Higher-Order Uncertainty

Abstract

You have higher-order uncertainty iff you are uncertain of what opinions you should have. This chapter defends three claims about it. First, the higher-order evidence debate can be helpfully reframed in terms of higher-order uncertainty. The central question becomes how your first- and higher-order opinions should relate—a precise question that can be embedded within a general, tractable framework. Second, this question is nontrivial. Rational higher-order uncertainty is pervasive, and lies at the foundations of the epistemology of disagreement. Third, the answer is not obvious. The Enkratic Intuition—that your first-order opinions must “line up” with your higher-order opinions—is incorrect; epistemic akrasia can be rational. If all this is right, then it leaves us without answers—but with a clear picture of the question, and a fruitful strategy for pursuing it.

Deliberation and confidence change

“…3 Our conception of confidence thus differs from that of authors who use "confidence", "credence", or "degree of belief" synonymously (Lasonen-Aarnio 2013), or who take confidence as a betting disposition or affective state that is explained or determined by credence (Christensen 2009;Frances and Matheson 2019). It might turn out that confidence is related or can even be reduced to resistance to revision (Levi 1980), credal resilience (Skyrms 1977;Egan and Elga 2005), higher-order uncertainty (Dorst 2019(Dorst , 2020, or evidential weight (Nance 2008;Joyce 2005), yet these questions are not our concern in the present paper.…”

Epistemic akrasia: No apology required

“…one is rational to believe about what one is rational to believe. And, like Elga, he thinks that certain intuitively akratic doxastic states can be rational (see Dorst 2019). He offers his Simple Trust principle as an improvement on NRR.…”

Higher‐order evidence and losing one's conviction

“…It is also worth noting that there have been some sophisticated attempts to handle higher-order evidence by combining a Bayesian approach with epistemic logic, building on work by Timothy Williamson (Dorst, 2019a(Dorst, , 2019bLasonen-Aarnio, 2015;Williamson, 2019Williamson, , 2000. It is beyond the scope of this paper to assess the relation of this proposal to those efforts, though the comparison would be an interesting one.…”