Another Approach to Consensus and Maximally Informed Opinions with Increasing Evidence

Stewart, Rush T. and Nielsen, Michael (2019): Another Approach to Consensus and Maximally Informed Opinions with Increasing Evidence. In: Philosophy of Science, Vol. 86, No. 2: pp. 236-254

Abstract

Merging of opinions results underwrite Bayesian rejoinders to complaints about the subjective nature of personal probability. Such results establish that sufficiently similar priors achieve consensus in the long run when fed the same increasing stream of evidence. Here, we establish a merging result for sets of probability measures updated by Jeffrey conditioning. This generalizes a number of different merging results in the literature. We also show that such sets converge to a shared, maximally informed opinion. Finally, we demonstrate the philosophical significance of our study by detailing applications to the topics of dynamic coherence, imprecise probabilities, and opinion pooling.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Faculties: Philosophy, Philosophy of Science and Religious Science
• Subjects: 100 Philosophy and Psychology > 100 Philosophy
• ISSN: 0031-8248
• Language: English