# Bayesianism for the Logically Ignorant

This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’m writing it up now because I might talk about it in the near future, at a job talk.

The basic idea is to wonder what consequences follow from relaxing the standard assumption that Bayesian agents are logically omniscient.

Bayesian epistemology and decision theory typically assume that the ideal agents are logically omniscient. Borrowing a practice from I.J. Good, I refer to my putative ideal agent as “you”. That is, they assume that if $\phi$ and $\psi$ are logically equivalent, then you should believe them to the same degree.

This seems to have some normative weight. What reason could you have for believing equivalent propositions to different degrees except for some failure of insight on your part?

But consider “believe all and only the truths”. Likewise, this has some normative force. The only reason to fail to fully believe a truth or to fully disbelieve a falsehood, is some lack of insight or evidence. So does this mean that we should force you to have only trivial 0/1 degrees of belief? Of course not! Bayesianism is all about how to behave when you can’t live up to the regulative ideal of truth.

I think we need to make the same kind of move in the case of logical omniscience. Of course logical omniscience is a kind of regulative ideal (just like truth is) but we should think about how to model agents who fail to live up to this ideal. So how do you model logical ignorance? With great difficulty, it turns out.

Let’s start with a basic discussion of simple Bayesianism, and find out where the assumptions about logical omniscience creep it. Here’s a first attempt. The objects of belief are sets of possible worlds. These sets of possible worlds form an algebra and … Whoah. Wait a minute. If beliefs are about sets of possible worlds, then we’ve already baked in logical omniscience! If $\phi$ and $\psi$ are logically equivalent, then they will be true in all the same possible worlds. So you can’t have different beliefs about them.

Here’s our first interesting result. Logical omniscience is built into Bayesianism at a very early stage. This makes it really quite difficult to drop or weaken the assumption.

Let’s try to start again in such a way that it is at least clear where logical omniscience enters. So, the objects of beliefs are sentences in a language: syntactic things. Now $\phi$ and $\psi$ can be different syntactic objects but still be logically equivalent. So that’s nice.

However, even if there’s only one elementary letter in your language, you now have infinitely many sentences to have beliefs over! $a,a\wedge a,a \wedge a \wedge a\dots$ This is awkward, to say the least. Can we do anything to manage this awkward infinity of sentences? There must be some kinds of things we can do, since logically omniscient agents managed to have beliefs over finite algebras.

How to we build in logical omniscience? We take equivalence classes of sentences using the logical equivalence relation “$\equiv$”. That is, we identify all the propositions logically equivalent to $\phi$ and we call this $\overline{\phi}$. We build up an algebra of equivalence classes of sentences. This is called the “Lindenbaum algebra”. This is then the thing logically omniscient agents have beliefs over.

So now we’ve seen that by taking this “quotient algebra” we can strip down the number of sentences you need to have beliefs over. So, are there equivalence relations other than classical logical equivalence that will give us “well-behaved” quotient algebras that don’t build in logical omniscience? Yes there are. What you need is for your relation to be a “congruence relation”. This means basically that it “plays nicely” with the logical structure.

Where does this get us? Remember we had our norm that said “logically equivalent sentences should be believed equally strongly”. We might argue that a weaker, but still reasonable norm would only demand that “sentences known to be logically equivalent should be believed equally strongly”.

What can we say about this idea of “known equivalence”? Well, if you were being a logically omniscient Bayesian you would say that the right relation to use to “quotient up” your space of sentences is the classical equivalence. We might instead argue that some other congruence which is less stringent is a more reasonable requirement. We still require that the relation is a congruence, which is no small requirement. But it’s a start!

In the next post, we’ll see that logically ignorant agents are Dutch-bookable, and then we’ll see why that’s not such a problem.