Transitional attitudes and the unmooring view of higher‐order evidence

Abstract

AbstractThis paper proposes a novel answer to the question of what attitude agents should adopt when they receive misleading higher‐order evidence that avoids the drawbacks of existing views. The answer builds on the independently motivated observation that there is a difference between attitudes that agents form as conclusions of their reasoning, calledterminal attitudes, and attitudes that are formed in a transitional manner in the process of reasoning, calledtransitional attitudes. Terminal and transitional attitudes differ both in their descriptive and in their normative properties. When an agent receives higher‐order evidence that they might have reasoned incorrectly to a belief or credence towardsp, then their attitude towardspis no longer justified as aterminalattitude towardsp, but it can still be justified as atransitionalattitude. This view, which I call theunmooring view, allows us to capture the rational impact of misleading higher‐order evidence in a way that integrates smoothly with a natural picture of epistemic justification and the dynamics of deliberation.