The SEP article discussing Pascal's Wager states,

Premise 1 presupposes that you should have a probability for God’s existence in the first place. However, perhaps you could rationally fail to assign it a probability—your probability that God exists could remain undefined. We cannot enter here into the thorny issues concerning the attribution of probabilities to agents. But there is some support for this response even in Pascal’s own text, again at the pivotal claim that “[r]eason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up…” The thought could be that any probability assignment is inconsistent with a state of “epistemic nullity” (in Morris’ 1986 phrase): to assign a probability at all—even 1/2—to God’s existence is to feign having evidence that one in fact totally lacks. For unlike a coin that we know to be fair, this metaphorical ‘coin’ is ‘infinitely far’ from us, hence apparently completely unknown to us. Perhaps, then, rationality actually requires us to refrain from assigning a probability to God’s existence (in which case at least the Argument from Superdominance would apparently be valid). Or perhaps rationality does not require it, but at least permits it. Either way, the Wager would not even get off the ground.

Where can I find a source which goes into depth about the "thorny issues concerning the attribution of probabilities to agents"? This question seems to deal with similar issues, and it also seems that there is a consensus that rationality requires/permits a non-assignment of probability. Is this the general philosophical consensus? Are there any sources which specifically talk about this?

  • There is a Pascal Wager-like argument in favour of infinite life/immortality, where evidence of infinite spans is either inconclusive and/or delegated to myth and legend. Is this an acceptable style of answer to your question? – Tautological Revelations Jul 27 '19 at 15:48
  • Another strange example of a Pascal Wager-like argument is exploring outer space, contingent on the universe being infinite. Do you accept this kind of answer? When you get into the topic of infinite gain, you enter some very strange territory of philosophy. – Tautological Revelations Jul 27 '19 at 15:49
  • I'm not sure about the probabilistic implications of Kant. Do you want a citation of Kant? – Tautological Revelations Jul 27 '19 at 16:16
  • @TautologicalRevelations I'm sure that some philosophers, such as Kant, reject this sort of probability. What I'm looking for is what the philosophical community as a whole thinks. Is this an overwhelmingly popular idea, or is there still debate? – Josh Aug 5 '19 at 4:03
  • Fair enough. :) :D Let's work towards giving you best answers possible. – Tautological Revelations Aug 7 '19 at 2:28

There are plenty of issues with subjective probability assignments to degrees of belief discussed e.g. in SEP's Subjective Probability Theory. I will only address the one outlined in the OP. For a book length treatment see Fundamental Uncertainty: Rationality and Plausible Reasoning volume edited by Marzetti and Brandolini.

The idea of distinguishing probabilistically quantifiable risk and unknown uncertainty goes back to Chicago school's economist Knight (his Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (1921)), and is termed Knightian uncertainty. Here is Knight:


Keynes echos Knight in The General Theory of Employment (1937), and explicitly rejects assigning probabilities under uncertainty:


From a technical point of view, we certainly can not have a probability space for events with unknown structure of outcomes. There is plenty of that in Pascal's setup, e.g. unknown alternative gods and their costs and rewards, see What fallacy in Pascal's Wager allows replacing God with the devil? Epistemological objections include overconfidence in models (Gray), insensitivity to robustness of evidence (Kyburg), suppression of dependency of events, etc. But, while the rejection of uncertain subjective probabilities is certainly a mainstream view, there is no consensus on it. After reviewing the above objections, Sinick concludes on Less Wrong:

"While some people have said that subjective probabilities of arbitrary events are not meaningful, there are definitions that make the notion of subjective probability meaningful, though arguably only as an intervals rather than as numbers. Using intervals rather than numbers addresses some of the objections that have been raised. A large part of the debate about whether one should assign subjective probabilities to arbitrary events is perhaps best conceptualized as a debate about how large the probability intervals that one assigns should be... The ways in which assigning subjective probabilities can be bad for one's epistemology seem to fall under the broad heading "failing to incorporate all of one's knowledge when assigning a probability and then using it uncritically, or forgetting that the probability that you assign to an event does not fully capture your knowledge pertaining to the event." These issues can be at least partially mitigated by keeping them in mind.

The idea of Knightean uncertainty has been revived and reinvented multiple times, including recently as Rumsfeld's "unknown unknowns", and Taleb's black swans. Taleb also coined a term ludic fallacy for "basing studies of chance on the narrow world of games and dice", confusing the unstructured randomness in life with the structured randomness of games. But it is interesting that he finds a rational seed in the Pascal's Wager despite rejecting the probability assignments required for it to work formally:


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  • Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. – Philip Klöcking Aug 9 '19 at 11:41
  • I know this question is almost a month old by now, but I revisited it and I'm wondering what exactly you mean by "the rejection of uncertain subjective probabilities is certainly a mainstream view." What exactly does uncertain subjective probabilities mean? If, for example, you have some evidence to point towards one hypothesis, but this evidence is not conclusive, can a probability be assigned? If so, why draw the line there; why not make assignment under equal/no evidence possible? If not, how do we encode partial evidence into probability? – Josh Aug 21 '19 at 4:23
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    @Josh After moderators move comments to chat it is expected that all further discussion is posted there. I just meant the Knight-Keynes position. – Conifold Aug 22 '19 at 5:24

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