Externalism and exploitability

Abstract

According to Bayesian orthodoxy, an agent should update—or at least should plan to update—her credences by conditionalization. Some have defended this claim by means of a diachronic Dutch book argument. They say: an agent who does not plan to update her credences by conditionalization is vulnerable (by her own lights) to a diachronic Dutch book, i.e., a sequence of bets which, when accepted, guarantee loss of utility. Here, I show that this argument is in tension with evidence externalism, i.e., the view that an agent's evidence can entail non-trivial propositions about the external world. I argue that this tension casts doubt on the idea that diachronic Dutch books can be used to justify or vindicate updating plans.