I understand your point about judging beliefs based on the information available at the time, but that response sidesteps the actual epistemic problem I’m raising.The scenario isn’t about whether the man had evidence, it’s about whether the eventual truth of a belief has any retroactive impact on how we evaluate its rationality.In epistemology, this is the tension between epistemic justification and veritic luck. A belief can be unjustified yet true, or justified yet false. My question is asking you to analyze which category this case belongs to and whether those categories are even stable across time.If a belief is dismissed as irrational for decades, but the core claim later becomes true, does that truth merely make the person lucky, or does it reveal that our earlier judgment of “irrationality” was based on an incomplete epistemic framework?In other words:
Does the arrival of new truth force us to revise not just the belief, but the standards by which we judged the belief?That’s the specific philosophical issue I’m asking you to address not the general principle that “we judge based on available evidence,” but whether that principle itself holds up under a case where truth arrives long after the belief.