I’m just back from the Arche Scepticism Conference, and my photos are here. A very successful event with many fine talks. I was particularly interested in Crispin Wright’s offering, which tackled the topic of entitlement and included some engagement with the kind of problem that I was trying to press in this paper. That’s the problem of explaining how entitlement has anything to do with epistemic rationality (as opposed to, say, practical rationality). It’s a point Duncan Pritchard has also discussed.
As far as I could tell, Wright’s move was a version of the kind of dominance-involving strategy I discuss in section 3 onwards: accepting certain things is epistemically rational because doing so maximizes epistemic good.
The major problem with that strategy is that one could be visited by the truth fairy. She asks you to name your epistemic goods, then promises to maximize them all for you tomorrow if you will just accept p today. It’s pretty clear to me that her actions do nothing to make acceptance of p epistemically rational. (I think in the paper the truth fairy is some kind of goddess; her new name only occured to me while listening to Wright’s talk.)
Why not? In the paper I suggested that it has something to do with the irrelevance of maximizing epistemic goods with regard to propositions other than p. Now, I would like to say more about why that stuff is irrelevant. (I have an idea; maybe the subject of my next blog post.) And, in the light of some other remarks of Wright’s, I would like to say more about why we should think a defence of the epistemic rationality of accepting certain propositions is what’s required in response to sceptical arguments.
