Epistemic Actualism

Abstract

According to veritism, your epistemic goal is to believe what's true. According to actualist veritism, your epistemic goal is to believe what's actually true. At first glance, it seems that the pursuit of truth and the pursuit of actual truth will lead to the same destination. This will follow for evidential decision theorists; but if we are causal decision theorists (as I am), then pursuing truth and pursuing actual truth will lead us to different destinations. In this paper, I assume causal decision theory and argue for actualist veritism over veritism. My argument is that veritism does not respect the direction of fit of belief, since it incentivizes changing the world to match your beliefs, rather than changing your beliefs to match the world as it is. In contrast, actualist veritism honors the direction of fit of belief, and only incentivizes changing your beliefs to match the world as it is. For this reason, actualist veritism allows epistemic teleologists to escape “epistemic bribery” objections, to doubt self‐verifying propositions like “someone believes this proposition,” and to maintain coherence in the face of self‐falsifying propositions like “I don't believe this proposition.”