The higher-order evidence debate concerns how higher-order evidence affects the rationality of our first-order beliefs. This Element has two parts. The first part (Sections 1 and 2) provides a critical overview of the literature, aiming to explain why the higher-order evidence debate is interesting and important. The second part (Sections 3 to 6) defends calibrationism, the view that we should respond to higher-order evidence by aligning our credences to our reliability degree. The author first discusses the traditional version of calibrationism and explains its main difficulties, before proposing a new version of calibrationism called 'Evidence-Discounting Calibrationism.' The Element argues that this new version is independently plausible and that it can avoid the difficulties faced by the traditional version.

We often have reason to doubt our own ability to form rational beliefs, or to doubt that some particular belief of ours is rational. Perhaps we learn that a trusted friend disagrees with us about what our shared evidence supports. Or perhaps we learn that our beliefs have been afflicted by motivated reasoning or by other cognitive biases. These are examples of higher-order evidence. While it may seem plausible that higher-order evidence should somehow impact our beliefs, it is less clear how and why. Normally, when evidence impacts our beliefs, it does so by virtue of speaking for or against the truth of theirs contents. But higher-order evidence does not directly concern the contents of the beliefs that they impact. In recent years, philosophers have become increasingly aware of the need to understand the nature and normative role of higher-order evidence. This is partly due to the pervasiveness of higher-order evidence in human life. But it has also become clear that higher-order evidence plays a central role in many epistemological debates, spanning from traditional discussions of internalism/externalism about epistemic justification to more recent discussions of peer disagreement and epistemic akrasia. This volume brings together, for the first time, a distinguished group of leading and up-and-coming epistemologists to explore a wide range of interrelated issues about higher-order evidence.

We often have reason to doubt our own ability to form rational beliefs, particularly when we are exposed to higher-order evidence. This book explains how disagreements with trusted friends, or learning of our own cognitive biases, can impact on our views. From there it explores a range of interrelated issues on this topic of higher-order evidence.

What strength of evidence is required for knowledge? Ordinarily, we often claim to know something on the basis of evidence which doesn't guarantee its truth. For instance, one might claim to know that one sees a crow on the basis of visual experience even though having that experience does not guarantee that there is a crow (it might be a rook, or one might be dreaming). As a result, those wanting to avoid philosophical scepticism have standardly embraced "fallibilism": one can know a proposition on the basis of evidence that supports it even if the evidence doesn't guarantee its truth. Despite this, there's been a persistent temptation to endorse "infallibilism", according to which knowledge requires evidence that guarantees truth. For doesn't it sound contradictory to simultaneously claim to know and admit the possibility of error? Infallibilism is undergoing a contemporary renaissance. Furthermore, recent infallibilists make the surprising claim that they can avoid scepticism. Jessica Brown presents a fresh examination of the debate between these two positions. She argues that infallibilists can avoid scepticism only at the cost of problematic commitments concerning evidence and evidential support. Further, she argues that alleged objections to fallibilism are not compelling. She concludes that we should be fallibilists. In doing so, she discusses the nature of evidence, evidential support, justification, blamelessness, closure for knowledge, defeat, epistemic akrasia, practical reasoning, concessive knowledge attributions, and the threshold problem.

Every known religious or explicitly irreligious outlook is contested by large contingents of informed and reasonable people. Many philosophers have argued that reflection on this fact should lead us to abandon confident religious or irreligious belief and to embrace religious skepticism. John Pittard critically assesses the case for such disagreement-motivated religious skepticism. While the book focuses on religious disagreement, it makes a number of significant contributions to the more general discussion of the rational significance of disagreement as well.

Richard Pettigrew offers an extended investigation into a particular way of justifying the rational principles that govern our credences (or degrees of belief). The main principles that he justifies are the central tenets of Bayesian epistemology, though many other related principles are discussed along the way. These are: Probabilism, the claims that credences should obey the laws of probability; the Principal Principle, which says how credences in hypotheses about the objective chances should relate to credences in other propositions; the Principle of Indifference, which says that, in the absence of evidence, we should distribute our credences equally over all possibilities we entertain; and Conditionalization, the Bayesian account of how we should plan to respond when we receive new evidence. Ultimately, then, this book is a study in the foundations of Bayesianism. To justify these principles, Pettigrew looks to decision theory. He treats an agent's credences as if they were a choice she makes between different options, gives an account of the purely epistemic utility enjoyed by different sets of credences, and then appeals to the principles of decision theory to show that, when epistemic utility is measured in this way, the credences that violate the principles listed above are ruled out as irrational. The account of epistemic utility set out here is the veritist's: the sole fundamental source of epistemic utility for credences is their accuracy. Thus, Pettigrew conducts an investigation in the version of epistemic utility theory known as accuracy-first epistemology. The book can also be read as an extended reply on behalf of the veritist to the evidentialist's objection that veritism cannot account for certain evidential principles of credal rationality, such as the Principal Principle, the Principle of Indifference, and Conditionalization.

This Element examines a main theme in religious epistemology, namely, the possibility of knowledge of God. Most often philosophers consider the rationality or justification of propositional belief about God, particularly beliefs about the existence and nature of God; and they will assess the conditions under which, if there is a God, such propositional beliefs would be knowledge, particularly in light of counter-evidence or the availability of religious disagreement. This Element surveys such familiar areas, then turns toward newer and less-developed terrain: interpersonal epistemology, namely what it is to know another person. It then explores the prospects for understanding what it might take to know God relationally, the contours of which are significant for many theistic traditions.

Transcendental arguments were prominent in Western philosophy, German idealism, phenomenological tradition, and P. F. Strawson's thinking. They have fallen out of fashion because of their associations with transcendental idealism and verificationism. They are still invoked by important figures in the analytic tradition even if the very same tradition has cast doubt on such arguments. The nature of transcendental arguments remains unclear: Are they supposed to be deductive? Are they synthetic or analytic? If they are a priori, how are they supposed to be about the empirical world? What are their relations to necessity, conceivability, and essence? This Element takes up the challenge of elucidating the nature of transcendental arguments, embedded in the wider context of transcendental epistemology. It will be argued that the key premise 'transcendental conditional' is synthetic, necessary, and a posteriori.

This accessible Element defends version of virtue epistemology shown to have all-things-considered advantages over other views on the market. The view is unorthodox, in that it incorporates Sosa's animal/reflective knowledge distinction, which has thus far had few takers. The author shows why embracing a multi-tiered framework is not a liability within virtue epistemology but instead affords it an edge not attainable otherwise. The particular account of knowledge goes beyond Sosa's own view by introducing and incorporating several theoretical innovations (regarding both basing and risk, as well as the introduction of multiple species of reflective knowledge) which are aimed at revamping how we think about 'high-grade' knowledge, how we attain it, and what it demands of us. The result is a new and improved stratified virtue epistemology that can hold up against scrutiny.

This Element aims to work towards developing a novel account of defeat. It distinguishes among three broad views in the epistemology of defeat: scepticism, internalism, and externalism. It argues that that sceptical and internalist accounts of defeat are bound to remain unsatisfactory.