◉ Against Binary Belief: Elizabeth Jackson, Faith, and the Abandonment of the Epistemic Gradient

Elizabeth Jackson's work on belief, credence, faith, epistemic permissivism, and Pascalian reasoning offers one of the clearest contemporary attempts to preserve a rational role for categorical belief even when credence has registered uncertainty, disagreement, or evidential ambiguity. Across this corpus, credence is often assigned the task of mapping evidential support, while belief is allowed to play a separate role: taking a stand, sustaining commitment, enabling faith, preserving philosophical allegiance, or permitting wager-guided theistic adoption. This paper argues that this division of labor is epistemically unstable. If rational belief is belief governed by evidence, then rational belief must be degree-sensitive. It must map onto the degree, quality, and structure of relevant evidence. A categorical belief-state that outruns or conflicts with evidence-mapped credence is not rational belief in the epistemic sense; it is acceptance, policy, hope, identity, commitment, or faith under another description.