Graduate Student Talk Series _ Yan Zeng

Abstract: Can practical factors affect whether a belief is justified or counts as knowledge when the evidence remains unchanged? Pragmatic encroachers argue they can. Jie Gao extends this approach to degrees of belief. She argues that practical factors can affect whether the shifty credences are epistemically rational. In particular, she argues that time pressure can make a higher credence rational without providing new evidence. She offers two defenses: allowing credences to respond to practical factors can save cognitive resources for other epistemic goals. And such sensitivity does not conflict with Bayesian conditionalization. 

 

This Talk examines whether these defenses sufficiently justify the epistemic rationality of higher credence under urgency. I argue that the epistemic advantages of adopting a cognitive strategy don't justify that each credence is rational. Second, I argue that saving cognitive resources does not justify higher credence when the agent already recognizes that one's evidence does not support it. Third, I explain why compatibility with Bayesian conditionalization does not independently resolve this problem.