Do pragmatic arguments show too much? Academic Article

abstract

• 2015, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. Pragmatic arguments seek to demonstrate that you can be placed in a situation in which you will face a sure and foreseeable loss if you do not behave in accordance with some principle P. In this article I show that for every P entailed by the principle of maximizing expected utility you will not be better off from a pragmatic point of view if you accept P than if you dont, because even if you obey the axioms of expected utility theory it is possible to place you in a situation in which you will face a certain and foreseeable loss. This shows that for a large class of Ps, there is no pragmatic difference between people who accept P and those who dont.

authors

• Peterson, Martin

published proceedings

• EUROPEAN JOURNAL FOR PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

altmetric score

• 0.5

author list (cited authors)

• Peterson, M.

citation count

• 2

publication date

• May 2016

publisher

• Springer Nature  Publisher

published in

• European Journal for Philosophy of Science  Journal

keywords

• Decision Theory
• Money Pump
• Pragmatic Argument

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

• 10.1007/s13194-015-0120-2

start page

• 165

end page

• 172

volume

• 6

issue

• 2

URL

• http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1007%2Fs13194-015-0120-2