“Belief Inertia and Awareness-Evidence Commutativity” (forthcoming in Analysis)
Abstract: It is alleged that imprecise probabilism can render one unable to update one’s credence in light of new evidence. While such belief inertia by itself is already quite worrying, I argue that it has other worrying epistemic implications that were previously unnoticed. It opens the possibility that one’s doxastic state depends not only on the evidence one has but also on the temporal order between awareness growth and evidence acquisition. I find this implication difficult to accept.
“Two Conceptions of Testimonial Undervaluation” (in Social Epistemology)
Abstract: With the help of the formal structure of Bayesianism, I distinguish between two different ways in which one’s testimony can be undervalued. While the modelling in the existing literature only focuses on the undervaluation of the trustworthiness of the testimony, the undervaluation of the relevance of the testimony has not been given due attention. The undervaluation of relevance cannot be modelled with Jeffrey conditionalisation as it is traditionally practised. However, it can be modelled with Adams conditionalisation or Jeffrey conditionalisation if applied to the right partition. Distinguishing between the two conceptions of testimonial undervaluation opens the possibility that a person can be subject to double testimonial undervaluation or both testimonial undervaluation and testimonial overvaluation because of the same social identity.
“The Weight of Evidence, Epistemic Luck and Ambiguity Aversion” (forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society)
Abstract: I show that credence backed by weightier evidence is not only more resilient to challenging evidence learned in the future but also more resilient counterfactually. Even if the evidence had been different in the past, such credence would have changed by a relatively small margin. I further show that such counterfactual resilience amounts to being less susceptible to a particular kind of epistemic luck—evidential-doxastic luck. We can utilise the susceptibility to evidential-doxastic luck to rationalise a kind of ambiguity aversion that cannot be otherwise rationalised. It can be rationalised as expected utility maximisation not relative to a set of probability functions in the actual world but relative to a set of probability functions across the specified close possible worlds.
“Higher-Order Evidence as Unspecific Evidence” (work in progress)
Abstract: It is a popular view among formal epistemologists that unspecific evidence requires imprecise credence. Henderson (2022) has recently proposed that imprecise credence is also required by higher-order evidence. I think Henderson is on the right track. Unfortunately, she says little about why the two kinds of evidence happen to require the same treatment. Is it a coincidence? I believe the answer is no. Higher-order evidence, as it is typically presented, requires the same treatment as unspecific evidence does because the former is just a special case of the latter. With the reducibility of higher-order evidence to unspecific evidence in mind, I show that the intuition that lopsided higher-order evidence requires the simple increasing or decreasing of credence is mistaken. What lopsided higher-order evidence requires is to make one’s credence imprecise in only one direction.