Mauricio Suarez, Complutense University, Propensities and pragmatism

 

Monday, January 13th, at 18:00 PM

Gilman Building, Hall 449

 

Chair: Prof. Yossef Schwartz

The lecturer outlines a genuinely pragmatist conception of propensity, and defends it against common objections to the propensity interpretation of probability, prominently Humphreys’ paradox. He reviews the paradox in detail and identifies one of its key assumptions, the identity thesis, according to which propensities are probabilities (under a suitable interpretation of Kolmogorov’s axioms). The identity thesis is also involved in empiricist propensity interpretations deriving from Popper’s influential original proposal, and makes such interpretations untenable. As an alternative, he urges a return to Charles Peirce’s original insights on probabilistic dispositions, and offers a reconstructed version of his pragmatist conception, which rejects the identity thesis.

Within the framework of the Bar-Hillel Colloquium for the History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science 2013-2014