I argue that a standard formulation of hinge epistemology is host to epistemic relativism and show that two leading hinge approaches (Coliva's acceptance account and Pritchard's nondoxastic account) are vulnerable to a form of incommensurability that leads to relativism. Building on both accounts, I introduce a new, minimally epistemic conception of hinges that avoids epistemic relativism and rationally resolves hinge disagreements. According to my proposed account, putative cases of epistemic incommensurability are rationally resolvable: hinges are propositions that are the objects of our belief-like attitudes and are rationally revisable in virtue of our overarching commitment to avoid systematic deception in our epistemic practices. 1 This motivation for relativism can be found in Kusch (2013;2016a) andCarter (2017); see also Baghramian & Coliva (2019, ch. 7). Furthermore, there are different definitions of relativism, as well as different arguments that motivate it (arguments from underdetermination (Barnes and Bloor 1982) and semantic considerations (MacFarlane 2014, Kölbel 2003). In this paper, I will work with a formulation of relativism from incommensurable disagreements as this is a form of relativism that seems most pressing for hinge epistemology.

I argue against the Standard View of ignorance, according to which ignorance is defined as equivalent to lack of knowledge, that cases of environmental epistemic luck, though entailing lack of knowledge, do not necessarily entail ignorance. In support of my argument, I contend that in cases of environmental luck an agent retains what I call epistemic access to the relevant fact by successfully exercising her epistemic agency and that ignorance and non-ignorance, contrary to what the Standard View predicts, are not modal in the sense that knowledge is. After responding to objections, I conclude by sketching an alternative account of ignorance centered on the notions of epistemic access and epistemic agency. 1 Introduction: Ignorance as Lack of Knowledge There are definitional and axiological aspects of ignorance. Definitional are the aspects that explain what ignorance is, its nature. To offer a definitional account of ignorance is to say, for instance, what makes the sentence 'S is ignorant that p' true, independently of the content of p and of who S is. Axiological are the aspects of ignorance that contingently accompany the definitional aspects and that typically are the subject matter of social epistemology: what p's content is, how S came to believe it, what S's identity is, and how she maintains her belief.This paper is about the definitional aspects of ignorance, which are normally taken to be independent of the axiological ones. The mainstream approach in analytic epistemology of ignorance has it that an account of what makes 'S is ignorant that p' true need not capture all the connotations of the expressions 'ignorance' or 'to be ignorant'. For instance, it is intuitively true that ignorance and its

In this paper, I review Steven Bland’s recent attempt to refute epistemic relativism by means of a dialectical argument that proves non-circularly the objective reliability of naturalistic epistemic systems. Before addressing Bland’s argument, I present the incommensurability thesis and its relation to epistemic relativism. I conclude by arguing that Bland’s attempt to refute relativism must explain how and why the commitments to our epistemic systems should lead us to judge their reliability.

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