I argue that a standard formulation of hinge epistemology is host to epistemic relativism and show two leading approaches (Coliva’s acceptance account Pritchard’s non-doxastic account) are vulnerable form incommensurability leads relativism. Building on both accounts, introduce new, minimally conception hinges avoids rationally resolves disagreements. According my proposed account, putative cas...

In The empirical stance, Bas van Fraassen argues for a reconceptualization of empiricism, and a rejection of its traditional rival, speculative metaphysics, as part of a larger and provocative study in epistemology. Central to his account is the notion of voluntarism in epistemology, and a concomitant understanding of the nature of rationality. In this paper I give a critical assessment of thes...

In ‘Reversibility or Disagreement’ (this journal), we posed a dilemma for invariantists about epistemic expressions—that is, for those who claim that expressions such as ‘might’ and ‘probably’ make a contextinvariant contribution to the truth conditions of the utterances to which they belong. The crux of our dilemma is simple: invariantists, we argued, cannot make sense of a phenomenon that we ...

In The empirical stance, Bas van Fraassen argues for a reconceptualization of empiricism, and a rejection of its traditional rival, speculative metaphysics, as part of a larger and provocative study in epistemology. Central to his account is the notion of voluntarism in epistemology, and a concomitant understanding of the nature of rationality. In this paper I give a critical assessment of thes...

There are five basic ways to resolve disagreements: keep arguing until capitulation, compromise, locate an ambiguity or contextual factors, accept Pyrrhonian skepticism, and adopt relativism. Relativism is perhaps the most radical and least popular solution to a disagreement, and its defenders generally think the best motivator for relativism is to be found in disputes over predicates of person...

Epistemic virtues or epistemic values, we are told, play a major role in our assessments of the bearing of evidence in science. There is something quite right about this notion; and there is something quite wrong about it. My goal in the chapter is to explain each. In brief, what is right about the notion of epistemic virtue or value is that criteria such as simplicity and explanatory power do ...

Relativism and realism are often held to be in conflict. It is not obvious what the exact nature of the conflict is supposed to be, because it is not obvious what the two doctrines amount to. But that there is some kind of conflict between moral realism and moral relativism is evidenced by the fact that some take moral relativism to be the straightforward denial of moral realism. David Brink, f...

I Preliminary remarks What I am calling New Age Relativism is usually proposed as a thesis about the truth-conditions of utterances, where an utterance is an actual historic voicing or inscription of a sentence of a certain type. Roughly, it is the view that, for certain discourses, whether an utterance is true depends not just on the context of its making—when, where, to whom, by whom, in what...

Epistemic justification has been claimed to be a special case of argument by philosophers such as Accordingly for each attempt, epistemic justification is the occasion of the arguer making a case for some conclusion based on other premises, when the audience and the arguer are the same person. The dialectical model of argument is used to inform how it is that a subject could come to justify her...