Abstract

The recent epistemology literature has seen a lively debate about how agents should respond to credible but misleading higher-order evidence that their reasoning has been faulty. This chapter uses the distinction between transitional and terminal attitudes to propose a novel solution to this problem, which avoids the drawbacks of existing views while preserving their main insights. The proposed view says that when an agent receives higher-order evidence that they might have reasoned incorrectly, then their attitude that resulted from this reasoning is no longer justified as a terminal attitude, but it can still be justified as a transitional attitude. This view allows us to capture the rational impact of misleading higher-order evidence in a way that integrates smoothly with a compelling general picture of epistemic justification and the dynamics of deliberation.