ABSTRACT Guessing is the thesis that, roughly put, you may believe something iff it is among the most probable answers to a salient question. The thesis is motivated by observed features of felicitous belief reports when agents confront a question they aren't certain how to answer. This paper raises a novel problem for the thesis, focusing on belief reports in multi‐question scenarios. I introduce and motivate a plausible inter‐question principle for belief, show that Guessing is incompatible with the principle, and argue that the resulting puzzle is intractable and significant—posing a unique challenge to the thesis. Moreover, the problem generalizes to formally parallel “question‐sensitive” accounts in epistemology and philosophy of language, calling for future research into their limits.
Helena Fang (Sun,) studied this question.