What is warranted confidence?

Warranted confidence is a concept in personal epistemology: Confidence based on tested schemas is categorically different from confidence based on untested assumptions.

Example: You've believed for years that 'people leave jobs because of bad managers.' It feels obviously true — you've seen it happen. But when you actually test the schema against your own career history, you find that two of your three job changes were driven by compensation and growth opportunities, not management. Your confidence in the schema was high. Your evidence was low. After documenting five cases where you checked the claim against real data — and finding it held in three but failed in two — you now hold the schema with calibrated confidence: it captures a real pattern, but it's not the universal law you treated it as. That recalibrated confidence changes how you make hiring decisions, how you coach your team, and how you diagnose retention problems.

This concept is part of Phase 15 (Schema Validation) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for schema validation.