Do pragmatic arguments show too much? Academic Article uri icon

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.

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