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Notes
I focus in the following on Machery’s ‘unreliability’ argument; he also uses arguments based on dogmatism and parochialism to support the same conclusions. However, most of my concerns about the former also apply to the latter.
Machery does say that judgments belonging to unreliable kinds may be used when said judgment is known to be an exception, but it’s unlikely that Weatherson’s controversial judgment meets that criterion.
Machery does make some moves in this vein—he writes that unusualness is only a problem when the accuracy of judgment depends on considering the unusual feature (thus making the process of adding two pink elephants to two pink elephants not unusual in the relevant sense), for instance. This move does not, however, defang the cases discussed above.
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Nado, J. Philosophizing out of bounds. Philos Stud 179, 319–327 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01582-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01582-0