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How should your beliefs change when your awareness grows?

  • Richard G Pettigrew*
  • *Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article (Academic Journal) › peer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

Epistemologists who study credences have a well-developed account of how you should change them when you learn new evidence; that is, when your body of evidence grows. What's more, they boast a diverse range of epistemic and pragmatic arguments that support that account. But they do not have a satisfactory account of when and how you should change your credences when you become aware of possibilities and propositions you have not entertained before; that is, when your awareness grows. In this paper, I consider the arguments for the credal epistemologist's account of how to respond to evidence, and I ask whether they can help us generate an account of how to respond to awareness growth. The results are surprising: the arguments that all support the same norms for responding to evidence growth support a number of different norms when they are applied to awareness growth. Some of these norms seem too weak, others too strong. I ask what we should conclude from this, and argue that our credal response to awareness growth is considerably less rigorously constrained than our credal response to new evidence.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)733 - 757
Number of pages25
JournalEpisteme
Volume21
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 13 Oct 2022

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