Two kinds of epistemological sceptical paradox are reviewed and a shared assumption, that warrant to accept a proposition has to be the same thing as having evidence for its truth, is noted. 'Entitlement', as used here, denotes a kind of rational warrant that counter-exemplifies that identification. 1 The paper pursues the thought that there are various kinds of entitlement and explores the possibility that the sceptical paradoxes might receive a uniform solution if entitlement can be made to reach sufficiently far. Three kinds of entitlement are characterised and given prima facie support, and a fourth is canvassed. Certain foreseeable limitations of the suggested anti-sceptical strategy are noted. The discussion is grounded, overall, in a conception of the sceptical paradoxes not as directly challenging our having any warrant for large classes of our beliefs but as crises of intellectual conscience for one who wants to claim that we do. 2 I T wo Kinds of Sceptical Paradox. Call a proposition a cornerstone for a given region of thought just in case it 1. The term is already in use in contemporary epistemology in a number of contrastive senses. My use of it contrasts in particular-though it also has points of contact-with that of Tyler Burge in a number of important recent articles (see e.g. Burge [1993]). Such overlap in terminology is unfortunate but, given that English has only so many expressions for norms of doxastic acceptance, all of which are already in use with multiple connotations, it is too late to hope to avoid it. 2. The paper originates in ideas that go back to my Henriette Hertz British Academy lecture (Wright [1985]) which shared the root idea that an attractive response to scepticism might draw on the possibility of non-evidential warrant. The major strategic contrast with the present proposals is in how such warrant is conceived as possible. In the lecture, I proposed that at least some 'cornerstones' might be regarded as defective in factual content and that acceptance of them might accordingly be freed from the requirements of evidence that I took to be characteristic of the factual. In the present discussion, non-factuality is no longer assigned a role in making a case that rational acceptance need not be evidence-based.
No abstract
Every student of English-speaking analytical metaphysics is taught that the early twentieth century philosophical debate about truth confronted the correspondence theory, supported by Russell, Moore, the early Wittgenstein and, later, J.L. Austin, with the coherence theory advocated by the British Idealists. Sometimes the pragmatist conception of truth deriving from Dewey, William James, and C.S. Peirce is regarded as a third player. And as befits a debate at the dawn of analytical philosophy, the matter in dispute is normally taken to have been the proper analysis of the concept.No doubt this conception nicely explains some of the characteristic turns taken in the debate. Analysis, as traditionally conceived, has to consist in the provision of illuminating conceptual equivalences; and illumination will depend, according to the standard rules of play, on the analysans’ utilizing only concepts which, in the best case, are in some way prior to and independent of the notion being analyzed — or, if that's too much to ask, then concepts which at least permit of some form of explication which does not in turn take one straight back to that notion.
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