# Can rational choice guide us to correct {\em de se} beliefs?

## TL;DR

This paper examines whether rational choice can determine correct self-locating beliefs, analyzing decision-based arguments in the Sleeping Beauty problem and showing limitations of such approaches under certain conditions.

## Contribution

It demonstrates that decision-based arguments have limitations in settling self-locating belief correctness, especially outside additive game scenarios, and clarifies when rational choice aligns with correct beliefs.

## Key findings

- Thinners maximize ex ante expected payout in additive games.
- Unintuitive actions can result from decision reasons unrelated to beliefs.
- The approach does not definitively resolve the Sleeping Beauty controversy.

## Abstract

Significant controversy remains about what constitute correct self-locating beliefs in scenarios such as the Sleeping Beauty problem, with proponents on both the "halfer" and "thirder" sides. To attempt to settle the issue, one natural approach consists in creating decision variants of the problem, determining what actions the various candidate beliefs prescribe, and assessing whether these actions are reasonable when we step back. Dutch book arguments are a special case of this approach, but other Sleeping Beauty games have also been constructed to make similar points. Building on a recent article (James R.~Shaw. {\em De se} belief and rational choice. {\em Synthese}, 190(3):491-508, 2013), I show that in general we should be wary of such arguments, because unintuitive actions may result for reasons that are unrelated to the beliefs. On the other hand, I show that, when we restrict our attention to {\em additive} games, then a thirder will necessarily maximize her {\em ex ante} expected payout, but a halfer in some cases will not (assuming causal decision theory). I conclude that this does not necessarily settle the issue and speculate about what might.