Epistemic Utility and Norms for Credence

Beliefs come in different strengths. An agent’s credence in a proposition is a measure of the strength of her belief in that proposition. Various norms for credences have been proposed. Traditionally, philosophers have tried to argue for these norms by showing that any agent who violates them will be lead by her credences to make bad decisions. In this article, we survey a new strategy for justifying these norms. The strategy begins by identifying an epistemic utility function and a decision-theoretic norm; we then show that the decision-theoretic norm applied to the epistemic utility function yields the norm for credences that we wish to justify. We survey results already obtained using this strategy, and we suggest directions for future research.