In “Can We Do Without Pragmatic Encroachment?”:http://brian.weatherson.org/cwdwpe.pdf, I argued that the pragmatic aspects of epistemic justification are explained in terms of the pragmatic aspects of belief. As I’ve mentioned before here, I no longer think that is entirely accurate. Here is one small respect in which it isn’t true.

The picture in that paper was that having a justified belief is simply a matter of two things.

1. Having a credence that is high enough to count as a belief in the situation the agent is in.
2. That credence being justified.

But that now seems to me to be too demanding a standard for epistemic justification. Let’s say that _S_’s evidence justifies a credence of 0.941 in _p_. But _S_’s actual credence in _p_ is 0.943. And let’s say that as long as _S_’s credence in _p_ is higher than 0.9, then she wouldn’t make any different decisions in virtue of what her credence in _p_ is. Then it seems to me that (a) she believes that _p_, and (b) her belief in _p_ is very reasonable. After all, her credence is only off by a very small amount.

The numbers in the previous paragraph are ludicrously precise, but I think the basic idea is clear and correct. If _S_’s credence in _p_ is close to ideal, and she believes _p_, then it seems that her belief is highly justified. Perhaps it is better justified the closer her credence is to the correct credence (at least ceteris paribus) but near to correct suffices for high justification. And since ‘justified’ is a comparative adjective, it seems plausible to say that it is context-sensitive, and in most contexts, high justification is justification enough. So the simple two step account of justification can’t be right.

The problem is that it isn’t quite as easy to fix the account as it might look. We could say that _S_ has a justified belief that _p_ iff the following conditions are met:

1. _S_ has a high enough credence in _p_ to count as believing it.
2. _S_’s credence in _p_ is close to the correct credence to have in _p_ given her evidence.

But I think that won’t quite work, for the following reason. Go back to the case where _S_’s evidence justifies a credence of 0.941 in _p_, but _S_’s actual credence in _p_ is 0.943. And assume all of _S_’s other credences (that are relevant to current decisions) are perfectly in order. Now _S_ has to make a decision where the right thing to do if _p_’s probability is greater than 0.942 is to do _A_, but otherwise the right thing to do is _B_. In this case, it seems that both the conditions are met, so _S_ has a justified belief that _p_. But this is wrong. She shouldn’t believe _p_. Indeed, she shouldn’t do the thing that’s best to do given _p_, namely _A_. And this isn’t because she has any other irrational credences; _ex hypothesi_ she doesn’t.

The conclusion seems clear enough. We want to say that _S_ has a justified belief in _p_ only if her credence in _p_ is close enough to the ideal credence. But ‘close enough’ is itself senstive to what kind of choices _S_ has to make. If the difference between _p_’s actual credence and _p_’s ideal credence is enough to swing a decision that she has to make, then the credence isn’t close enough. So the account of justification has to include an extra, pragmatically sensitive component.

Put another way, the plan behind the earlier paper was to isolate the pragmatic component of justification to point 1 of the two point account of justified belief. It now seems to me that that won’t work. The ‘close’ in point 2 is interest-relative in a way that undermines the big idea of the project.