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Richard Pettigrew, Epistemic Risk & the Demands of Rationality, Oxford University Press, 2022, 211pp., $108.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780192864352.
Reviewed by Boris Babic, University of Hong Kong
William James famously writes:
We must know the truth; and we must avoid error—these are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are not two ways of stating an identical commitment, they are two separable laws (James, 1896).
The core insight in this passage is that as epistemic agents we face competing costs: you can avoid error by refusing to believe anything, but you will never learn the truth. And if you try to learn true things, you risk incurring some error too. Every theory of epistemic risk is ultimately a theory of enriching this insight with a sufficiently general methodological framework for handling the (epistemic) trade-offs associated with competing doxastic attitudes.
In Epistemic Risk & the Demands of Rationality,…
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