I’m Tom, and this is my blog.

Fragile credences are the opposite of resilient credences. The probability you assign to a proposition, or your credence in it, is more resilient the less it is expected to change given new evidence. A person may assign the same probability to two propositions, yet one of these probabilities might be more resilient than the other. Low-resilience credences could be called fragile – at least, that’s what I’ve decided to call them.

I think credal resilience is practically and philosophically useful concept. It’s a part of orthodox Bayesian epistemology that doesn’t get enough love, which sounded like as good an idea as any for the name of a weblog. The name also serves as a reminder that –in the face of the severe epistemic errors of past generations and the complexity of our universe– my own credences ought to be fragile.

The image above is a photograph taken in Venice by Derek Parfit, who used it as the cover art for his 1984 book Reasons and Persons. Parfit is a personal hero of mine, and I hope it is amply obvious that I am paying homage to Reasons and Persons, not comparing my blog to it.