✶ Warranted Uncertainty: The Discipline of Not Knowing in a Credence-First Epistemology

This paper defends warranted uncertainty as a central component of rational credencing. Against cultures of forced decisiveness, debate confidence, institutional overstatement, and binary knowledge-talk, it argues that uncertainty can be an epistemic achievement: the successful refusal to assign more confidence than the evidence supports. The paper extends the Credencing framework by giving a more precise treatment of Theta, the warranted uncertainty interval, and by distinguishing raw disagreement between perceived evidence and assigned credence from excess Core Irrationality after appropriate slack has been considered. The result is a calibration-first account of "not knowing." An agent may rationally withhold sharp credence when evidence is incomplete, noisy, ambiguous, or model-dependent; may act decisively under uncertainty without pretending to know; and may honestly say "I do not know" as a high-resolution report about the current evidential situation. The paper also distinguishes honest uncertainty from evasive uncertainty. Honest uncertainty names what is unknown, identifies live alternatives, assigns credence bands, and states update conditions. Evasive uncertainty uses complexity, missing certainty, or indefinite skepticism to protect assigned credence from perceived evidence. By formalizing confidence caps, warranted slack, excess Core Irrationality, and update conditions, this paper protects the Credencing model from becoming an overconfident diagnostic instrument. Rationality is not the habit of always knowing. It is the discipline of keeping confidence answerable to evidence, including when the evidence demands restraint.