Puneh Nejati-Mehr

Difficult actions such as quitting smoking present a puzzle for standard theories of rational confidence: evidence indicates a low chance of success, warranting low confidence, yet reasoning with confidence can promote success. Standard monistic accounts that identify confidence as a degree of belief cannot resolve this tension, since they allow only one rational attitude towards an agent’s success-prospects. Instead, this paper proposes Confidence Dualism (CD): rational agents can hold two distinct but complementary confidence-attitudes—epistemic confidence, which tracks evidence, and practical confidence, which functions in goal-relevant reasoning. On this account, rational agents engage in Promotional Reasoning, where practical confidence rationalises choosing acts that causally improve their success prospects in goal-relevant decisions, even while epistemic confidence acknowledges that success is improbable. Thus, an agent can rationally act as if quitting is likely while being aware that it is not. CD avoids the shortcomings of the standard monistic account and integrates epistemic and practical demands of agency in a more nuanced theory of rational confidence.