Permissivism and the Value of Rationality: A Challenge to the Uniqueness Thesis

Abstract

In recent years, permissivism—the claim that a body of evidence can rationalize more than one response—has enjoyed somewhat of a revival. But it is once again being threatened, this time by a host of new and interesting arguments that, at their core, are challenging the permissivist to explain why rationality matters. A version of the challenge that I am especially interested in is this: if permissivism is true, why should we expect the rational credences to be more accurate than the irrational ones? My aim is to turn this challenge on its head and argue that, actually, those who deny permissivism will have a harder time responding to such a challenge than those who accept it.

On the pragmatic and epistemic virtues of inference to the best explanation

“…Assuming veritism, which says that accuracy is the fundamental source of purely epistemic value, we can give accuracy arguments for norms that govern credences by showing that, if you violate the norm, your credences are somehow suboptimal from the point of view of accuracy. Accuracy arguments have been given for Probabilism (Joyce 1998 , 2009 ; Pettigrew 2016a ), Bayes’ Rule (Greaves and Wallace 2006 ; Leitgeb and Pettigrew 2010 ; Briggs and Pettigrew 2020 ), the Principal Principle (Pettigrew 2013 ), the Principle of Indifference (Leitgeb and Pettigrew 2010 ; Pettigrew 2016b ), and norms governing peer disagreement (Levinstein 2015 ), higher-order evidence (Schoenfield 2016 ), and the permissibility or impermissibility of rationality (Horowitz 2014 ; Schoenfield 2019 ), among many others. If the accuracy arguments for Bayes’ Rule succeed, they tell against explanationism.…”

Permissivism, Margin-for-Error, and Dominance

“…1 For prominent arguments in favor of epistemic permissivism see Kelly (2013) and Schoenfield (2013Schoenfield ( , 2019. For prominent arguments against epistemic permissivism see White (2005) and Greco and Hedden (2016).…”

Permissivism, the value of rationality, and a convergence‐theoretic epistemology

“…Recent defenders of impermissivism includeDogramaci and Horowitz (2016),Greco and Hedden (2016),Horowitz (2014Horowitz ( , 2019,Schultheis (2018), andWhite (2014). Recent defenders of permissivism includeKelly (2014),Meacham (2019), Palmira (forthcoming),Schoenfield (2014Schoenfield ( , 2019,Thorstad (2019), andYe (2019) Weisberg (2020). defends a mixed position: Evidential support is unique but rationality is permissive.…”