Friday, 19 March 2010
On the Structure of Anthropic Arguments
Wayne Myrvold, Talbot College, U. of Western Ontario
817R Cathedral of Learning
Abstract: Anthropic arguments favour hypotheses according to which the universe is conducive to the presence of observers. Arguments of this form have recently been invoked in cosmology, and their status and legitimacy has been the subject of some debate. I will examine arguments of this sort from the perspective of Bayesian confirmation theory, with an eye to getting clear about how these arguments work-when they do work-and why they fail when they fail.