In defence of dogmatism

Abstract

According to Jim Pryor's dogmatism, when you have an experience with content p, you often have prima facie justification for believing p that doesn't rest on your independent justification for believing any proposition. Although dogmatism has an intuitive appeal and seems to have an antisceptical bite, it has been targeted by various objections. This paper principally aims to answer the objections by Roger White according to which dogmatism is inconsistent with the Bayesian account of how evidence affects our rational credences. If this were true, the rational acceptability of dogmatism would be seriously questionable. I respond that these objections don't get off the ground because they assume that our experiences and our introspective beliefs that we have experiences have the same evidential force, whereas the dogmatist is uncommitted to this assumption. I also consider the question whether dogmatism has an antisceptical bite. I suggest that the answer turns on whether or not the Bayesian can determine the priors of hypotheses and conjectures on the grounds of their extra-empirical virtues. If the Bayesian can do so, the thesis that dogmatism has an antisceptical bite is probably false.

Internalism without Luminosity1

“…Some varieties of dogmatism, such as those described in Miller (ms.) and Moretti (), endorse a related view: that if I have an experience as of a red wall (and no defeaters), then that the wall is red is part of my evidence, whether it is red or not (they therefore must allow that one's evidence can contain false propositions). The argument below shows that, as far as the what‐to‐believe project goes, such views are also committed to assigning a high antecedent likelihood to p being the case conditional on it appearing as if p.…”

Perceptual Justification and the Cartesian Theater

“…See, e.g., (Brogaard, 2013), (Brown, 2013), (Cohen, 2010), (Cullison, 2010), (Huemer, 2006 and, (Jehle 5 and Weatherson, 2012), (Kung, 2010), (Lycan, 2013), (Moretti, 2015), (Pollock and Cruz, 1999), (Pryor, 2000 and, (Silins, 2008), (Tucker, 2010 and, (Weatherson, 2007), and (Wedgwood, 2013), among many others. Note that while anti-Cartesianism is often coupled with a Moorean reply to the skeptic, this is not something I build in to the view.…”

“…25 E.g., (Vogel, 2014). 26 E.g., (Cohen, 2010), (Jehle and Weatherson, 2012), (Kung, 2010), (Moretti, 2015), (Pryor, MS and 2013), 27 (Vogel, 2014), and (Weatherson, 2007).…”

Religious experience and the probability of theism: comments on Swinburne

“…Or so the argument goes. (For helpful recent discussions see, e. g., Brogard (2013), Pryor (2013), Tucker (2013b), Moretti (2015a, 2015b), Miller (2016; and the literature quoted in section 4).…”