Dear all, Please join us for the CamPoS (Cambridge Philosophy of Science) seminar
Wednesday 22nd January 1-2:30pm in HPS Seminar Room 2. Mauricio Suarez (Institute Philosophy / Complutense) will give a talk entitled "Propensities and Pragmatism". The abstract is below. Best wishes, Christopher Propensities and Pragmatism Abstract: I outline a pragmatist conception of propensity, and defend it against common objections to the propensity interpretation of probability, prominently Humphreys’ paradox. I review the paradox in detail and identify one of its key assumptions, the identity thesis, according to which propensities are probabilities (under a suitable interpretation of Kolmogorov’s axioms). The identity thesis is also involved in empiricist propensity interpretations deriving from Popper’s influential original proposal, and makes such interpretations untenable. As an alternative, I urge a return to Charles Peirce’s original insights on probabilistic dispositions, and offer a reconstructed version of his pragmatist conception, which rejects the identity thesis.
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