Apology for an Average Believer: Wagered Belief and Information Environments

ABSTRACT

Some persons who believe provably false claims – such as that there were significant voter irregularities in the 2020 election – may nevertheless be evidentially rational for holding their false beliefs. I consider a person I call our average believer. In her daily life, she incidentally gathers evidence favoring the hypothesis that there were significant voter irregularities, but she does not investigate the matter. Her information environment, moreover, is such that it accidentally (through no fault of her own) excludes counterevidence to the thesis that there were such irregularities and intensifies the flow of information that there were irregularities. As a consequence, she becomes convinced that there were significant voting irregularities in the 2020 U.S. election. I argue that while she is not zetetically rational, for she does not investigate the matter, she is evidentially rational in that she apportions her belief to the evidence. While she has no right to the Cliffordian, or assertoric, belief that there were such irregularities, she is not epistemically blameworthy for having the wagered belief it is true.

KEYWORDS:

• Belief
• conviction
• rationality
• evidence

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this essay was delivered at the 2022 Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy conference. I am indebted to the attendees for their questions and comments. Junhee Han assisted with research for this article and proofread an earlier version, for which I am grateful. I thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments, which have helped improve this essay.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. After writing this essay, I discovered that Endre Begby (2021) also discusses information environments; I haven’t the space here to examine how well our accounts align.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Richard Kenneth Atkins

Richard Kenneth Atkins is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. He is author of Peirce on Inference (Oxford 2023), Charles S. Peirce’s Phenomenology (Oxford 2018), Peirce and the Conduct of Life (Cambridge 2016), and Puzzled?! (Hackett 2015). His articles have appeared in Synthese, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, European Journal of Philosophy, and British Journal for the History of Philosophy, among other venues.