Intraspecies impermissivism

Episteme 16 (3):340-356 (2018)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

The Uniqueness thesis says that any body of evidence E uniquely determines which doxastic attitude is rationally permissible regarding some proposition P. Permissivists deny Uniqueness. They are charged with arbitrarily favouring one doxastic attitude out of the set of attitudes they regard as rationally permissible. Simpson claims that an appeal to differences in cognitive abilities can remove the arbitrariness. I argue that it can't. Impermissivists face a challenge of their own: The problem of fine distinctions. I suggest that meeting this challenge requires impermissivists to loosen up at higher levels – when comparing belief-forming systems that differ in the fineness of their doxastic outputs. This more relaxed take on Uniqueness is a kind of ‘intraspecies impermissivism’.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 101,795

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

The Case for Rational Uniqueness.Jonathan Matheson - 2011 - Logic and Episteme 2 (3):359-373.
The Uniqueness Thesis: A Hybrid Approach.Tamaz Tokhadze - 2022 - Dissertation, University of Sussex
Permissivism, Underdetermination, and Evidence.Elizabeth Jackson & Margaret Greta Turnbull - 2023 - In Maria Lasonen-Aarnio & Clayton Littlejohn (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evidence. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 358–370.
Alleged Counterexamples to Uniqueness.Ryan Ross - 2021 - Logos and Episteme 12 (2):203-13.
Permissivism.Julia Smith - forthcoming - In Kurt Sylvan, Ernest Sosa, Jonathan Dancy & Matthias Steup (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 3rd edition. Wiley Blackwell.
Doxastic permissiveness and the promise of truth.J. Drake - 2017 - Synthese 194 (12):4897-4912.
Evidential nihilism.P. D. Magnus - 2020 - Analysis 80 (4):674-683.

Analytics

Added to PP
2018-05-22

Downloads
107 (#200,096)

6 months
10 (#430,153)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Scott Stapleford
St. Thomas University