The Centre for Time presents a special seminar, today (Wednesday 3 Dec) at 3:30pm — all welcome.
Venue: McRae Room, S418, Main Quad Pre-talk: 2pm in the usual place (S413). Jossi Berkovitz (Toronto/Centre for Time) :: "The World According to de Finetti" ABSTRACT: Bruno de Finetti is one of the founding fathers of the subjectivist school of probability, where probabilities are interpreted as rational degrees of belief. His work on the relation between the axioms and theorems of the probability calculus and rationality is among the corner stones of modern subjective probability theory. De Finetti maintained that rationality requires that an agent's degrees of belief be coherent. A common view has it that degrees of belief are coherent just in case they are represented by a probability function. I propose that de Finetti had a somewhat different view: an agent's degrees of belief are coherent if they could be represented by a set of probability functions, each of which corresponds to a subset of the agent's degrees of belief in propositions that can in principle be jointly verified. On this view, coherence imposes weaker constraints on degrees of belief. I then consider the implications of this interpretation of de Finetti for probabilities in quantum mechanics, focusing on the EPR/Bohm experiment and Bell's theorem. -- Centre for Time Department of Philosophy Main Quad, A14 University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia T: +61 2 9351 4057 F: +61 2 9351 3918 W: http://www.usyd.edu.au/time/
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