It's widely reported that the classical Bayesian norms of rationality break down in the face 'higher-order evidence'. On first pass, this needn’t be particularly troubling. Classical Bayesianism has many well-documented limitations. However, these limitations don't undermine its application across a wide range of cases. So, they don't directly challenge Bayesian orthodoxy. On close inspection, the problem runs deeper though. Hedden & Dorst (2022) have recently argued that almost all evidence is (in part) ‘higher-order evidence’. If they are right, and it is in fact the case that the classical Bayesian norms break down in the face of ‘higher-order evidence’, it follows that the classical Bayesian norms break down in almost all cases. In this paper, I defuse this problem. I show that it rests on the conflation of two distinct kinds of 'higher-order evidence’. Once we properly attend to the distinction between these two kinds of higher-order evidence we can accept Hedden & Dorst’s (2022) initial observation without endorsing wide-spread violations of classical Bayesianism. Hence, we can make a more accurate assessment of the scope and limits of Bayesian epistemology.
