A Match Made in (Rational) Heaven? How Credences Relate to Probability Beliefs

ABSTRACT Much has been said about the relation between credences and beliefs. Surprisingly little, however, has been said about how credences more specifically relate to probability beliefs. In this paper, I will argue that they are normatively related. This proposal goes against belief‐first reductionism, which says that credences just are probability beliefs. Against the most popular version of this view, I will offer a novel counterexample in which intuitively there is an irrational subject with mismatching credences and probability beliefs. Such cases motivate what I call the Interdoxastic Coordination Principle (ICP), according to which a subject is epistemically rational only if (roughly put) her credences and her beliefs' epistemically probabilistic contents match. I will show that ICP gets right various data points about the interplay between credences and probability beliefs.

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Publication Details

Journal
Theoria
Published
2026-04-16
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1111/theo.70087
Primary Topic
Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

A Match Made in (Rational) Heaven? How Credences Relate to Probability Beliefs

Roman Heil
Theoria
Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
article

A Match Made in (Rational) Heaven? How Credences Relate to Probability Beliefs

Roman Heil
article en

Abstract

ABSTRACT Much has been said about the relation between credences and beliefs. Surprisingly little, however, has been said about how credences more specifically relate to probability beliefs. In this paper, I will argue that they are normatively related. This proposal goes against belief‐first reductionism, which says that credences just are probability beliefs. Against the most popular version of this view, I will offer a novel counterexample in which intuitively there is an irrational subject with mismatching credences and probability beliefs. Such cases motivate what I call the Interdoxastic Coordination Principle (ICP), according to which a subject is epistemically rational only if (roughly put) her credences and her beliefs' epistemically probabilistic contents match. I will show that ICP gets right various data points about the interplay between credences and probability beliefs.

Theoria
Goethe University Frankfurt (DE)
Openalex Percentile: Top 9%
Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
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