I’ve been thinking a bit about Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath’s argument for ‘pragmatic encroachment’ into epistemology. Unless I’m missing some important distinctions, their argument is an argument for a position called ‘value-based epistemology’ in the feminist epistemology literature. There is a “long discussion of their paper at Certain Doubts”:http://bengal-ng.missouri.edu/~kvanvigj/certain_doubts/index.php?p=273#more-273. They end up arguing for the following principle:
bq. Two subjects can have the same evidential (or, more generally, purely epistemic) standing to a proposition, but one can be justified and the other not, simply because, for one, the stakes are higher.
(The quote is filched from a comment of Fantl’s on the CD thread.) I want to set out a position that isn’t yet occupied in this debate. This principle may be true, and yet there is in no interesting sense pragmatic encroachment into _epistemology_. The position is that what it is to believe a proposition can be affected by pragmatic matters, but once we’ve fixed what belief is in a practical position, what it takes to be justified in having that attitude does not vary with practical considerations.
There’s a big project that’s at the back of this – a Keynesian “Probability First” approach to epistemology. The position I’m taking here is that there is no pragmatics in probabilistic epistemology, and hence no pragmatics in epistemology proper, but plenty of pragmatics in the relationship between probabilistic and non-probabilistic doxastic states, and hence pragmatics in non-probabilistic epistemology. I don’t have convincing arguments for this position, for instance I don’t have responses to the feminist arguments for values-based epistemology I alluded to above, but I’m going to set out the position anyway.
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