The Lockean Thesis says you must believe p iff you're sufficiently confident of it. On some versions, the 'must' asserts a metaphysical connection; on others, it asserts a normative one. On some versions, 'sufficiently confident' refers to a fixed threshold of credence; on others, it varies with proposition and context. Claim: in one of these forms or another, the Lockean Thesis follows from epistemic utility theory-the view that norms of rationality are constrained by the norm to promote accuracy. More: epistemic utility theory meshes with natural language considerations to yield a Lockean picture of beliefs that helps to model and explain their role in inquiry and conversation. Your beliefs are your best guesses in response to the contextual priorities you face. In this respect epistemic utility theory and natural language are jointly illuminating: each can be used to study the other. Upshot: we have a new approach to the epistemology and semantics of belief. And it has teeth. It implies that the role of beliefs is fundamentally different than many have thought, and in fact supports a metaphysical reduction of belief to credence. Question. You ask me if I think Bob's in his office, and I reply that I'm confident he is. Have I answered your question? Have I told you what I think? Some theorists say "No": there's a further attitude that I might take-belief-and telling you that I have high credence doesn't settle the question of whether I believe. 1 The Lockean Thesis disagrees: I must believe he's in his office iff I'm sufficiently confident he is. 2 But that claim is multiply ambiguous. (1) The 'must' could assert either a metaphysical or a normative connection: perhaps belief reduces to high credence; or perhaps they are distinct attitudes which simply ought to be in harmony. (2) The 'sufficiently confident' could refer to either a fixed or variable threshold of credence: perhaps there is a single threshold such that I believe iff my credence is above that threshold; or perhaps the threshold can vary with proposition and context. Mix and match these distinctions as you like-they are all versions of the Lockean Thesis as I will understand it. Method. You ask me if you should be more confident that Linda is a bank teller than

Assume that it is your evidence that determines what opinions you should have. I argue that since you should take peer disagreement seriously, evidence must have two features. (1) It must sometimes warrant being modest: uncertain what your evidence warrants, and (thus) uncertain whether you're rational. (2) But it must always warrant being guided : disposed to treat your evidence as a guide. It is surprisingly difficult to vindicate these dual constraints. But diagnosing why this is so leads to a proposal-Trust-that is weak enough to allow modesty but strong enough to yield many guiding features. In fact, I argue that Trust is the Goldilocks principle-for it is necessary and sufficient to vindicate the claim that you should always prefer to use free evidence. Upshot: Trust lays the foundations for a theory of disagreement and, more generally, an epistemology that permits self-doubt-a modest epistemology.

This paper is about guessing: how people respond to a question when they aren't certain of the answer. Guesses show surprising and systematic patterns that the most obvious theories don't explain. We argue that these patterns reveal that people aim to optimize a tradeoff between accuracy and informativity when forming their guess. After spelling out our theory, we use it to argue that guessing plays a central role in our cognitive lives. In particular, our account of guessing yields new theories of belief, assertion, and the conjunction fallacy—the psychological finding that people sometimes rank a conjunction as more probable than one of its conjuncts. More generally, we suggest that guessing helps explain how boundedly rational agents like us navigate a complex, uncertain world.

KK is the thesis that if you can know p, you can know that you can know p. Though it’s unpopular, a flurry of considerations has recently emerged in its favour. Here we add fuel to the fire: standard resources allow us to show that any failure of KK will lead to the knowability and assertability of abominable indicative conditionals of the form ‘If I don’t know it, p’. Such conditionals are manifestly not assertable—a fact that KK defenders can easily explain. I survey a variety of KK-denying responses and find them wanting. Those who object to the knowability of such conditionals must either (i) deny the possibility of harmony between knowledge and belief, or (ii) deny well-supported connections between conditional and unconditional attitudes. Meanwhile, those who grant knowability owe us an explanation of such conditionals’ unassertability—yet no successful explanations are on offer. Upshot: we have new evidence for KK.

No abstract