Given the standard dominance conditions used in accuracy theories for outright belief, epistemologists must invoke epistemic conservatism if they are to avoid licensing belief in both a proposition and its negation. In ‘Accuracy and epistemic conservatism’ Florian Steinberger charges the committed accuracy monist – the theorist who thinks that the only epistemic value is accuracy – with being unable to motivate this conservatism. I show that the accuracy monist can avoid Steinberger’s charge by moving to a subtly different set of dominance conditions. Having done so, they no longer need to invoke conservatism. I briefly explore some ramifications of this shift.
This paper argues that the agent concerned to have accurate (outright) beliefs will have a consistent and multipremise closed belief set, and not a (merely) singlepremise closed and (merely) pairwise consistent belief set, as has often been thought. This argument rests on the fact that we need a notion of accuracy coherence for belief that is belief-sensitive; sensitive to one's perspective, in a way that the standard belief-insensitive notion of accuracy coherence is not. The choice of the beliefsensitive over belief-insensitive notion is defended, as is the choice of this particular belief-sensitive kind of accuracy coherence over other belief-sensitive rivals.Our conclusion is that accurate believers are deductively cogent.
Kevin Dorst has recently pointed out an apparently puzzling consequence of denying epistemic luminosity: given some natural-sounding bridging principles between knowledge, credence, and indicative conditionals, the denial of epistemic luminosity licenses the knowledge and assertability of abominable-sounding conditionals of the form ⌜If I don’t know thatϕ, thenϕ⌝. We provide a general and systematic examination of this datum by testing Dorst’s claim against various semantics for the indicative conditional in the setting of epistemic logic. Our conclusion is that, regardless of whether knowledge is luminous, the knowability of these conditionals is highly sensitive to the correct semantic analysis of the indicative conditional. Moreover, standard pragmatic resources can explain away the infelicity of such assertions. As it stands, the datum does not tell against epistemic non-luminosity.
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