Context-sensitivity and the Preface Paradox for credence

Dominik Kauss

doi:10.1007/s11229-021-03115-6

Abstract

It’s intuitively plausible to suppose that there are many things that we can be rationally certain of, at least in many contexts. The present paper argues that, given this principle of Abundancy, there is a Preface Paradox for (rational) credence. Section 1 gives a statement of the paradox, discusses its relation to its familiar counterpart for (rational) belief, and points out the congeniality between Abundancy and broadly contextualist trends in epistemology. This leads to the question whether considerations of context-sensitivity might lend themselves to solving the Preface for credence. Sections 2 and 3 scrutinize two approaches in this spirit—one mimicking Hawthorne’s (2002) Semantic Contextualist approach to an epistemic version of the Preface, the other one analogous to Clarke’s (2015) Sensitivist approach to the doxastic version—arguing that neither approach succeeds as it stands.

Highlights

One way we might try to bring considerations of context-sensitivity to bear on the Preface for credence is to proceed in direct analogy with Hawthorne’s Contextualist approach to an epistemic version of the Preface
Which possibilities count as relevant and cannot be properly ignored in appraising a’s knowledge can change from context to context, and so can the answer to the question whether a knows that P. Utilizing this apparent shiftiness of knowledge, Hawthorne offers a way out of the epistemic Preface: While for each Pi there is an ordinary context relative to which a knows that Pi, there is no ordinary context in which a knows each Pi, and no ordinary context in which a knows the conjunction of all the Pi. The former is supposed to explain why we find the individual knowledge ascriptions plausible, the latter seeks to account for the fact that we find ascribing knowledge of the conjunction implausible, and the two explanations combine without contradicting epistemic Closure
My reply to the considered Contextualist approach to the credal Preface is this: Even if ascriptions of rational credence show the same context-sensitivity as ascriptions of knowledge, the claim that the latter are nearly as context-sensitive as Hawthorne suggests is not sufficiently motivated

Summary

The Preface for credence

When absorbed in the practical and theoretical activities of our everyday lives rather than contemplating philosophical reasons for skepticism, at any given time there’s loads of non-trivial propositions that we take for granted without harboring any doubt about their truth, propositions that we are highly but absolutely certain of. Given Complementarity, this is just to say that a’s evidence makes it rational for a to be less than certain that everything they are certain of is true This should already give us pause in light of assumptions (1), (3), and (4): a’s adopting even the slightest non-zero certainty in ∃P([Ca P]∧¬P) is probabilistically incoherent with a’s being simultaneously certain in each Pi. Arguably, violations of probability theory are not somehow less serious, in rational respect, than violations of logic. The intuition of risk aggregation powering the doxastic Preface is that it’s rational for a to believe that some of their beliefs are false The force of this intuition depends at least in part on the assumption that a believes many (non-trivial) things, as ordinary agents normally do: Ceteris paribus, the larger the set of propositions a believes, the greater the risk of believing a falsehood, and the more tempting said idea. I will consider two such attempts, each constructed in analogy with a respective existing approach to some version of the Preface, the first being Hawthorne’s (2002) Contextualist approach to an epistemic version, the second Clarke’s (2015) Sensitivist approach to a more conventional doxastic version

Contextualism about rationality

Sensitivism about credence

Conclusion

Compliance with ethical standards