Religious diversity and epistemic luck

Abstract

A familiar criticism of religious belief starts from the claim that a typical religious believer holds the particular religious beliefs she does just because she happened to be raised in a certain cultural setting rather than some other. This claim is commonly thought to have damaging epistemological consequences for religious beliefs, and one can find statements of an argument in this vicinity in the writings of John Stuart Mill and more recently Philip Kitcher, although the argument is seldom spelled out very precisely. This paper begins by offering a reconstruction of an argument against religious beliefs from cultural contingency, which proceeds by way of an initial argument to the unreliability of the processes by which religious beliefs are formed, whose conclusion is then used to derive two further conclusions, one which targets knowledge and the other, rationality. Drawing upon recent work in analytic epistemology, I explore a number of possible ways of spelling out the closely related notions of accidental truth, epistemic luck, and reliability upon which the argument turns. I try to show that the renderings of the argument that succeed in securing the sceptical conclusion against religious beliefs also threaten scepticism about various sorts of beliefs besides religious beliefs.

Close Error, Visual Perception, and Neural Phase: A Critique of the Modal Approach to Knowledge

“…This unification with the theoretical framework of anti‐luck epistemology represented an enduring advancement in the modal approach. Although the modal account of epistemic luck has undergone a series of subsequent refinements (e.g., Pritchard, 2007b; Carter and Pritchard, 2015; Bondy and Pritchard, 2018), its core formulation remains the dominant means of explicating the structure epistemic luck, and it is quite common to see this formulation applied to other questions in philosophy (e.g., Becker, 2008; Michaelian, 2013; Baker‐Hytch, 2014).…”

Epistemic externalism in the philosophy of religion

“…Baker‐Hytch () has argued that it is difficult, for the purposes of a Mill‐style argument, to identify a way of singling out the relevant type of belief‐forming process which both secures the skeptical result with respect to religious beliefs and doesn't lead to widespread skeptical results in domains besides religious belief.…”

Do great minds really think alike?

“…On this picture, it would be rationally required to have, say, a credence expressed as the interval [.5, 6.1), and it would be impermissible to have a credence that is more specific than that interval 2. The various kinds of doxastic attitudes and their applicability to the uniqueness and disagreement literatures are nicely summarized in Kvanvig's (2014) Rationality and Reflection (pp.…”