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Knowledge of Our Own Beliefs[Note 1. Thanks to audiences at Carnegie Mellon University, the Rutgers ...]
Author(s) -
Roush Sherrilyn
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
philosophy and phenomenological research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.7
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1933-1592
pISSN - 0031-8205
DOI - 10.1111/phpr.12274
Subject(s) - generalization , probabilistic logic , order (exchange) , subject (documents) , bridge (graph theory) , epistemology , common knowledge (logic) , computer science , economics , artificial intelligence , philosophy , description logic , medicine , finance , library science , multimodal logic , epistemic modal logic
There is a widespread view that in order to be rational we must mostly know what we believe. In the probabilistic tradition this is defended by arguments that a person who failed to have this knowledge would be vulnerable to sure loss, or probabilistically incoherent. I argue that even gross failure to know one's own beliefs need not expose one to sure loss, and does not if we follow a generalization of the standard bridge principle between first‐order and second‐order beliefs. This makes it possible for a subject to use probabilistic decision theory to manage in a rational way cases of potential failure of this self‐knowledge, as we find in implicit bias. Through such cases I argue that it is possible for uncertainty about what our beliefs are to be not only rationally permissible but advantageous.