To form accurate beliefs about something, you really do have to observe it.
Does this not confuse accurate belief with knowledge? Leaving aside doubts about whether justified accurate belief is sufficient for knowledge (e.g., the Gettier problem), there is certainly more to knowledge than just accurate belief, and while I accept your statement for knowledge, it does not seem true for mere accurate belief.
I suppose the issue hinges on—and perhaps this is your point—whether accurate means probability of being correct or whether it turns out to have been correct. On the second account—which is the common meaning of accurate—the lotto player who believes she will win and actually does win has an accurate belief before she wins, though she is of course not justified in having that belief. In terms of the first sense of accurate, she is not accurate at all, but I think you’ll have a much harder time trying to convince people of that than you would if you used knowledge instead of accurate belief. The man on the street will not accept that if he believes the Giants will win on Sunday and they actually win that his belief was nevertheless not accurate, while he’ll easily acknowledge that he didn’t really know they would win.
To form accurate beliefs about something, you really do have to observe it.
Does this not confuse accurate belief with knowledge? Leaving aside doubts about whether justified accurate belief is sufficient for knowledge (e.g., the Gettier problem), there is certainly more to knowledge than just accurate belief, and while I accept your statement for knowledge, it does not seem true for mere accurate belief.
I suppose the issue hinges on—and perhaps this is your point—whether accurate means probability of being correct or whether it turns out to have been correct. On the second account—which is the common meaning of accurate—the lotto player who believes she will win and actually does win has an accurate belief before she wins, though she is of course not justified in having that belief. In terms of the first sense of accurate, she is not accurate at all, but I think you’ll have a much harder time trying to convince people of that than you would if you used knowledge instead of accurate belief. The man on the street will not accept that if he believes the Giants will win on Sunday and they actually win that his belief was nevertheless not accurate, while he’ll easily acknowledge that he didn’t really know they would win.