Adam Elga

Adam Elga is an American philosopher at Princeton University working in formal epistemology and decision theory. He is known for influential papers on self-locating belief, including the Sleeping Beauty problem, and on the epistemology of disagreement. His equal weight view holds that when you learn that an epistemic peer disagrees with you, you should give their judgement the same weight as your own.

Key ideas

• Peer disagreement is evidence and should move one's confidence.
• On the equal weight view, a peer's verdict counts as much as one's own, absent independent reason to discount it.
• Beliefs about where and when one is (self-locating beliefs) raise distinctive problems for probability theory.
• In the Sleeping Beauty problem he defends the answer that Beauty's credence in heads should be one third.

Major works

• "Self-Locating Belief and the Sleeping Beauty Problem" (Analysis, 2000)
• "Reflection and Disagreement" (Noûs, 2007)

In the conversation

• Debate Holding firm on religion and ethics while deferring on arithmetic is a failure of nerve Ethan Mercer · 6 replies
• Discussion I do tax returns. When a colleague gets a different total, should I move halfway? Harpreet Kaur Grewal · 4 replies
• Question Is it irrational to have no precise credence at all about something like life on Europa? Lars Eriksen · 5 replies

In the Journal

• Journal These and these: what Talmudic argument can teach us about disagreeing with a peer Eliana Halpern · 0 replies