Joshua Edward Pearson

Suppose you believe on independent grounds that Verdi is Italian, Bizet is French, and Satie is French. To your surprise, you then learn that all three composers are compatriots. What should you believe? This case—Composers—has generated significant discussion. Some argue you should be cautious and become ambivalent as to whether all three composers are French or all three are Italian. Surprisingly, if that’s right, Composers wreaks epistemological anarchy: a wide variety of epistemological principles turn out to be false. Those resistant to this anarchy instead argue you should be bold and conclude that all three composers are French. I endorse the anarchy. But I do so here in a unique way. Existing approaches to Composers side exclusively with either the cautious or bold reaction, ruling the other out as irrational. This is undesirable, as both reactions seem reasonable. I outline a new way to model—or should I say, ‘compose’—Composers that captures this permissive element of the case.

I outline a novel counterexample to the principle of belief revision, Anticipation: if both learning and learning not‐ would render belief in unjustified, you cannot now be justified in believing. If I am right, not only is the leading theory of belief revision false, so are various recently proposed weakenings. I develop and defend a new theory that correctly predicts the failures of Anticipation I argue for, predicated on the simple idea that one is justified in ruling out possibility just in case that possibility is sufficiently improbable.

I present an intractable puzzle for the currently popular view that belief is weak—the view that expressions like ‘S believes p’ ascribe to S a doxastic attitude towards p that is rationally compatible with low credence that p. The puzzle concerns issues that arise on considering beliefs in conditionals. I show that proponents of weak belief either cannot consistently apply their preferred methodology when accommodating beliefs in conditionals, or they must deny that beliefs in conditionals can be used in reasoning.