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Lara Buchak, Epistemic Risk and the Demands of Rationality, by Richard Pettigrew, Mind, 2024;, fzae017, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzae017
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William James (1897) famously argued that different individuals can have different attitudes towards epistemic risk, and therefore different standards about when to believe. You might cautiously withhold belief, unwilling to take the risk that the belief is false—whereas I might venturesomely adopt a belief, willing to take that risk for the possibility that the belief is true. Our attitudes towards epistemic risk can thus play a role in determining what to believe, even after the evidence has come in—and a given body of evidence thus permits more than one epistemic response. Belief is permissive.
Could a similar argument show that rational credence depends on one’s risk attitude, and is therefore permissive? In his remarkably clear, cogent, and well-argued book Epistemic Risk and the Demands of Rationality, Richard Pettigrew takes up the task of providing such an argument. He argues for two claims. First, that because different individuals might adopt very different attitudes towards epistemic risk, credence is radically interpersonally permissive: for a given body of evidence, two rational individuals can vary greatly in the credences they adopt. Second, that because some risk attitudes permit more than one credence function, credence is (somewhat less radically) intrapersonally permissive: for a given body of evidence and some individuals, there is more than one credence function that it is rational for the individual to adopt.
