November 20, 2024 | 5:00PM – 7:00PM

Dodd Hall 247 & Zoom

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Join us on Wednesday, November 20, 2024 in Dodd Hall 247 for a talk by Emily Adlam, Chapman University, as part of the History, Philosophy, and Science of Science (HPASS) speaker series.

Against Self-Location

In this talk, I will make a distinction between pure self-locating credences and superficially self-locating credences, and then argue that there is never any rationally compelling way to assign pure self-locating credences. I will first argue that from a practical point of view, pure self-locating credences simply encode our pragmatic goals, and thus pragmatic rationality does not dictate how they must be set. I will then use considerations motivated by Bertrand’s paradox to argue that the indifference principle and other popular constraints on self-locating credences fail to be a priori principles of epistemic rationality, and critique some approaches to deriving self-locating credences based on analogies to non-self-locating cases. Finally, I will consider the implications of this conclusion for various applications of self-locating probabilities in scientific contexts, arguing that it may undermine certain kinds of reasoning about multiverses, the simulation hypothesis, Boltzmann brains and vast-world scenarios.

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