ON ACCEPTING ACCEPTANCE

“Believing on the Basis of the Evidence” (BBE) makes too many points to address them all here, so I limit this critique to what I view as the main problems of the approach advocated in BBE. In particular, I show that the idea of “acceptance” is a confused combination of belief and utility and so leads to problems where both need to be separately specified. I also show that the criticisms of Bayesian probabilistic inference are unfounded. The Bayesian equivalent of “acceptance” is a decision to condition belief in the target proposition on another proposition (“evidence”) that is not certain. This local does not commit the user to believe that the evidence proposition is true in any other context. Most of the problems of the “acceptance” approach in BBE come from unnecessarily making a decision about acceptance before it is known how the resulting accepted statement will be used.