Against conditionalization (Q1202501)

Bayesian epistemology is marked by a scruple for compliance with the probability axioms. One cornerstone of Bayesian epistemology is the doctrine of personalism, the view according to which an agent's beliefs are not the mechanical result of conditionalizing a logical probability over her total history of observational experience. Another cornerstone of Bayesian epistemology is the teaching that since personalism is true, epistemic injunctions must be issued to rational agents to procure their compliance with the probability axioms, so that their beliefs are characterized by real-valued degrees that are coherent in the technical sense of being governed by the same constraints that rightly rule measures of objective chance. As a result Bayesians brandish Dutch Book theorems, tout conditionalization as the only true path to new beliefs in response to new evidence, and endorse the principle of Reflection as the price of personal epistemic integrity. In this paper, we argue that the epistemic levies which Bayesians exact in return for bestowing the benison of rationality on human believers are extortionate. We propose to pose a systematic challenge to Bayesian principles, from Dutch Book to conditionalization to Reflection, focusing on the issue of conditionalization. We will show that conditionalization is by no means the only rational method of updating belief (if it is a rational method at all). The reasons we will delineate in favor of this view will cast doubt on both Dutch Book arguments and Reflection. We will show that an agent might and sometimes ought to be counted rational even if he does not conditionalize or Reflect or avow Dutch Book. These principles, we will demonstrate, discount too much that is rational as unworthy.