When Is Evidence No Longer Prior?

ABSTRACT

Some pragmatists hold that there are both practical and epistemic reasons to believe. A crucial issue for this view is how epistemic and practical reasons should be weighed against each other to deliver all‐things‐considered verdicts regarding what one ought to believe. According to threshold models, when the strength of practical reasons for belief exceeds a certain threshold, practical reasons become prior to epistemic reasons. These models are affected by a threshold problem: they fail to specify the threshold at which practical reasons take priority. This prevents them from being sufficiently informative and well motivated. This paper proposes a response to the threshold problem. I argue that in most situations there are higher‐order practical reasons for conforming to epistemic reasons. These higher‐order practical reasons in turn determine the threshold. This threshold view yields intuitive verdicts across various cases and provides a clear guide for determining when we should believe for practical rather than epistemic reasons. Moreover, the view can explain why exceeding the threshold triggers the priority of practical reasons over epistemic reasons, and why the threshold is context dependent.