Roughly, epistemic descent principles say that 
a higher-order belief about the epistemic status 
of a first-order belief entails that the first-
order belief has that epistemic status. Though 
largely neglected by epistemologists, these 
principles are central to our practice of 
epistemic self-assessment. I provide a taxonomy 
of these principles, identify the most 
interesting of them, and evaluate four of the most 
interesting descent principles.