Epistemic Safety: Risk and Its Negativity in the Good Case

Practical encroachment may be understood with an influx of epistemic possibilities into the epistemic context through raising epistemic standard. The same piece of evidence no longer epistemically justifies the corresponding belief because of the extra alternative possibilities. I differentiate relevance into ethical relevance and epistemic relevance through practical interest, and note that, even though one lost confidence in some facts one used to know, one did not lose epistemic justification. I will illustrate the difference between making an epistemic justificatory difference to knowledge and its required precision, and making only an ethical justificatory difference about what one decides to do. If banks are not open on Saturday mornings, one would have to decide differently concerning when it is that one deposited one’s pay cheque, but the salience of the alternative does not constitute its epistemic relevance: one retained the epistemic justification to know that the bank will be open tomorrow all the same. One’s belief is thus still epistemically safe as before. Epistemic risk measures the likelihood of having committed an epistemic wrong, which is constituted by believing falsely. I propose a numerical relation between epistemic safety and epistemic risk as a result.