What is the problem of awareness growth and how should an epistemologist respond to it? (eBook)

Essay from the year 2022 in the subject Philosophy - Practical (Ethics, Aesthetics, Culture, Nature, Right, ...), grade: First Class Honours, London School of Economics, language: English, abstract: This essay argues that there cannot exist a formal framework that consistently obtains intuitively correct results for all cases of awareness growth. This is because intuitions determine the rationally correct outcome of any case of awareness growth. Since it is reasonable for intuitions to vary between rational agents, it is feasible to obtain different intuitively correct results with two rational agents in an identical case of awareness growth. This impedes the existence of a framework that consistently obtains intuitively correct results for all cases of awareness growth.

First, I present the classical Bayesian framework and explain how the problem of awareness growth arises. Second, I present Bradley’s account of Reverse Bayesianism as a credence-revision rule and show that it fails to provide intuitively correct results for mixed cases of awareness growth, which disqualifies it as a general framework for all cases of awareness growth. Third, I demonstrate that intuitions determine the rationally correct outcome of any case of awareness growth and show that it is feasible to rationally obtain different intuitively correct outcomes when considering the exact same case of awareness growth with two rational agents.

Last, I conclude that it is impossible for a framework that consistently obtains the intuitively correct outcome to exist and suggest that credence-revision following awareness growth should occur on a case-by-case basis without any constraints other than the rationality assumption of the rational agent.