Bayesian epistemology

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Has the “abandon significance” movement in statistics trickled down into philosophy of science? A little bit. Nowadays (since the late 1990’s [i]), probabilistic inference and confirmation enter in philosophy by way of fields dubbed formal epistemology and Bayesian epistemology. These fields, as I see them, are essentially ways to do analytic epistemology using probability. Given its goals, I do not criticize the best known current text in Bayesian Epistemology with that title, Titelbaum 2022, for not engaging in foundational problems of Bayesian practice, be it subjective, non-subjective (conventional), empirical or what some call “pragmatic” Bayesianism. The text focuses on probability as subjective degree of belief. I have employed chapters from it in my own seminars in spring 2023 to explain some Bayesian puzzles such as the tacking paradox. But I am troubled with some of the examples Titelbaum uses in criticizing statistical significance tests. I only came across them while flipping through some later chapters of the text while observing a session of my colleague Rohan Sud’s course on Bayesian Epistemology this spring. It was not a topic of his seminar. Continue reading →