Duncan Pritchard's Epistemic Angst promises a novel solution to the closure-based sceptical problem that, unlike more traditional solutions, does not entail revising our fundamental epistemological commitments. In order to do this, it appeals to a Wittgensteinian account of rational evaluation, the overarching theme of which is that it neither makes sense to doubt nor to believe in our anti-sceptical hinge commitments. The purpose of this paper is to show that the argument for the claim that there can be no rational basis to believe our anti-sceptical hinge commitments relies upon an implicit assumption about rational support that I label The Pritchensteinian Rational Grounds Principle. I argue that, insofar as this principle is intended to apply to closure-style inferences, it leads to irrational doxastic attitudes. I consider a seemingly plausible modification of the principle that would avoid this result but show that this modified principle faces serious problems of its own.

A certain brand of skeptical argument appeals to the thought that our inability to subjectively discriminate between competing hypotheses means that we are unwarranted in believing in either. Externalists respond by pointing out that such arguments depend on an internalist conception of warrant that we would do well to reject. This strategy has been criticized by Crispin Wright, who argues that if we pursue the implications of externalism sufficiently far we find that it is ultimately unstable or incoherent. I first rehearse the simple externalist anti-skeptical position. I then present Wright’s argument for the externalist instability, offering a clearer way of understanding its central claim. Finally, I show that the instability in fact arises due to hidden internalist assumptions about evidence and that rid of these assumptions the externalist position is stable after all.

A prima facie plausible and widely held view in epistemology is that the epistemic standards governing the acquisition of testimonial knowledge are stronger than the epistemic standards governing the acquisition of perceptual knowledge. Conservatives about testimony hold that we need prior justification to take speakers to be reliable but recognise that the corresponding claim about perception is practically a non-starter. The problem for conservatives is how to establish theoretically significant differences between testimony and perception that would support asymmetrical epistemic standards. In this paper I defend theoretical symmetry of testimony and perception on the grounds that there are no good reasons for taking these two belief forming methods to have significant theoretical differences. I identify the four central arguments in defence of asymmetry and show that in each case either they fail to establish the difference that they purport to establish or they establish a difference that is not theoretically significant.

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