Suppose you'd like to believe that p (e.g. that you are popular), whether or not it's true. What can you do to help? A natural initial thought is that you could engage in Intentionally Biased Inquiry: you could look into whether p, but do so in a way that you expect to predominantly yield evidence in favour of p. The paper hopes to do two things. The first is to argue that this initial thought is mistaken: intentionally biased inquiry is impossible. The second is to show that reflections on intentionally biased inquiry strongly support a controversial 'access' principle which states that, for all p, if p is (not) part of our evidence, then that p is (not) part of our evidence is itself part of our evidence. Sometimes, the truth is bleak. When this happens, we might prefer not to know; we might even prefer to have false beliefs. For the same reason, however, when Ideas from this paper have been presented at the 2012 ARCHE/CSMN graduate conference, the MIT Dissertation Workshop, the 2014 MITing of the Minds, the 2014 Formal Epistemology Workshop, and the 2014 Joint Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association. Thanks to the audiences and my commentators Stew Cohen, Declan Smithies, and Jeff Dunn, on these occasions. In addition, the paper has improved greatly as a result of comments from
An important question in epistemology is whether the KK principle is true, i.e., whether an agent who knows that p is also thereby in a position to know that she knows that p. We explain how a “transparency” account of self‐knowledge, which maintains that we learn about our attitudes towards a proposition by reflecting not on ourselves but rather on that very proposition, supports an affirmative answer. In particular, we show that such an account allows us to reconcile a version of the KK principle with an “externalist” or “reliabilist” conception of knowledge commonly thought to make that principle particularly problematic.
We give a probabilistic analysis of inductive knowledge and belief and explore its predictions concerning knowledge about the future, about laws of nature, and about the values of inexactly measured quantities. The analysis combines a theory of knowledge and belief formulated in terms of relations of comparative normality with a probabilistic reduction of those relations. It predicts that only highly probable propositions are believed, and that many widely held principles of belief-revision fail.
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