I’ve posted the latest section of my dogmatism paper.

bq. “In Defence of a Dogmatist”:http://brian.weatherson.org/dog1_4.pdf (sections 1-4)

I’ve tidied up the discussion of Dave Chalmers’ views in section 1, and in section 4 I put forward a response to bootstrapping type concerns. The main argument goes something like the following, though you’ll need to read to paper to see it all.

* We can only run the problematic bootstrapping inference if we have justified beliefs about what our appearances are, and what they aren’t
* That is, the bootstrapping argument requires a strong luminosity assumption
* Given the luminosity assumption, an ‘introspective’ bootstrapping argument that concludes our introspection is reliable will be sound
* So to run a bootstrapping argument against dogmatism, we need to assume that bootstrapping is bad, but that luminosity obtains, so introspective bootstrapping is good
* So the assumptions needed to run a bootstrapping argument against dogmatism are, if not logically incoherent, at least not capable of consistent defence

I also discuss briefly an argument of Roger White’s that is, if I’ve understood it correctly, similar in style to the ‘dominance’ argument I run in “Scepticism, Rationalism and Empiricism”:http://brian.weatherson.org/sre.pdf. I complain that these dominance arguments also need luminosity assumptions, that Roger hasn’t been explicit enough about which such assumption he is making, and hence there’s no reason to think the dogmatist couldn’t just deny that assumption when it is made explicit.