Permissivism and the Arbitrariness Objection

Abstract

Permissivism says that for some propositions and bodies of evidence, there is more than one rationally permissible doxastic attitude that can be taken towards that proposition given the evidence. Some critics of this view argue that it condones, as rationally acceptable, sets of attitudes that manifest an untenable kind of arbitrariness. I begin by providing a new and more detailed explication of what this alleged arbitrariness consists in. I then explain why Miriam Schoenfield's prima facie promising attempt to answer the Arbitrariness Objection, by appealing to the role of epistemic standards in rational belief formation, fails to resolve the problem. Schoenfield's strategy is, however, a useful one, and I go on to explain how an alternative form of the standards-based approach to Permissivism – one that emphasizes the significance of the relationship between people's cognitive abilities and the epistemic standards that they employ – can respond to the arbitrariness objection.

The Uniqueness Thesis

“…For example, among those who argue in favor of the thesis are Feldman (, ), White (, , ), Christensen (), Matheson (), Horowitz (), Greco and Hedden (forthcoming), and Dogramaci and Horowitz (forthcoming). Among those who argue against the thesis are Douven (), Titelbaum (), Brueckner and Bundy (), Decker (), Rosa (), Kelly (), Meacham (), Peels and Booth (), Schoenfield (), Kopec (), Sharadin (forthcoming), Simpson (ms.), and Titelbaum and Kopec (ms.).…”

“…See Kopec (ms.), who further develops a version of this view, and see Horowitz (forthcoming) for further critique of this kind of view in the context of Uniqueness. Some discussion in Simpson (ms.) is also relevant here, since some instrumentalist views could be sensitive to the cognitive limitations of particular agents, and Simpson uses these kinds of limitations in his defense of permissivism (although he uses the limitations to justify differing epistemic standards). Thanks to Brian Hedden for pressing the latter point.…”

Unacknowledged Permissivism

“…The arbitrariness objection to permissivism is discussed at length by White (2005White ( , 2013, but see also Christensen (2007) and Feldman (2006) for early mentions of the problem. Since then, the objection has surfaced in many places in the literature under the label of arbitrariness (Schoenfield, 2014;Simpson, 2017), instability (Weisberg, forthcoming), or inconsistency (Greco & Hedden, 2016). The objection takes the form of a reductio against permissivism.…”

Religious Beliefs and Philosophical Views: A Qualitative Study

“…Some authors (e.g., Simpson 2017, Vavova 2018 have attempted to outline general principles that might help us distinguish situations where permissivism is plausible from situations where we should be genuinely worried about the role of IFs in our belief formation. Simpson (2017), for instance, thinks that one can be a permissivist about a given question Q if the agents involved disagree about Q because they have different cognitive abilities and apply different standards. In this paper, I adopt a moderately permissivist attitude 1 , i.e., I hold that there is often more than one way to rationally respond to a given body of evidence, but that not all IFs are equally epistemically benign.…”