's theorem. This theorem does not presuppose the existence of either “constant acts” or “mitigators,” and all of its structure axioms can be reasonably interpreted as extendibility conditions.
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In this chapter we examine the evidential decision theory developed by Richard Jeffrey in The Logic of Decision. Jeffrey's theory has a number of significant advantages over Savage's. For example, it is able to account for the effects of an agent's actions on the probabilities of states of the world, and it provides a neat solution to the problem of small worlds. Even more important is the fact that the theory can be underwritten by a beautiful representation result, proved by the mathematician Ethan Bolker, that has almost none of the defects associated with Savage's theorem. This theorem does not presuppose the existence of either “constant acts” or “mitigators,” and all of its structure axioms can be reasonably interpreted as extendibility conditions.
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