Epistemic Existentialism

Abstract

Subjectivist permissivism is a prima facie attractive view. That is, it's plausible to think that what's rational for people to believe on the basis of their evidence can vary if they have different frameworks or sets of epistemic standards. In this paper, I introduce an epistemic existentialist form of subjectivist permissivism, which I argue can better address “the arbitrariness objection” to subjectivist permissivism in general. According to the epistemic existentialist, it's not just that what's rational to believe on the basis of evidence can vary according to agents’ frameworks, understood as passive aspects of individuals’ psychologies. Rather, what's rational to believe on the basis of evidence is sensitive to agents’ choices and active commitments (as are frameworks themselves). Here I draw on Chang's work on commitment and voluntarist reasons. The epistemic existentialist maintains that what's rational for us to believe on the basis of evidence is, at least in part, up to us. It can vary not only across individuals but for a single individual, over time, as she makes differing epistemic commitments.

Epistemic Consent and Doxastic Justification1

“…38 Subjective permissivists about evidential support also suggest ways in which individuals can play a role in determining the details of their epistemic situations (see, e.g., Schoenfield 2014, Callahan 2019. Their views, however, typically take for granted the normative authority of evidentialist norms and only give the subject enough powers to affect the particular prescriptions that apply to them.…”

Permissivism, Underdetermination, and Evidence

“…Instead of conceiving of the relationship between evidence and proposition as a two-place relation, many permissivists argue that evidence relates to propositions via a three-place relation. We learn what a body of evidence supports by applying a set of epistemic standards (see Schoenfield 2014;Callahan 2021), such as a particular weighting of the opposing Jamesian goals of believing truths and avoiding error (see Kelly 2013), or a trade-o between simplicity or explanatory power. 14 If I prize believing truth over believing error and you weigh these goals di erently, or if we otherwise interpret evidence with di erent epistemic standards, then permissivists argue we will quite naturally arrive at distinct, rational doxastic attitudes in response to the same body of evidence.…”

Fragmentation and Old Evidence

“…This is the prior probability before conditionalizing on K, the relevant set of background evidence. 19 Despite being hypothetical, ur-priors are taken to be interesting because they encode the most basic epistemic standards to which a subject is committed (Schoenfield 2014;Meacham 2016;Callahan 2020;Titelbaum Forthcoming). A subject's epistemic standards determine how she will modify her beliefs given a piece of evidence.…”