Your view reminds me of Quine’s “web of belief” view as expressed in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” section 6:
The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. Truth values have to be redistributed over some of our statements. Reevaluation of some statements entails reevaluation of others, because of their logical interconnections—the logical laws being in turn simply certain further statements of the system, certain further elements of the field.
Quine doesn’t use Bayesian epistemology, unfortunately because I think it would have helped him clarify and refine his view.
One way to try to flesh this intuition out is to say that some beliefs are meaningful by virtue of being subject to revision by experience (i.e. they directly pay rent), while others are meaningful by virtue of being epistemically entangled with beliefs that pay rent (in the sense of not being independent beliefs in the probabilistic sense). But that seems to fail because any belief connected to a belief that directly pays rent must itself be subject to revision by experience, at least to some extent, since if A is entangled with B, an observation which revises P(A) typically revises P(B), however slightly.
Your view reminds me of Quine’s “web of belief” view as expressed in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” section 6:
Quine doesn’t use Bayesian epistemology, unfortunately because I think it would have helped him clarify and refine his view.
One way to try to flesh this intuition out is to say that some beliefs are meaningful by virtue of being subject to revision by experience (i.e. they directly pay rent), while others are meaningful by virtue of being epistemically entangled with beliefs that pay rent (in the sense of not being independent beliefs in the probabilistic sense). But that seems to fail because any belief connected to a belief that directly pays rent must itself be subject to revision by experience, at least to some extent, since if A is entangled with B, an observation which revises P(A) typically revises P(B), however slightly.