@article{18ba3d5f9c8b4fe092847bd1112944e5,
title = "Fragmentation and logical omniscience",
abstract = "It would be good to have a Bayesian decision theory that assesses our decisions and thinking according to everyday standards of rationality—standards that do not require logical omniscience (Garber, 1983; Hacking, 1967). To that end we develop a “fragmented” decision theory in which a single state of mind is represented by a family of credence functions, each associated with a distinct choice condition (Lewis, 1982; Stalnaker, 1984). The theory imposes a local coherence assumption guaranteeing that as an agent's attention shifts, successive batches of “obvious” logical information become available to her. A rule of expected utility maximization can then be applied to the decision of what to attend to next during a train of thought. On the resulting theory, rationality requires ordinary agents to be logically competent and to often engage in trains of thought that increase the unification of their states of mind. But rationality does not require ordinary agents to be logically omniscient.",
author = "Adam Elga and Agust{\'i}n Rayo",
note = "Funding Information: Both authors contributed equally to this work. Thanks to Diego Arana Segura, Sara Aronowitz, Alejandro P{\'e}rez Carballo, Ross Cameron, David Chalmers, Jonathan Cohen, Keith DeRose, Sinan Dogramaci, Cian Dorr, Kenny Easwaran, Hartry Field, Branden Fitelson, Peter Fritz, Jeremy Goodman, Daniel Hoek, Frank Jackson, Shivaram Lingamneni, Christopher Meacham, Patrick Miller, Molly O{\textquoteleft}Rourke-Friel, Michael Rescorla, Ted Sider, Mattias Skipper, Robert Stalnaker, Jason Stanley, Bruno Whittle, Robbie Williams, an anonymous No{\^u}s referee; participants in the Corridor reading group (on three occasions), a graduate seminar session at Rutgers University, a Fall 2011 joint MIT/Princeton graduate seminar, and a Spring 2016 MIT/Princeton/Rutgers graduate seminar taught jointly with Andy Egan; audiences at several APA division meetings (2017 Eastern and Pacific, 2021 Eastern) the 2008 Arizona Ontology Conference, Brown University, Catholic University of Peru, CUNY, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Ohio State University, Syracuse, University, University of Bologna, UC Berkeley, UC Riverside, UC Santa Cruz, University of Connecticut at Storrs, University of Graz, University of Leeds, University of Paris (IHPST), University of Oslo (on two occasions), University of Texas at Austin, Yale University, MIT, and Rutgers University. The initial direction of this paper was enormously influenced by conversations with Andy Egan. Elga gratefully acknowledges support from a 2014-15 Deutsche Bank Membership at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2021 Wiley Periodicals LLC.",
year = "2022",
month = sep,
doi = "10.1111/nous.12381",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "56",
pages = "716--741",
journal = "Nous",
issn = "0029-4624",
publisher = "Wiley-Blackwell",
number = "3",
}