Epistemic consequentialists maintain that the epistemically right (e.g. the justified) is to be understood in terms of conduciveness to the epistemic good (e.g. true belief). Given the wide variety of epistemological approaches that assume some form of epistemic consequentialism, and the controversies surrounding consequentialism in ethics, it is surprising that epistemic consequentialism remains largely uncontested. However, in a recent paper, Selim Berker has provided arguments that allegedly lead to a 'rejection' of epistemic consequentialism. In the present paper it is shown that reliabilism-the most prominent form of epistemic consequentialism, and one of Berker's main targets-survives Berker's arguments unscathed.
Reliabilism—the view that a belief is justified iff it is produced by a reliable process—is often characterized as a form of consequentialism. Recently, critics of reliabilism have suggested that since it is a form of consequentialism, reliabilism condones a variety of problematic trade-offs involving cases where someone forms an epistemically deficient belief now that will lead her to more epistemic value later. In the present paper, we argue that the relevant argument against reliabilism fails because it equivocates. While there is a sense in which reliabilism is a kind of consequentialism, it is not of a kind on which we should expect problematic trade-offs.
Suppose that beliefs come in degrees. How should we then measure the accuracy of these degrees of belief? Scoring rules are usually thought to be the mathematical tool appropriate for this job. But there are many scoring rules, which lead to different ordinal accuracy rankings. Recently, Fallis and Lewis (2016) have given an argument that, if sound, rules out many of the many popular scoring rules, including the Brier score, as genuine measures of accuracy. I respond to this argument, in part by noting that the argument fails to account for verisimilitudethat certain false hypotheses might be closer to the truth than other false hypotheses. Oddie (forthcoming), however, has argued that no member of a very wide class of scoring rules (the socalled proper scores) can appropriately handle verisimilitude. I explain how to respond to Oddies argument and recommend a class of weighted scoring rules that, I argue, genuinely measure accuracy while escaping the arguments of Fallis and Lewis as well as Oddie.
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