8. Anna Mahtani | What are probabilities?

Portugal Street Philosophy Podcast

Welcome to the eighth episode of the Portugal Street Philosophy Podcast, the official podcast of the LSE Philosophy Society. In each episode, we take an important philosophical question and explore our best current attempts to answer it. For this episode, our question is “What are probabilities?” and our guide to the topic is Professor Anna Mahtani.

In this episode we discuss:

• Subjective and objective probabilities
• The Kolmogorov axioms
• Interpretations of probability
• Dutch Book arguments and rationality
• Subjective probabilities and epistemic states
• Epistemic states of real vs. ideal agents
• Open questions in bounded rationality: awareness growth, imprecise probabilism

About our guest:

Anna Mahtani is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the London School of Economics. She works on the philosophy of language, decision theory, formal epistemology, and welfare economics, as well as the relationship between these areas. She has published on a wide range of topics, including vagueness, imprecise probabilism, arguments for probabilism, and the ex-ante Pareto principle. She is currently writing a book called The Objects of Credence. Check out Anna's website here: https://personal.lse.ac.uk/mahtania/

About your host:

Eric Chen is an undergraduate studying Philosophy and Economics at the London School of Economics.