Justifying Objective Bayesianism on Predicate Languages

Objective Bayesianism says that the strengths of one’s beliefs ought to be probabilities, calibrated to physical probabilities insofar as one has evidence of them, and otherwise sufficiently equivocal. These norms of belief are often explicated using the maximum entropy principle. In this paper we i...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jürgen Landes, Jon Williamson
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2015-04-01
Series:Entropy
Subjects:
Online Access:http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/17/4/2459
Description
Summary:Objective Bayesianism says that the strengths of one’s beliefs ought to be probabilities, calibrated to physical probabilities insofar as one has evidence of them, and otherwise sufficiently equivocal. These norms of belief are often explicated using the maximum entropy principle. In this paper we investigate the extent to which one can provide a unified justification of the objective Bayesian norms in the case in which the background language is a first-order predicate language, with a view to applying the resulting formalism to inductive logic. We show that the maximum entropy principle can be motivated largely in terms of minimising worst-case expected loss.
ISSN:1099-4300