Philosophy 290-6

We examine the thesis that justified belief requires not access to one’s own mind but rather the distinct, and often non-conscious, capacity of self-monitoring, and that the purpose of self-monitoring is self-correction. We discuss notions of justified belief in epistemology and Bayesianism, consider a new self-monitoring notion of justified belief based on second-order tracking, and relate it to the notion of calibration in Bayesianism, statistics, and psychologists’ studies of human beings’ confidence/accuracy ratios. We apply the new self-monitoring rationality requirements proposed for the relation between first- and second-order beliefs to the Preface Paradox, Moore’s Paradox, the Commitment Paradox, the Paradox of Entailment, and the problem of formulating fallibilism, in order to explain both why there is a tension in each of these cases and why there is nevertheless no contradiction