Good Guesses as Accuracy-Specificity Tradeoffs
Peer reviewed, Journal article
Published version
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https://hdl.handle.net/11250/3083311Utgivelsesdato
2023Metadata
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Sammendrag
Guessing is a familiar activity, one we engage in when we are uncertain of the answer to a question under discussion. It is also an activity that lends itself to normative evaluation: some guesses are better than others. The question that interests me here is what makes for a good guess. In recent work, Dorst and Mandelkern have argued that good guesses are distinguished from bad ones by how well they optimize a tradeoff between accuracy and specificity. Here I argue that Dorst and Mandelkern’s implementation of this idea fails to satisfy some plausible constraints on good guesses, and I develop an alternative implementation that satisfies the relevant constraints. The result is a new account of good guesses which retains the positive aspects of Dorst and Mandelkern’s proposal, but without the drawbacks.
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The Author(s) 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License,
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