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26 - Belief, Doubt, and Evidentialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

By
Isaac Levi
Edited by
Jonathan E. Adler  and
Lance J. Rips
Isaac Levi
Affiliation:
Columbia University
Jonathan E. Adler
Affiliation:
Brooklyn College, City University of New York
Lance J. Rips
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Illinois
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Summary

The Main Task of Epistemology: Justifying Changes in Full Belief

I would bet my bottom dollar that William Henry Seward was Secretary of State in the Cabinets of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. I am equally confident that while holding that office under Johnson he negotiated the purchase of Alaska by the United States of America from Russia. I am sure that the purchase was in 1867 give or take a year or so. (I am fairly confident that the year was 1867 but not absolutely certain.) However, I am absolutely certain that Seward had his permanent residence in Auburn, New York, for most of his life.

Confident assertion of matters of fact strikes many as out of place. Epistemic modesty requires that I refrain from expressions of absolute certainty not only about the date of the purchase of Alaska but concerning all the other claims made in the previous paragraph.

A public claim of absolute certainty even when one is sincere in the claim is not the way to win friends and influence people. But champions of epistemic modesty are concerned with more than conversational etiquette or political correctness. Not only should we avoid expressing absolute certainty, we should not be absolutely certain about questions of fact.

Many philosophers would concede that we should all be certain about the truth of the theses of logic and, perhaps, concerning other theses lurking in the cores of our conceptual frameworks.

Type
Chapter
Information
Reasoning
Studies of Human Inference and its Foundations
 , pp. 535 - 547
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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