Isaac Levi Prize 2024: Deference Principles for Imprecise Credences

This essay gives an account of epistemic deference for agents with imprecise credences. I look at the two main imprecise deference principles in the literature, known as Identity Reflection and Pointwise Reflection. I show that Pointwise Reflection is strictly weaker than Identity Reflection, and argue that, if you are certain you will update by conditionalization, you should defer to your future self according to Identity Reflection. Then I give a more general justification for Pointwise and Identity Reflection from the assumption that you defer to someone whenever you consider their doxastic state to be better than yours, in the sense of leading to better decision-making.