Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: I propose a general alethic theory of epistemic risk according to which the riskiness of an agent’s credence function encodes her relative sensitivity to different types of graded error. After motivating and mathematically developing this approach, I show that the epistemic risk function is a scaled reflection of expected inaccuracy (a quantity also known as generalized information entropy). This duality between risk and information enables us to explore the relationship between attitudes to epistemic risk, the choice of scoring rules in epistemic utility theory, and the selection of priors in Bayesian epistemology more generally (including the Laplacean principle of indifference).
Source: Philosophy of Science
DOI: 10.1086/703552
Author: Boris Babic
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2888489258