The quasi-cyclical preferences that Bermúdez ascribes to Agamemnon and others in analogous situations do not best represent them. I offer two alternative accounts. One works best if the preference ordering is taken to be the agent's personal betterness ordering of acts; the other works best if it is taken to provide a summary of the agent's dispositions to act.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn a series of papers over the past twenty years, and in a new book, Igor Douven (sometimes in collaboration with Sylvia Wenmackers) has argued that Bayesians are too quick to reject versions of inference to the best explanation that cannot be accommodated within their framework. In this paper, I survey their worries and attempt to answer them using a series of pragmatic and purely epistemic arguments that I take to show that Bayes' Rule really is the only rational way to respond to your evidence.
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