Warranted Uncertainty: The Discipline of Not Knowing in a Credence-First Epistemology
A calibration paper defending honest uncertainty as an achievement rather than a failure of inquiry.
Source Paper
This page is a simplified guide to the paper. The source document is linked below; the guide here keeps the main idea accessible and tied back to the site’s model.
Open on Academia.eduLow-Register Abstract
This paper argues that not knowing can be rationally disciplined. When evidence is incomplete, noisy, ambiguous, or model-dependent, the right response may be a confidence band rather than a single sharp number.
The paper protects Credencing from becoming overconfident about its own diagnostics. A gap between Perceived Evidence (EP) and Assigned Credence (CA) matters, but some slack can be warranted by limited evidence, unclear base rates, competing hypotheses, or bounded skill.
How It Fits Credencing
This paper deepens the Warranted Uncertainty page and the interactive model’s slack zone. It explains why the site should distinguish raw disagreement between EP and CA from excess Core Irrationality after warranted uncertainty is considered.
It also keeps Bayesian language usable. The goal is not false precision. The goal is confidence that stays answerable to evidence while admitting how much resolution the evidence can actually support.
How to Read It
Read this whenever a discussion forces premature certainty. The practical move is to state confidence bands, live alternatives, missing evidence, and update conditions instead of pretending the evidence is sharper than it is.