How should your beliefs change when your awareness grows?

Episteme:1-25 (forthcoming)
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Abstract

Epistemologists who study credences have a well-developed account of how you should change them when you learn new evidence; that is, when your body of evidence grows. What's more, they boast a diverse range of epistemic and pragmatic arguments that support that account. But they do not have a satisfactory account of when and how you should change your credences when you become aware of possibilities and propositions you have not entertained before; that is, when your awareness grows. In this paper, I consider the arguments for the credal epistemologist's account of how to respond to evidence, and I ask whether they can help us generate an account of how to respond to awareness growth. The results are surprising: the arguments that all support the same norms for responding to evidence growth support a number of different norms when they are applied to awareness growth. Some of these norms seem too weak, others too strong. I ask what we should conclude from this, and argue that our credal response to awareness growth is considerably less rigorously constrained than our credal response to new evidence.

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Richard Pettigrew
University of Bristol

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References found in this work

Knowledge and its limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - New York: Oxford University Press.
The Logic of Decision.Richard C. Jeffrey - 1965 - New York, NY, USA: University of Chicago Press.
Accuracy and the Laws of Credence.Richard Pettigrew - 2016 - New York, NY.: Oxford University Press UK.
Knowledge and Its Limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - Philosophy 76 (297):460-464.
Knowledge and its Limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 64 (1):200-201.

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