Abstract

It seems intuitive that our credal states are improved if we obtain evidence favoring truth over any falsehood. In this regard, Fallis and Lewis have recently provided and discussed some formal versions of such an intuition, which they name ‘the Monotonicity Principle’ and ‘Elimination’. They argue, with those principles in hand, that the Brier rule, one of the most popular rules of accuracy, is not a good measure, and that accuracy-firsters cannot underwrite both probabilism and conditionalization. In this paper, I will argue that their conclusions are somewhat hasty. Specifically, I will demonstrate that there is another version of the Monotonicity Principle that can be satisfied by some additive rules of accuracy, such as the Brier rule. Moreover, it will also be argued that their version of the principle has some undesirable features regarding the epistemic betterness. Therefore, their criticisms can hardly jeopardize accuracy-firsters until any further justification of their versions of the Monotonicity Principle and Elimination is provided.