Epistemic permissivism is the view that it is possible for two people to rationally hold incompatible attitudes toward some proposition on the basis of one body of evidence. In this paper, I defend a particular version of permissivism – unacknowledged permissivism (UP) – which says that permissivism is true, but that no one can ever rationally believe that she is in a permissive case. I show that counter to what virtually all authors who have discussed UP claim, UP is an attractive view: it is compatible with the intuitive motivations for permissivism and avoids a significant challenge to permissivism: the arbitrariness objection

Smith, Julia Jael

English

PhilPapers

Unacknowledged Permissivism

Permissivism is the view that a single body of evidence can sometimes rationalize incompatible doxastic attitudes – for example, suspension of judgment and belief – toward some hypothesis. Impermissivism, by contrast, is the view that there is at most one rational doxastic response to the evidence. This dissertation argues that rationality is permissive, but in an unexpected way: cases in which a body of evidence rationalizes multiple, incompatible responses are possible, but subjects who are in such a case can never rationally believe that they are. This view has sometimes been referred to as unacknowledged permissivism. Unacknowledged permissivism is often said to be implausible. The orthodox view is that it is an unmotivated view, in part because it is said to break ties with the core motivation for defending permissivism in the first place – namely, our intuitions about cases describing disagreement between peers. I challenge the dominant view, arguing that, contrary to what has been assumed, our intuitions about these cases are compatible with unacknowledged permissivism. I also provide a positive argument for unacknowledged permissivism. I argue for a requirement of rationality that prohibits a subject from believing some proposition P while also believing that an incompatible attitude toward P is rational, given his or her evidence. A subject who believes such a conjunction is committed to a kind of intrapersonal incoherence that, in other cases, is obviously rationally problematic. If this is correct, there is a compelling case for the conclusion that believing one is in a permissive case is rationally prohibited. This, combined with the theoretical implausibility of impermissivism, constitutes a strong case for unacknowledged permissivism.Ph.D

University of Toronto Research Repository

https://philpapers.org/archive/SMIUP-2.pdf

Unacknowledged Permissivism

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

PhilPapers

University of Toronto Research Repository