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Resolutions Against Uniqueness

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Abstract

The paper presents a new argument for epistemic permissivism. The version of permissivism that we defend is a moderate version that applies only to explicit doxastic attitudes. Drawing on Yalcin’s framework for modeling such attitudes, we argue that two fully rational subjects who share all their evidence, prior beliefs, and epistemic standards may still differ in the explicit doxastic attitudes that they adopt. This can happen because two such subjects may be sensitive to different questions. Thus, differing intellectual interests can yield failures of uniqueness. This is not a merely pragmatic phenomenon.

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Notes

  1. We take it that not having any explicit attitude towards a certain proposition counts as a different attitude (cf. Friedman, 2018).

  2. Here we ignore, of course, de se beliefs.

  3. We follow Yalcin in taking these worlds to be the metaphysically possible worlds. Since the problem of logical omniscience that drives Yalcin arises even for merely logically possible worlds, moving to epistemically possible worlds will be an alternative only if some epistemically possible worlds are logically impossible.

  4. The same is true, of course, of metaphysical entailment if we don’t include any metaphysically impossible worlds, and similarly for other kinds of modality.

  5. This last cell is already ruled out by an implicature of the question. But we ignore such complications here.

  6. We would like to thank an anonymous referee for pressing us on this point.

  7. The idea is not entirely new. We would like to thank an anonymous referee for pointing this out. Nelson (2010), for example, argues that we do not have positive epistemic duties such as ‘you ought to believe φ′. Our evidence only limits what is permissible to believe. Such positive duties are instead determined by non-epistemic considerations which include one’s needs, interests, and preferences. In this case, the relevant non-epistemic consideration are the questions to which they are sensitive. However, whether questions are non-epistemic considerations is currently up for debate (see, e.g., Friedman, forthcoming).

  8. We have to take probability density function and not simply a probability function because there are infinitely, indeed uncountably, many possible worlds.

  9. That is, the probability of the set of all possible worlds is 1; all sets of worlds have a probability of at least 0; and the probability of the union of disjoint sets of possible worlds is the sum of the probability of each.

  10. At least, that is the principle behind Bayesian conditionalization, of which we want to develop an analogue for explicit credences. The constancy of these ratios may be the source of problems with undercutting defeat (Weisberg, 2015).

  11. Jane Friedman (2018) has argued that we are not permitted to believe propositions that are not of interest to us. If that is true, we could strengthen our conclusion to the claim that two agents with the same evidence and prior beliefs are sometimes not permitted to believe the same proposition. However, here we stay neutral regarding this point.

  12. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing us on this point.

  13. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing us on this point.

  14. See Velázquez-Quesada (2014) for a discussion on how certain acts of inference are used to derive explicit from implicit beliefs.

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Acknowledgements

For helpful feedback and comments on earlier versions of the paper, we would like to thank Matthew Barker, Matthew Burley, George Christopoulos, Zeno Şerban, Jordan Walters, Ali Aenehzodae, Joshua Brecka, participants of the conferences by the Ohio Philosophical Association and the Canadian Philosophical Association, and two anonymous referees. We would also like to thank Densy Jimenez for his help with the figures.

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Correspondence to Kenji Lota.

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Lota, K., Hlobil, U. Resolutions Against Uniqueness. Erkenn 88, 1013–1033 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-021-00391-z

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