Glossary

Core Credencing Terms

Credence: a graded degree of confidence in a claim, hypothesis, possibility, or interpretation. Objective Evidence (E0): the evidential support that exists in the world apart from the agent. Perceived Evidence (EP): what the agent takes the evidence to show after attention, interpretation, memory, social pressure, and reasoning have done their work.

Assigned Credence (CA): the confidence the agent actually adopts. Deep Rationality (SD): the skill side of rationality, including statistical literacy, causal reasoning, Bayesian updating, hypothesis comparison, and sensitivity to base rates. Core Rationality: the integrity side of rationality, the willingness to assign confidence in line with what one takes the evidence to show.

Calculation Error (DE): the gap between objective evidence and perceived evidence. Core Irrationality (IC): the gap between perceived evidence and assigned credence. Warranted Slack: the amount of EP-CA variation treated as reasonable under uncertainty. Excess Core Irrationality: the portion of Core Irrationality that remains after warranted slack is allowed. Warranted Uncertainty: the range of doubt that remains rational given limited evidence, limited skill, and the stakes of judgment.

Diagnostic Safeguard: a rule that prevents the model from treating every gap as excess misalignment. Responsibility Filter: the check for evidence access, skill, pressure, and willingness to repair before moving from structural diagnosis to responsibility assessment. Epistemic Akrasia: believing against one’s own judgment about what the evidence supports.

Bayesian and Probabilistic Terms

Prior: the starting credence before a new item of evidence is considered. Likelihood: the probability of observing the evidence if a hypothesis were true. Posterior: the updated credence after prior and evidence are combined. Bayesian Updating: disciplined movement from prior to posterior in response to evidence.

Bayes Factor: a measure of how much more strongly evidence supports one hypothesis over another. Base Rate: the background frequency of an event, condition, or property in the relevant population. Reference Class: the group used to estimate a base rate. Conditional Probability: the probability of one thing given that another thing is true.

Expected Value: the probability-weighted value of possible outcomes. Decision Threshold: the credence level at which action becomes justified under the stakes. Sensitivity: a test’s true-positive rate. Specificity: a test’s true-negative rate. False Positive: a positive signal when the condition is absent. False Negative: a negative signal when the condition is present.

Epistemology and Rational Inquiry

Evidence: information that should rationally affect confidence. Justification: the support that makes a belief epistemically responsible. Warrant: a stronger status sometimes used for beliefs formed by reliable or properly functioning processes. Reliability: the tendency of a method, source, or faculty to produce true or accurate beliefs.

Defeater: information that weakens or cancels a justification. Undercutting Defeater: evidence that attacks the connection between evidence and conclusion. Rebutting Defeater: evidence that directly supports the opposite conclusion. Testability: the degree to which a claim can be checked against observation, prediction, or independent constraint.

Falsifiability: the possibility that a claim could be shown false under some conditions. Epistemic Humility: awareness of one’s limits and error risk. Epistemic Responsibility: managing belief in ways answerable to evidence. Intellectual Virtue: a stable trait that improves inquiry, such as curiosity, courage, fairness, or honesty about uncertainty.

Cognitive Bias and Failure Modes

Base-Rate Neglect: ignoring background frequency when vivid case details dominate attention. Confirmation Bias: preferentially seeking or noticing evidence that supports one’s existing view. Motivated Reasoning: reasoning shaped by what one wants, fears, or socially needs to be true. Availability Heuristic: overestimating likelihood because examples are easy to recall.

Anchoring: relying too heavily on an initial number, frame, or impression. Overconfidence: assigning more certainty than one’s evidence or track record warrants. Dunning-Kruger Effect: low skill paired with inflated self-assessment, especially when the skill needed to judge performance is also weak. Identity-Protective Cognition: processing evidence in ways that defend group belonging or self-concept.

Cognitive Dissonance: discomfort created by tension among beliefs, values, and actions. Rationalization: constructing reasons after the fact to protect a desired conclusion. Selective Skepticism: applying high standards to unwelcome claims and low standards to welcome claims. Epistemic Bubble: a network where contrary evidence is absent. Echo Chamber: a network where contrary sources are actively discredited.

Argument, Disagreement, and Communication

Argument: a structured attempt to support a conclusion with reasons. Premise: a supporting claim in an argument. Conclusion: the claim being supported. Validity: a logical relation in which the conclusion follows if the premises are true. Soundness: validity plus true premises. Induction: reasoning from observed cases to broader patterns.

Abduction: inference to the best explanation. Steelmanning: reconstructing an opposing view in its strongest plausible form. Charitable Interpretation: reading an argument in a way that avoids needless distortion. Burden of Proof: the responsibility to provide support for a claim. Extraordinary Claim: a claim that would strongly disrupt background expectations and therefore needs unusually strong evidence.

Crux: a point that would actually change one’s view if resolved. Double Crux: a shared disagreement point that would move both parties. Update Condition: a specified observation or argument that would raise or lower credence. Disagreement: evidence that another mind, with its own information and biases, assigns a different credence.

Institutions, Science, and Public Reasoning

Social Epistemology: the study of how knowledge and belief are shaped by testimony, institutions, trust, expertise, and group processes. Expert Deference: rational reliance on people with better evidence, skill, or domain knowledge. Expert Overreach: confidence outside the expert’s competence or evidential base. Peer Review: institutional filtering by qualified critics before publication.

Replication: repeating a study or analysis to test whether a result holds. Incentive Gradient: the way rewards and punishments shape what people notice, report, or suppress. Institutional Credencing: the process by which organizations assign confidence, act on information, and manage dissent. Epistemic Governance: structures that make collective belief more accurate, accountable, and updateable.

Transparency: making evidence, methods, and uncertainty visible. Accountability: exposing claims and decisions to correction. Prediction Record: a track record of forecasted credences and outcomes. Calibration Curve: a comparison between confidence levels and actual frequencies. Public Reason: argument offered in terms that others can inspect without accepting private revelation or protected authority.

How to Use It

Use this glossary as a quick reference while reading the longer pages. If a term becomes unclear, return here, then follow the related link to the full concept article or case study.

The terms are grouped by function rather than alphabetically because Credencing is a model of relationships. Evidence, credence, bias, argument, and institutions are not isolated vocabulary islands; they interact in actual judgment.