Epistemic Pluralism

An outline of my Leverhulme ECF Project on "Epistemological Pluralism"

Metaphilosophy, 2020

In this paper epistemic pluralism concerning knowledge is taken to be the claim that very different facts may constitute knowledge. The paper argues for pluralism by arguing that very different facts can constitute the knowledge-making links between beliefs and facts. If pluralism is right, we need not anxiously seek a unified account of the links between beliefs and facts that partly constitute knowledge in different cases of knowledge. The paper argues that no good reasons have been put forward in favour of believing in a unified maker of knowledge. It then appeals to the role of knowledge in order to argue that we have positive reason to embrace pluralism.

In A. Coliva and N. J. L. L. Pedersen (eds.): Epistemic Pluralism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Sect. 1 offers some stage-setting. Pluralist views have recently attracted considerable attention in different areas of philosophy. Truth and logic are cases in hand. According to the alethic pluralist, there are several ways of being true. According to the logical pluralist, there are several ways of being valid. Sect. 2 introduces epistemic pluralism through the work of Tyler Burge, Alvin Goldman, and William Alston. In the work of these authors, we find pluralism about respectively epistemic warrant (Burge), justification (Goldman), and desiderata (Alston). Sect. 3 investigates what rationale can be given for epistemic pluralism. Drawing on the literature on truth pluralism I suggest that one rationale for adopting a pluralist view in epistemology is its wider scope. Pluralism puts one in a position to accommodate a wider range of cases of epistemic assessments. In Sect. 4 I do two things. First, I explain why the distinction between epistemic monism and epistemic pluralism is most interestingly drawn at the level of non-derivative epistemic goods. Second, I make the observation that, at a very fundamental level, the varieties of epistemic pluralism presented in Sect. 2 are not particularly pure in nature. This is because they are all combined with veritic unitarianism, i.e. the view that there are several epistemic goods but that truth is the only non-derivative one. What, other than truth, might qualify as goods of this kind? Sect. 5 offers some preliminary considerations on this question, drawing on the work of Michael DePaul and Jonathan Kvanvig. In Sect. 6 I present two kinds of collapse arguments, each meant to show that pluralism is inherently unstable. I first consider each argument in the case of truth and then transpose them to epistemology. In Sect. 7 I respond to both collapse arguments.

In this essay I will argue against Nancy Cartwright's normative thesis that we should try to avoid the fascination of big, unified and hierarchical pictures of the world. I will oppose this normative thesis, and my reason to do so will be that there is a fundamental demand of the mind that asks for some such picture as a framework of self-interpretation. Big pictures articulate meanings and help us situating ourselves in the world, facilitating decision-making. The fact that there is some such psychological need for big and coherent pictures make it desirable that these be scientifically informed rather than based in superstitious, obsolete and, more generally, common sense beliefs. The demand for unified accounts of nature and human knowledge is one for empowerment.

Journal of the Americal Philosophical Association, 2019

Drawing on insights from the epistemological work of the Jaina philosophers of classical India, I argue in defense of epistemic pluralism, the view that there are different but equally valid ways of knowing the world. The version of epistemic pluralism I defend is stance pluralism, a pluralism about epistemic stances or perspectives, understood to be policies or stratagems of knowing. I reject the view that the correct way to characterize epistemic pluralism is as consisting in a pluralism about epistemic systems.

There has been little focus on what it means for disagreement to manifest itself in a variety of ways, and how these various forms of disagreement might relate to each other. In this chapter, I focus on doxastic disagreements. I examine four different ways that doxastic disagreement can present itself: descriptive disagreement, conceptual disagreement, full disagreement and credal disagreement. Pluralism is one way to resolve issues concerning doxastic disagreement. One such pluralist account, developed out of John MacFarlane’s work, is disjunctive pluralism. I criticise Disjunctive Pluralism and argue for an alternative pluralist theory of disagreement that I call kinship pluralism. Moreover, I argue that kinship pluralism can be adequately extended to other varieties of disagreement, namely group and agnostic disagreement.

Social Science Information, 51(2), 2012

In their symposium article, Daigneault & Jacob (2012) remind us of the classical triangle of conceptual analysis: Term/Meaning/Empirical-referent. The general understanding of this triangle is that a term, the concept, is related, on the one hand, to a meaning – or a conception – through some sort of conceptual definition and, on the other hand, to the empirical world through an operational definition that ensues from the conceptual definition. Thus the triad is closed, and if we were only to be serious about defining our concepts, we would come to agree on the conceptions on which they are based and on the empirical referents to which they refer. But things are more complex than they appear. The complexity of social relations gives rise to more than one approach to conceptualizing. Here I would like to make the argument that the strategies for a sound conceptual analysis vary according to the intelligibility scheme – or the explanatory position – that one adopts. This argument is based on a remarkable book by the French sociologist, Jean-Michel Berthelot, L’Intelligence du Social (1990).1 In this conclusion I proceed in two steps: first I describe the six intelligibility schemes presented by Berthelot; and sec- ond I show how these schemes give rise to four c nceptualization strategies, which I use to compare the contributions to this symposium.

There are a number of debates that are relevant to questions concerning objectivity in science. One of the eldest, and still one of the most intensely fought, is the debate over epistemic relativism.-All forms of epistemic relativism commit themselves to the view that it is impossible to show in a neutral, non-question-begging, way that one " epistemic system " , that is, one interconnected set of epistemic standards, is epistemically superior to (all) others. I shall call this view " No-metajustification ". No-metajustification is commonly taken to deny the objectivity of standards. In this paper I shall discuss two currently popular attempts to attack " No-metajustification ". The first attempt attacks No-metajustification by challenging a particular strategy of arguing in its defence: this strategy involves the ancient Pyrrhonian " Problem of the Criterion ". The second attempt to refute No-metajustification targets its metaphysical underpinning: to wit, the claim that there are, or could be, several fundamentally different and irreconcilable epistemic systems. I shall call this assumption " Pluralism ". I shall address three questions with respect to these attempts to refute epistemic relativism by attacking No-metajustification: (i) Can the epistemic relativist rely on the Problem of the Criterion in support of No-metajustification? (ii) Is a combination of Chisholmian " particularism " (i.e. the insistence that we know lots of things) and epistemic naturalism an effective weapon against No-metajustification? And (iii) Is Pluralism a defensible assumption?

In Michael Hannon and Jeroen de Ridder (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Political Epistemology (New York: Routledge, 2021): 113-22

There is an intuitive difference in how we think about pluralism and attitudinal diversity in epistemological contexts versus political contexts. In an epistemological context, it seems problematically arbitrary to hold a particular belief on some issue, while also thinking it perfectly reasonable to hold a totally different belief on the same issue given the same evidence. By contrast, though, it doesn’t seem problematically arbitrary to have a particular set of political commitments, while at the same time thinking it perfectly reasonable for someone in a similar position have a totally different set of political commitments. This chapter examines three explanatory theses that might be used to make sense of this difference: (1) that practical commitments are desire dependent in a way that beliefs are not; (2) that there are reasons to be resolute in practical commitments, but not in beliefs; and (3) that compromise in the face of practical political disagreement doesn’t mitigate controversy, whereas compromise in the face of disagreement about mere beliefs does mitigate controversy.

According to Paul Boghossian (2006, 73) a core tenet of epistemic relativism is what he calls epistemic pluralism, according to which (i) 'there are many fundamentally different, genuinely alternative epistemic systems' , but (ii) 'no facts by virtue of which one of these systems is more correct than any of the others'. Embracing the former claim is more or less uncontroversial– viz., a descriptive fact about epistemic diversity. The latter claim by contrast is very controversial. Interestingly, the Wittgenstenian 'hinge' epistemologist, in virtue of maintaining that rational evaluation is essentially local, will (arguably, at least) be committed to the more controversial leg of the epistemic pluralist thesis, simply in virtue of countenancing the descriptive leg. This paper does three central things. First, it is shown that this 'relativistic' reading of Wittgenstein's epis-temology is plausible only if the locality of rational evaluation (in conjunction with a reasonable appreciation of epistemic diversity) commits the Wittgenstenian to a further epistemic incom-mensurability thesis. Next, Duncan Pritchard's (e.g., 2009; 2015) novel attempt to save the hinge epistemologist from a commitment to epistemic incommensurability is canvassed and critiqued. Finally, it is suggested how, regardless of whether Pritchard's strategy is successful, there might be another very different way—drawing from recent work by John MacFarlane (2014)—for the hinge epistemologist to embrace epistemic pluralism while steering clear of epistemic relativism, understood in a very specific way.