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Respecting all the evidence

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Repository DOI


Type

Article

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Authors

Sliwa, Paulina 
Horowitz, Sophie 

Abstract

Plausibly, you should believe what your total evidence supports. But cases of misleading higher-order evidence - evidence about what your evidence supports - present a challenge to this thought. In such cases, taking both first-order and higher-order evidence at face value leads to a seemingly irrational incoherence between one’s first-order and higher-order attitudes: you will believe P, but also believe that your evidence doesn’t support P. To avoid sanctioning tension between epistemic levels, some authors have abandoned the thought that both first-order and higher-order evidence have rational bearing. This sacrifice is both costly and unnecessary. We propose a principle, Evidential Calibration, which requires rational agents to accommodate first-order evidence correctly, while allowing rational uncertainty about what to believe. At the same time, it rules out irrational tensions between epistemic levels. We show that while there are serious problems for some views on which we can rationally believe, “P, but my evidence doesn’t support P”, Evidential Calibration avoids these problems. An important upshot of our discussion is a new way to think about the relationship between epistemic levels: why first-order and higher-order attitudes should generally be aligned, and why it is sometimes - though not always - problematic when they diverge.

Description

Keywords

higher-order evidence, rationality, reliability, epistemic akrasia, epistemic levels

Journal Title

Philosophical Studies

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0031-8116
1573-0883

Volume Title

172

Publisher

Springer Science and Business Media LLC