Pierre-Normand

Yes, you can have a uniform discrete distribution that is bounded between 0 and M such that the possible values are M, M/2, M/4, ... In that limit cas...

One way to represent "knowing nothing" might be to take the limit of an initial distribution that is uniform between 0 and M, where M tends towards in...

I agree that in the context of any real world instantiation of this problem, what you say is true (because there is no real world instantiation of thi...

Indeed! I misread you precisely in this way. We agree then.

Why are they not the same? In the case where the unseen envelope M is the smaller one, its content is indeed S = a/2.

Thanks so much. I'll do this from now on.

(How should I proceed in order to quote your formulas correctly?) Why couldn't you do that? If the initial set up calls for randomly assigning values ...

The equiprobability that I am talking about is the posterior equiprobability between the two possible contents of the second envelope: either X/2 or 2...

You might not find that everyone agrees on this first claim since, under conditions of equiprobability, the paradox arises whereby (1) acquiring knowl...

That's one particular case of a prior probability distribution (bounded, in this case) such that the posterior probability distribution (after one env...

You may call one interpretation the correct one in the sense that it provides a rational guide to behavior given a sufficient set of initial assumptio...

Agreed. Alternatively, some player's goal might merely be to maximise the expected value of her monetary reward. In that case, her choice to stick wit...

(This was Michael's response to a post by Baden on p.3 of this thread) I just wanted to note that, as Michael may have realized by now, the higher exp...

Since it's incomplete knowledge, or probabilistic knowledge, that is at issue, all that is needed is the lack of total ignorance. Total ignorance migh...

I just came upon this thread and didn't read though all of it. I did read the first few and the last few pages. It seems to me that @"andrewk" and @"J...

Let me just note that Rovelli and Bitbol both endorse relational approaches that share some features with Everett's interpretation. But they don't rei...

Thanks for the reference to Wallace on Everett's interpretation. I just looked up his book The Emergent Multiverse: Quantum Theory According to the Ev...

Yes, I quite agree; and so do I with most of the rest of your excellent post, with only minor reservations... Indeed!

(We are veering a bit off-topic...) I've now read about two thirds of it and let me demur. It seems to be an excellent paper. Rather than it being dev...

My argument, which was relying on the partial acceptance of the compatibilist notion of free will, addresses the sort of challenge posed by superdeter...

@"apokrisis" By the way, there is a paper, which I haven't yet read, by Jean-Michel Delhôtel, discussing both Hardy's and Bitbol's approaches to the i...

Under GR the gravitational effects still are attributed to a field and to disturbances of this field by matter. This field just happens to be the stru...

The MWI is a metaphysical gloss on Everett's relative-state interpretation. Everett's own interpretation is somewhat anti-metaphysical inasmuch as its...

That is true, but somewhat misleading in the context of the free will debate, even granting, for the sake of the argument, the dubious metaphysical pi...

I think this is a problem that afflict some libertarian (so-called) 'contra-causal' conceptions of free will. According to such conceptions, while mos...

I just bought the kindle edition of Joseph Rouse's recent Sellarsian book: Articulating the World: Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific Image. ...

Don't worry. I also often postpone responses for a long time because I want to think things though first or do some more readings about the topic. The...

Oops... I now realize that I had Jay Rosenberg and Alex Rosenberg confused in my mind. Jay, who unfortunately passed away 10 years ago, was Sellars's ...

Thanks for those! I'll read chapter 3 in Naturalism and Ontology, to get a better grasp of Sellars's motivation in dispensing specifically with the id...

I quite enjoyed it although it doesn't top Three Ways of Spilling Ink. Austin wittily savages Mr. Mackinnon's and Mr. Maclagan's musings on the allege...

Maybe Stover meant to put it in a rather provocative way. But if we bracket out the rather modern Marxist connotation of a class and rather hold on to...

Yes, I don't buy that. Ordinary facts, objects and properties come as a package, on my view (but not "events"). But Sellars is such a deep and brillia...

Thanks! I see it's the second chapter in his Philosophical Papers, and only 22 pages long. I'll read it. Austin is one of my favorite philosophers.

In the wake of Davidson't work on truth and 'radical' interpretation, disquotational theories of truth have come to acquire quite a bit more substance...

In what text did Austin express that? Earlier in this thread, @"Nagase" and @"fdrake" had an interesting exchange regarding the the sorts of constrain...

I actually meant that primarily as a self-admonition since there appears to be some good contributions that I either skipped or only read very oblique...

Here is a relevant paragraph from the SEP article on Wilfrid Sellars: "Platonic realists are often moved by the belief that the most basic linguistic ...

Thanks for uncovering that. It's a real gem. I read the piece mentioned in the OP a couple days ago when it was suggested in my Google feed. This othe...

That's possible. I've located a copy of Naturalism and Ontology but I haven't had the time to dig into it. There are conflicting strands in Sellars's ...

What @"Janus" says, in the post that you quoted from, rather reads to me like a form of pragmatism. Janus had insisted that nominalism only provides o...

This volume leaves out "La structure du comportement", unfortunately, doesn't it? On edit: However, I just found out a freely available (for non-comme...

I quite agree that they are talking past one another, but there is nevertheless something instructive to see. The way in which they are talking past o...

Agreed. To paraphrase Wilfrid Sellars, for one to characterize a mental state as a state of belief isn't an empirical characterization but rather a ma...

That was an awesome post. It quite resonates with a few pages that I was reading, earlier today, from Michel Bitbol's book De L'intérieur du monde (Fr...

Yes, those also all are very good example of contrastive explanations of the effect (or 'event') to be explained. What is especially enlightening, and...

Methane is indeed a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 is, on a per-molecule basis, but it also is over 200 times less concentrated (1800 parts ...

I replied over there.

Your own argument is that CO2 is a trace gas and that, as such, it can't contribute much to the enhanced greenhouse effect. It is true that CO2 is a m...

They are accurate enough. I am going to abide by @"unenlightened"'s request, though. So, if you want to know why CO2 is important, you can post this a...

Your numbers are off. When the Keeling Curve begins, in 1957, the atmospheric CO2 concentration was about 315ppm and now it is 410ppm. That's a 30% in...