How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Probability 1

Much recent work in epistemology concerns the relationship between binary notions like belief, and graded notions like degree of confidence or probability, also called "credence". 1 In particular, while earlier work tended to be broadly reductionist in one or the other direction, it's now common to adopt what might be called a "pluralist" approach to the two families of notions, holding that each is of independent epistemological interest and worth studying in its own right, not merely as an epiphenomenon of the other. 2These defenses of pluralism tend to take place against the backdrop of the thought that a certain simple view of the relationship between the two notions is off the table, because it is inconsistent with an extremely plausible, broadly fallibilist approach to epistemology.The simple view is the view that binary belief is maximal degree of belief-it is the endpoint of the scale of degreed belief.This view is typically rejected on the grounds that good post-Cartesians like us aren't maximally confident of anything, so if belief is going to be of any interest at all, it must not involve maximal confidence.My central aim in this paper is to defend the simple view.My main target will be the pluralist who accepts the importance of binary belief, but rejects the simple view on the broadly