Okay, in that case I guess I would agree with you, but it seems a rather vacuous scenario. In real life you are almost never faced with the dilemma of having to evaluate the probability of a claim without even knowing what that claim is, it appears in this case that when you assign a probability of 0.5 to an envelope you are merely assigning 0.5 probability to the claim that “whoever filled this envelope decided to put a true statement in”.
When, as in almost all epistemological dilemmas, you can actually look at the claim you are evaluating, then even if you know nothing about the subject area you should still be able to tell a conjunction from a disjunction. I would never, ever apply the 0.5 rule to an actual political discussion, for example, where almost all propositions are large logical compounds in disguise.
Okay, in that case I guess I would agree with you, but it seems a rather vacuous scenario. In real life you are almost never faced with the dilemma of having to evaluate the probability of a claim without even knowing what that claim is, it appears in this case that when you assign a probability of 0.5 to an envelope you are merely assigning 0.5 probability to the claim that “whoever filled this envelope decided to put a true statement in”.
When, as in almost all epistemological dilemmas, you can actually look at the claim you are evaluating, then even if you know nothing about the subject area you should still be able to tell a conjunction from a disjunction. I would never, ever apply the 0.5 rule to an actual political discussion, for example, where almost all propositions are large logical compounds in disguise.