Accuracy monism and doxastic dominance: reply to Steinberger

Abstract

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.

Accurate believers are deductively cogent

“…It follows that $$A(B, w) \le A(B^{\prime }, w)$$ at all $$w \in \cap B$$ and $$A(B, w) < A(B^{\prime }, w)$$ at some $$w \in \cap B$$, which just is the definition of weak $$\cap B$$‐dominance. That $$\cap B$$‐coherence (or something like it) requires consistency has been noted before, by Pettigrew (2017, p. 479) and Hewson (2020). I say ‘something like’ because as best as I can tell, Pettigrew takes something like $$\cap B$$‐coherence to make consistency necessary and sufficient (see p. 479).…”

“…So there must be some difference between the two notions, though Pettigrew's discussion is quite brief and I cannot pinpoint where the difference lies. 20 See also Hewson (2020) for this proof. 21 See Easwaran (2016, p. 829) for a proof.…”

“…8 Though we'll consider some other proposals for the worlds a belief set treats as live in section 6. These dominance conditions are discussed in Pettigrew (2017) and Hewson (2020); see fn. 19 for more on the background to this conception of belief coherence.…”

“…But since Strict Propriety entails Propriety, that difference won't matter here. Thanks to Kenny Easwaran for pointing out that it was Propriety rather than Strictness doing the work in this argument; in previous work (Hewson, 2020), I suggested — incorrectly — an analogy with the latter.…”