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Wolfgang Spohn | University of Konstanz, Germany - Academia.edu

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Wolfgang Spohn

University of Konstanz, Germany, Philosophy, Emeritus

University of Tübingen, Philosophy, Faculty Member

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After holding professorships in philosophy and philosophy of science at the Universities of Regensburg, Bielefeld, and in particular Konstanz, I am retired in Konstanz and senior professor at the University of Tübingen. My areas of specialization lie in contemporary analytic philosophy, in particular in epistemology and philosophy of science, philosophy of mind and language, philosophical logic, and the theory of practical rationality, i.e., decision and game theory. I was editor-in-chief of the journal Erkenntnis from 1988 - 2001. I am a member of the Leopoldina, National Academy of the Sciences of Germany, and the Academia Europaea. I received the Lakatos Award of the LSE in 2012 and the Frege Prize of the German Society of Analytic Philosophy in 2015.
Address: Department of Philosophy
University of Konstanz
78457 Konstanz
Germany

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Papers by Wolfgang Spohn

Indexical utility: another rationalization of exponential discounting

Economics and philosophy, Mar 22, 2024

This paper is about time preferences, the phenomenon that the very same things are usually consid... more This paper is about time preferences, the phenomenon that the very same things are usually considered the less valuable the farther in the future they are obtained. The utilities of those things are discounted at a certain rate. The paper presents a novel normative argument for exponential discount rates, whatever their empirical adequacy. It proposes to take indexical utility seriously, i.e. utilities referring to indexical propositions (that speak of 'I', 'now', etc.) as opposed to non-indexical propositions. Economic focus is only on the latter, while the former are neglected. The potential ignorance of when is now generates a difference between indexical and non-indexical utility that can be exploited for a novel argument in favour of exponential discount rates.

Vorbemerkung von Ansgar Seide

Rosemarie Rheinwald: Logik, Kausalität, Freiheit, 2012

Oxford University Press eBooks, Mar 29, 2012

Objectification

Oxford University Press eBooks, Mar 29, 2012

The Representation of Belief: Some Standard Moves

The Laws of Belief, 2012

Book reviews and critical studies

Philosophia, Jul 1, 1981

Oxford University Press eBooks, Mar 29, 2012

The Core of Free Will

Everyone sober believes in freedom of the will; whatever we precisely mean by it, it is something... more Everyone sober believes in freedom of the will; whatever we precisely mean by it, it is something we have. The world, which includes us, may be deterministic. This generates a contradiction. Or the world may be indeterministic; but it seems common ground that this does not improve the dialectic situation; the freely willed cannot occur at random. There is no escape, we are dealing here with a sharp contradiction, an outright antinomy. When I look at the overwhelming literature on the problem of free will-I am sure the majority has escaped me-I am amazed at how many different thoughts and theories are provoked by it, each being relevant, well considered, a germ of a larger research program, and containing a grain of truth (or more). This variety of responses is what makes for a truly deep and fruitful philosophical problem. Here, my point will not be to offer any novel thought on the topic; every stone has been turned many times. Despite its richness, however, the literature appears to me to give only improper emphasis to a certain point which occurred to me in my dissertation (1978, p. 193) and which deems ever more central to me, the longer I observe the literature. Mathematicians know that a sharp contradiction needs a sharp answer; wiggling concepts till the contradiction dissolves is not allowed. 1 Let me explain what I take to be a sharp answer.

The 5 Questions

The MIT Press eBooks, Dec 14, 2021

Psychological and Philosophical Frameworks of Rationality—A Systematic Introduction

The MIT Press eBooks, Dec 14, 2021

Overview of the Handbook

The Handbook of Rationality, Dec 14, 2021

Causation: Objective or Subjective?

Probabilistic and Causal Inference, 2022

We, and scientific practice, tend to conceive of causation as an objective relation characterizin... more We, and scientific practice, tend to conceive of causation as an objective relation characterizing the external world. Philosophy has been more ambiguous. This chapter intends to renew the doubts. If causation is only a model-relative notion and if causation is tightly entangled with notions that are best understood in a subject-relative way, then the objectivity of causation is at least undermined. The paper discusses these doubts and concludes that the objectivity of causation must not be presupposed, but must be constructively earned.

Vorbemerkung zu: Rosemarie Rheinwald: Can Non-Deductive Inferences Be Subjectively Justified?

The Core of Free Will

University of Pittsburgh Press eBooks, Jun 3, 2007

Page 307. 16 The Core of Free Will Wolfgang Spohn Department of Philosophy, University of Konstan... more

Exchange on Spohn's Laws of Belief

The authors of the following two discussion notes have been working on causation for about 40 yea... more The authors of the following two discussion notes have been working on causation for about 40 years. Woodward's work culminated in his book Making Things Happen (OUP 2003), Spohn's work culminated in chapters 14 and 15 of his book The Laws of Belief (OUP 2012), which have almost book-length. Prima facie, their accounts look quite similar; the interventionist theory of causal Bayes nets seems to be their common ground. Therefore, it is important to also see their differences. These are explained in the notes, which mutually discuss their theories of causation. The exchange originates from an Author Meets Critic session at the APA meeting in Baltimore in January 2017.

Enumerative induction

The paper explains enumerative induction, the confirmation of a law by its positive instances, in... more The paper explains enumerative induction, the confirmation of a law by its positive instances, in ranking theoretic terms. It gives a ranking theoretic explication of a possible law or a nomological hypothesis. And it shows, finally, that such schemes of enumerative induction uniquely correspond to mixtures of such nomological hypotheses. Thus the paper shows that de Finettl's probabilistic representation theorems may be directly transformed into an account of confirmation of possible laws and that enumerative induction is equivalent to such an account.

Current Issues in Causation

Brill | mentis eBooks, 2001

A Survey of Ranking Theory

Springer eBooks, 2016

A General Non-Probabilistic Theory of Inductive Reasoning

Machine Intelligence and Pattern Recognition, 1990

Probability theory, epistemically interpreted, provides an excelle n t, if not the best available... more Probability theory, epistemically interpreted, provides an excelle n t, if not the best available account of inductive reasoning. This is so because there are general and definite rules for the change of subje ctive probabilities through information or experience; induction and belief change are one and same topic, after all. The most basic of these rules is simply to conditiona lize with respect to the infollllation received; and there are similar and more general rules'! Hence, a fundamental reason for the epistemological success of probability theory is that there at all exists a well-behaved concept of conditional probab ility. Still, people have, and have reasons for, various concerns over probability theory. One of these is my starting point: Intuitively, we have the notion of plain belief; we believe proposi tions2 to be true (or to be false or neither). Probability theory, however, offers no fomlal counterpart to this notion. Believing A is not the same as having probability 1 for A, because probability 1 is incorrigible3; but plain belief is clearly corrigible. And believing A is not the same as giving A a probability larger than some 1-E, because believing A and believing B is usually taken to be equivalent to believing A & 84 Thus, it seems that the formal represen tation of plain belief has to take a non-probabilistic route. Indeed, representing plain belief seems easy enough: simply represent an epistemic state by the set of all propositions believed true in it or, since I make the common assumption that plain belief is deductively closed, by the conjunction of all propositions believed true in it. But this does not yet provide a theory of induction, i.e. an answer to the question how epi stemic states so represented are changed through information or experience. There is a con vincing partial answer: if the new information is compatible with the old epistemic state, then the new epistemic state is simply represented by the conjunction of the new information and the old beliefs. This answer is panial because it does not cover the quite common case where the new infolluation is incompatible with the old beliefs. It is, however, imponant to com plete the answer and to cover this case, too; otherwise, we would not represent plain belief as corrigible. The crucial problem is that there is no good completion. When epistemic states are represented simply by the conjunction of all propositions believed true in it, the answer can not be completed; and though there is a lot of fruitful work, no other representation of episte

Indexical utility: another rationalization of exponential discounting

Economics and philosophy, Mar 22, 2024

This paper is about time preferences, the phenomenon that the very same things are usually consid... more This paper is about time preferences, the phenomenon that the very same things are usually considered the less valuable the farther in the future they are obtained. The utilities of those things are discounted at a certain rate. The paper presents a novel normative argument for exponential discount rates, whatever their empirical adequacy. It proposes to take indexical utility seriously, i.e. utilities referring to indexical propositions (that speak of 'I', 'now', etc.) as opposed to non-indexical propositions. Economic focus is only on the latter, while the former are neglected. The potential ignorance of when is now generates a difference between indexical and non-indexical utility that can be exploited for a novel argument in favour of exponential discount rates.

Vorbemerkung von Ansgar Seide

Rosemarie Rheinwald: Logik, Kausalität, Freiheit, 2012

Oxford University Press eBooks, Mar 29, 2012

Objectification

Oxford University Press eBooks, Mar 29, 2012

The Representation of Belief: Some Standard Moves

The Laws of Belief, 2012

Book reviews and critical studies

Philosophia, Jul 1, 1981

Oxford University Press eBooks, Mar 29, 2012

The Core of Free Will

Everyone sober believes in freedom of the will; whatever we precisely mean by it, it is something... more Everyone sober believes in freedom of the will; whatever we precisely mean by it, it is something we have. The world, which includes us, may be deterministic. This generates a contradiction. Or the world may be indeterministic; but it seems common ground that this does not improve the dialectic situation; the freely willed cannot occur at random. There is no escape, we are dealing here with a sharp contradiction, an outright antinomy. When I look at the overwhelming literature on the problem of free will-I am sure the majority has escaped me-I am amazed at how many different thoughts and theories are provoked by it, each being relevant, well considered, a germ of a larger research program, and containing a grain of truth (or more). This variety of responses is what makes for a truly deep and fruitful philosophical problem. Here, my point will not be to offer any novel thought on the topic; every stone has been turned many times. Despite its richness, however, the literature appears to me to give only improper emphasis to a certain point which occurred to me in my dissertation (1978, p. 193) and which deems ever more central to me, the longer I observe the literature. Mathematicians know that a sharp contradiction needs a sharp answer; wiggling concepts till the contradiction dissolves is not allowed. 1 Let me explain what I take to be a sharp answer.

The 5 Questions

The MIT Press eBooks, Dec 14, 2021

Psychological and Philosophical Frameworks of Rationality—A Systematic Introduction

The MIT Press eBooks, Dec 14, 2021

Overview of the Handbook

The Handbook of Rationality, Dec 14, 2021

Causation: Objective or Subjective?

Probabilistic and Causal Inference, 2022

We, and scientific practice, tend to conceive of causation as an objective relation characterizin... more We, and scientific practice, tend to conceive of causation as an objective relation characterizing the external world. Philosophy has been more ambiguous. This chapter intends to renew the doubts. If causation is only a model-relative notion and if causation is tightly entangled with notions that are best understood in a subject-relative way, then the objectivity of causation is at least undermined. The paper discusses these doubts and concludes that the objectivity of causation must not be presupposed, but must be constructively earned.

Vorbemerkung zu: Rosemarie Rheinwald: Can Non-Deductive Inferences Be Subjectively Justified?

The Core of Free Will

University of Pittsburgh Press eBooks, Jun 3, 2007

Page 307. 16 The Core of Free Will Wolfgang Spohn Department of Philosophy, University of Konstan... more

Exchange on Spohn's Laws of Belief

The authors of the following two discussion notes have been working on causation for about 40 yea... more The authors of the following two discussion notes have been working on causation for about 40 years. Woodward's work culminated in his book Making Things Happen (OUP 2003), Spohn's work culminated in chapters 14 and 15 of his book The Laws of Belief (OUP 2012), which have almost book-length. Prima facie, their accounts look quite similar; the interventionist theory of causal Bayes nets seems to be their common ground. Therefore, it is important to also see their differences. These are explained in the notes, which mutually discuss their theories of causation. The exchange originates from an Author Meets Critic session at the APA meeting in Baltimore in January 2017.

Enumerative induction

The paper explains enumerative induction, the confirmation of a law by its positive instances, in... more The paper explains enumerative induction, the confirmation of a law by its positive instances, in ranking theoretic terms. It gives a ranking theoretic explication of a possible law or a nomological hypothesis. And it shows, finally, that such schemes of enumerative induction uniquely correspond to mixtures of such nomological hypotheses. Thus the paper shows that de Finettl's probabilistic representation theorems may be directly transformed into an account of confirmation of possible laws and that enumerative induction is equivalent to such an account.

Current Issues in Causation

Brill | mentis eBooks, 2001

A Survey of Ranking Theory

Springer eBooks, 2016

A General Non-Probabilistic Theory of Inductive Reasoning

Machine Intelligence and Pattern Recognition, 1990

Probability theory, epistemically interpreted, provides an excelle n t, if not the best available... more Probability theory, epistemically interpreted, provides an excelle n t, if not the best available account of inductive reasoning. This is so because there are general and definite rules for the change of subje ctive probabilities through information or experience; induction and belief change are one and same topic, after all. The most basic of these rules is simply to conditiona lize with respect to the infollllation received; and there are similar and more general rules'! Hence, a fundamental reason for the epistemological success of probability theory is that there at all exists a well-behaved concept of conditional probab ility. Still, people have, and have reasons for, various concerns over probability theory. One of these is my starting point: Intuitively, we have the notion of plain belief; we believe proposi tions2 to be true (or to be false or neither). Probability theory, however, offers no fomlal counterpart to this notion. Believing A is not the same as having probability 1 for A, because probability 1 is incorrigible3; but plain belief is clearly corrigible. And believing A is not the same as giving A a probability larger than some 1-E, because believing A and believing B is usually taken to be equivalent to believing A & 84 Thus, it seems that the formal represen tation of plain belief has to take a non-probabilistic route. Indeed, representing plain belief seems easy enough: simply represent an epistemic state by the set of all propositions believed true in it or, since I make the common assumption that plain belief is deductively closed, by the conjunction of all propositions believed true in it. But this does not yet provide a theory of induction, i.e. an answer to the question how epi stemic states so represented are changed through information or experience. There is a con vincing partial answer: if the new information is compatible with the old epistemic state, then the new epistemic state is simply represented by the conjunction of the new information and the old beliefs. This answer is panial because it does not cover the quite common case where the new infolluation is incompatible with the old beliefs. It is, however, imponant to com plete the answer and to cover this case, too; otherwise, we would not represent plain belief as corrigible. The crucial problem is that there is no good completion. When epistemic states are represented simply by the conjunction of all propositions believed true in it, the answer can not be completed; and though there is a lot of fruitful work, no other representation of episte