Likelihoodism and Guidance for Belief

Abstract

AbstractLikelihoodism is the view that the degree of evidential support should be analysed and measured in terms of likelihoods alone. The paper considers and responds to a popular criticism that a likelihoodist framework is too restrictive to guide belief. First, I show that the most detailed and rigorous version of this criticism, as put forward by Gandenberger (2016), is unsuccessful. Second, I provide a positive argument that a broadly likelihoodist framework can accommodate guidance for comparative belief, even when objectively well-grounded prior probabilities are not available. As I show, the shift from non-relational to comparative probabilities opens up a new space for addressing the belief guidance problem for likelihoodism.