It’s not clear what “subjective idealism is correct” means, because it’s not clear what “a given thing is real” means (at least in the context of this thread). It should be more clear what a claim means before it makes sense to discuss levels of credence in it.
If we are working with credences assigned to hypotheticals, the fact that the number of disjoint hypotheticals incompatible with some hypothetical S is large doesn’t in itself make them (when considered altogether) more probable than S. (A sum of an infinite number of small numbers can still be small.)
Working with credences in hypotheticals is not the only possible way to reason. If we are talking about weird things like subjective idealism, assumptions about epistemics are not straightforward and should be considered.
You are correct, this argument only works if you have a specific epistemic framework and a subjective idealistic framework which might not coincide in most subjective idealist. I only wrote it down because I just so happened to have used this argument successfully against someone with this framework (and I also liked the visualization I made for it). I didn’t want to go into what “a given thing is real” means because it’s a giant can of philosophical worms and I try to keep my shortforms short. Needless to say that this argument works with some philosophical definitions of “real” but not others. So as I said, this argument is pretty weak in itself and can only be used in certain situation in conjunction with other arguments.
This goes without saying and I apologize if I gave the impression that people should use this argument and it’s visualization to persuade rather than to explain.
It’s not clear what “subjective idealism is correct” means, because it’s not clear what “a given thing is real” means (at least in the context of this thread). It should be more clear what a claim means before it makes sense to discuss levels of credence in it.
If we are working with credences assigned to hypotheticals, the fact that the number of disjoint hypotheticals incompatible with some hypothetical S is large doesn’t in itself make them (when considered altogether) more probable than S. (A sum of an infinite number of small numbers can still be small.)
Working with credences in hypotheticals is not the only possible way to reason. If we are talking about weird things like subjective idealism, assumptions about epistemics are not straightforward and should be considered.
You are correct, this argument only works if you have a specific epistemic framework and a subjective idealistic framework which might not coincide in most subjective idealist. I only wrote it down because I just so happened to have used this argument successfully against someone with this framework (and I also liked the visualization I made for it). I didn’t want to go into what “a given thing is real” means because it’s a giant can of philosophical worms and I try to keep my shortforms short. Needless to say that this argument works with some philosophical definitions of “real” but not others. So as I said, this argument is pretty weak in itself and can only be used in certain situation in conjunction with other arguments.
(I think making arguments clear is more meaningful than using them for persuasion.)
This goes without saying and I apologize if I gave the impression that people should use this argument and it’s visualization to persuade rather than to explain.