The Nature of Awareness Growth

Abstract

Awareness growth—coming to entertain propositions of which one was previously unaware—is a crucial aspect of epistemic thriving. And yet, it is widely believed that orthodox Bayesianism cannot accommodate this phenomenon since that would require employing supposedly defective catchall propositions. Orthodox Bayesianism, it is concluded, must be amended. In this article, I show that this argument fails and that, on the contrary, the orthodox version of Bayesianism is particularly well suited to accommodate awareness growth. For it entails what I call the refinement view, which allows us to capture that awareness growth consists in the increase of one’s capacity of discernment.