Epistemic Permissivism and Risk Assessment in Irrationality

Abstract A popular version of epistemic permissivism says that, given the total evidence, there is sometimes a permissible credence range in a proposition. Ginger Schultheis (2018) offers a dominance argument against this. Schultheis argues that it is irrational to have a credence at the edge of any permissible range because the edge credence takes higher risks of being irrational than the credence in the middle. In this paper, I propose two new responses. Firstly, I argue that after the risk assessment in irrationality, a new stable range may emerge such that each credence from it does not take more risks than others. Schultheis’s dominance argument can only shrink the original credence range to this new stable range. Second, I argue that sometimes it is rational for us to have a more risky credence when a safer alternative is available. If rationality aims at truth-conduciveness and informativeness, a credence’s higher risks of being irrational do not render it irrational when one risks being less truth-conducive in exchange for informativeness.