Mind-Changing and Epistemic Commitment without Error: A Reply to Shields

Traditional conceptions of the epistemically ideal agent emphasise the possession of positive epistemic states (e.g., truth, knowledge, understanding, etc.) and the avoidance of falsehood and other epistemic defects. Matthew Shields challenges this picture and argues that flawless epistemic performance may be merely self-serving: an agent might pursue epistemic goods only because achieving them produces personal satisfactions. By contrast, changing one’s mind in response to good evidence and at a likely cost deprives the agent of such satisfaction. It, therefore, provides especially strong evidence that the agent values epistemic goods for their own sake. From this, Shields concludes that an epistemically ideal agent must have had at least one false belief or defective practice which they subsequently corrected. I argue that although Shields correctly identifies an inadequacy in accounts of ideal epistemic agency that focus exclusively on epistemic outcomes, it does not follow that the ideal agent must actually have been wrong – what matters is not so much the correction of error, but the agent’s practical willingness to expose their epistemic position to possible correction when doing so is costly.