Immediate warrant, epistemic responsibility, and Moorean dogmatism
In Andrew Reisner & Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen (eds.),
Reasons for Belief. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 158–179 (
2011)
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Abstract
“Moorean Dogmatist” responses to external world skepticism endorse courses of reasoning that many people find objectionable. This paper seeks to locate this dissatisfaction in considerations about epistemic responsibility. I sketch a theory of immediate warrant and show how it can be combined with plausible “inferential internalist” demands arising from considerations of epistemic responsibility. The resulting view endorses immediate perceptual warrant but forbids the sort of reasoning that “Moorean Dogmatism” would allow. A surprising result is that Dogmatism’s commitment to immediate epistemic warrant isn’t enough to avoid certain standard arguments for skepticism about the external world.