What about Belief?

You have finished your investigation. The witnesses have given their depositions, the crime scene has been examined and the suspects have been interviewed. Your analysis of the evidence has been scrupulous. And you are now pretty confident – any degree of confidence below 0.8 would be too low, any degree of confidence above 0.9, too high – that the lawyer is the culprit. You report as much to your superior. There is the expected talk of how good a case can be made in court and of how best to pitch the case to the district attorney. But then something unexpected happens. One of your colleagues turns to you and says, “I know you've already told us how confident you are that the lawyer did it. But tell us, do you believe she did it?” Given what we have seen so far, it is a poignant question.

I have claimed that the results of the last two chapters, and Modest Probabilism in particular, constitute a significant contribution to epistemology. Yet anyone familiar with the recent history of epistemology (or, for that matter, of the philosophy of science) cannot fail to have been struck by the unfamiliarity of the terms in which this alleged contribution has been couched. After all, epistemology has been trying to describe the conditions under which you are rational (or justified) to believe a hypothesis, the conditions under which you can be said to have knowledge.