Sleeping beauty should be imprecise

pp. 3159-3172

in: Synthese 191 (14), 2014.

Abstract

The traditional solutions to the Sleeping Beauty problem say that Beauty should have either a sharp 1/3 or sharp 1/2 credence that the coin flip was heads when she wakes. But Beauty’s evidence is incomplete so that it doesn’t warrant a precise credence, I claim. Instead, Beauty ought to have a properly imprecise credence when she wakes. In particular, her representor ought to assign (R(H!eads)=[0,1/2]). I show, perhaps surprisingly, that this solution can account for the many of the intuitions that motivate the traditional solutions. I also offer a new objection to Elga’s restricted version of the principle of indifference, which an opponent may try to use to collapse the imprecision.