Reframing Epistemic Partiality: A Case for Acceptance

Abstract

When the epistemic chips are down, what ought we believe about our friends? The debate over epistemic partiality bounces between two standard answers: the classic view that we ought believe only for evidential or epistemic reasons, and the partialist view that sometimes we ought to believe better about our friends than the evidence permits. I carve a middle ground, arguing that what we owe our friends is not belief but rather acceptance. I deploy an account on which accepting involves suppressing belief’s characteristic role of guiding cognition, reasoning, and action—a profile I motivate via structural analogy to familiar mechanisms in emotion regulation. The acceptance view highlights novel features of the psychological landscape of partiality cases, capturing the thoroughgoing regulation of diverse cognitive mechanisms, and a diachronic profile of commitment, cognitive effort, and self-control. Moreover, I argue that acceptance avoids pressing objections to the standard views: worries about doxastic control and rationality in friendship (for strong partialist views) and insincerity and the psychological dimension of friendship (for simple evidentialist views). Beyond just intervening in the epistemic partiality debate, a central motivation is to show that this mechanistically precise, psychologically-focused account reveals that acceptance—often dismissed as an unsatisfying cousin to belief—has more resources to make progress on issues in the ethics of belief than is often appreciated.