I’ve noticed, both in reading Fantl and McGrath’s book, and in talking to various people at Rutgers, that the position I took on pragmatic encroachment in “Can We Do Without Pragmatic Encroachment?”:http://brian.weatherson.org/cwdwpe.pdf has often been misinterpreted. This has happened so often that I assume it is my fault. So here’s a nickel summary of the views of that paper. This isn’t quite what I currently believe, but it’s close. (Below I say a bit about how I’ve changed my views.)

1. Functionalism is correct. That is, mental states are individuated functionally, and typically have three kinds of proprietary functional roles: relationships to inputs, relationships to other states, and relationships to outputs. The third of these is most important to the story here.
2. Ramsey’s functional characterisation of credences is more or less right, at least as regards relationships to outputs. So, assuming the input and internal connections are in order, to have credence _x_ in _p_ is more or less to be willing to bet on _p_ at odds 1 – x:x.
3. Rational credences track evidential probabilities, in much the way Keynes suggested. So to have a rational credence in _p_ just is to have one’s credence be (close enough to) the epistemic probability of _p_ given _E_, where _E_ is your actual evidence. (Note that there’s nothing pragmatic around yet, at least as long as evidence is not pragmatic.)
4. The output condition for belief is that an agent (typically) believes that _p_ iff for any _A_, _B_, the agent prefers _A_ to _B_ iff they prefer _A ∧ p_ to _B ∧ p_. There are other conditions on belief (i.e. input conditions and internal connections), but this condition explains the relationship between stake variation and variation in justified belief.
5. The previous point uses a tacit quantifier over actions. Actions _A_ and _B_ are in the relevant quantifier domain iff they are practically relevant to the agent. This is where stake variation impacts belief, and it is the only place that it does. So right now I believe that I’m listening to a Beatles song, but I wouldn’t continue to believe that if I had to bet my life on it. (It could be a very carefully done re-recording after all.) That’s because betting my life on this song being by the Beatles is not currently in the relevant quantifier domain, but could move into the quantifier domain if my practical situation changes.
6. An agent has a rational belief in _p_ iff they believe that _p_, and their credence in _p_ is rational in the sense of point 3.
7. As a consequence of all that, changing the stakes cannot change an agent from having a rational to having an irrational belief in _p_. But it can change them from having a rational belief in _p_ to neither believing _p_ nor being in a position to rationally believe that _p_.
8. Some similar story holds for knowledge, though that part of the story is explicitly put off until a later paper. (And if you’d asked me at the time I’d have said that paper would have taken less than 5 years to write.)

Here’s what I no longer think is correct in all that.

• I think the ‘internal connections’ part of the functional role is more important to interest-relativity than I thought at the time. I did (somewhat opaquely) discuss that role when discussing conjunction-introduction and related issues, but it should have been more upfront, and more detailed.
• I don’t think point 6 can be right, and in fact I suspect it fails in a way that undermines the larger project. The worry is that rationality doesn’t really require one’s credence _exactly_ tracking the Keynesian epistemic probability. It at most requires that credence be close enough. But how close is close enough might be sensitive to pragmatic factors. I think this is similar to a worry that Fantl and McGrath raise, though they have different enough terminology to me that it’s a little hard to be sure.
• Point 8 really isn’t right. The problem is that irrational credences in other propositions seem more likely to defeat _knowledge_ than to defeat _rational belief_.

I’ll write more posts setting out those three bullet points, but for now I really just wanted to lay out for my own satisfaction an executive summary of “Can We Do Without Pragmatic Encroachment”:http://brian.weatherson.org/cwdwpe.pdf.