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Notes
As Williamson puts it: “On standard Bayesian accounts of updating, the only present trace of past evidence is in present probabilities” (2000, 220). He is thinking about traditional Bayesianism the way I am – present certainties don’t make those propositions one is certain of evidence; instead those certainties are around thanks to past evidence that is no longer around.
Cf. Williamson, 2000, Chapter 10, who also points to cases where later evidence induces rational doubt, cases which are not naturally described as cases of ‘forgetting’.
Assuming causal connections relevant to epistemology are not intrinsic, the “time-slice” view will have to concern just “ex ante” rationality. This already tells us that the rationality of an agent in a more intuitive sense cannot be intrinsic.
I realize there are complications to do with externalism about belief content here. For these purposes I make the simplifying assumption that SwampJones is part of Jones’ linguistic community and thanks to that inherits the content for ‘Snickers bar’ and so on that is had by that expression in that community. I doubt that the kinds of issues raised here can be entirely bypassed by appealing to content externalism.
Here is Williamson: “Unfortunately, there is a tendency in the epistemological literature and elsewhere to use phrases like ‘it is rational to believe p’ as though they were governed by both schemas simultaneously, evaluating their truth-value sometimes according to what the evidence supports, sometimes according to what a rational person would believe in those circumstances with that evidence, and combining the results” (2017, 266–267).
I would like to register some skepticism about the distinction between ampliative inference on the one hand, and cases where beliefs are triggered by a variety of background beliefs, but I shall not pursue that concern here.
Generalizing, for any relation R, one had better not have it that standing in R to a proposition makes it evidence and also that (in the setting of the birthday encounter) if one has evidence that someone will live to at least t, one stands in R to the proposition that they will live to t plus a second.
References
Comesaña, J. (2020). Being Rational and Being Right. Oxford University Press.
Goodman J. & Salow, B. Epistemology normalized. The Philosophical Review (forthcoming). Duke University Press, Durham.
Williamson, T. (2000). Knowledge and Its Limits. Oxford University Press.
Williamson, T. (2017). Ambiguous rationality. Episteme, 14(3), 263–274.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Clayton Littlejohn for helpful discussion
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Hawthorne, J. Evidence, experience and decision. Philos Stud 180, 2491–2502 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01930-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01930-w