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One of the central aims of this thesis is to demonstrate that the standard account of political liberalism presupposes permissivism. I shall do this by showing that the burdens of judgment, which are invoked to explain reasonable disagreement in the standard account, presuppose permissivism. In the first part of this argument I shall explain what it means to have and share evidence; in the second, I shall explain for each of the listed burdens of judgment, how each burden presupposes that people can reasonably disagree even when they have the same evidence. These arguments will be presented in the Chapter 2.

In the rest of the thesis, I shall argue that permissivism is false by showing that the uniqueness thesis, the negation of permissivism, is indeed true.

Uniqueness: Given a total body of evidence and proposition, at most one doxastic attitude towards that proposition is the rationally justified one.

In Chapter 3, I shall initially distinguish between intrapersonal and interpersonal uniqueness. Intrapersonal uniqueness is the claim that given the evidence, at most one doxastic attitude towards a proposition would be rational for a given agent. This would be compatible with permissivism because even if intrapersonal uniqueness were true, different attitudes could be uniquely justified for different agents even if they all share the same total body of evidence. Interpersonal uniqueness would make the stronger claim in that the doxastic attitude which is justified, given the evidence, would be the same for all agents.

I shall then argue that any plausible account of permissivism will be consistent with intrapersonal uniqueness even if not with interpersonal uniqueness. This will involve arguing that any theory which violates intrapersonal uniqueness is open to Roger White’s (2005; 2014) Arbitrariness Objection and his Evidence Pointing Problem

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which I shall present. According to the Arbitrariness Objection, if my evidence were permissive and made more than one doxastic attitude permissible for me, then choosing an attitude by flipping a coin would be just as good as reasoning on the basis of my evidence. However, since flipping a coin is an arbitrary and irrational way to form beliefs, so also must reasoning on the basis of permissive evidence. According to the Evidence Pointing Problem, the metaphysics of evidential support preclude any body of evidence from, at the same time, supporting a proposition to different degrees. That is to say, evidential support is unidirectional. If evidential support were unidirectional, then uniqueness (at least in its intrapersonal version) must be true.

I shall subsequently present and address two objections to intrapersonal uniqueness. The first is Meacham’s objection to the arbitrariness objection according to which arbitrariness as such is, contra White, independent of questions of uniqueness or permissiveness. The second consists of a series of counterexamples in which people can justifiably have any doxastic attitude towards a proposition because those propositions are self-fulfilling.

After defending intrapersonal uniqueness, I shall present what I take to be the most plausible version of permissivism. On Schoenfield’s version of permissivism which is consistent with intrapersonal but not inter-personal uniqueness, what is epistemically rational for a person to believe is not only dependent on her evidence, but also on what epistemic standards she holds. This claim is not only consistent with the second burden of judgment, it goes a bit further: People can rationally disagree about a proposition given the same total body of evidence if and only if they can permissibly disagree about the weight of various evidential considerations. This makes the question of whether permissivism is true depend on whether people can permissibly have different epistemic standards. I shall describe two variations of this how this might be possible. On the first variation, agents can permissibly choose between multiple epistemic standards. I call this view intrapersonal permissivism about epistemic standards. On the second variation, there is one epistemic standard that is suited for each agent but different standards may be best suited for different agents. I call this view intrapersonal uniqueness about epistemic standards.

In the remaining chapters, I shall argue that given that intrapersonal uniqueness is true, so is interpersonal uniqueness. In the Chapter 4, I shall argue that White’s Arbitrariness Objection and the Evidence Pointing Problem can be extended against

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intrapersonal permissivism about epistemic standards. In the first of two parts of this chapter, I shall rehearse Bob Simpson’s extension of the Arbitrariness Objection to epistemic standards. The argument, roughly, is that if, for an agent more than one epistemic standard would have been rational for her to adopt, then reasoning from the evidence on the basis of her own epistemic standard is still arbitrary. In the second part of the chapter, I shall argue that the same metaphysical considerations that make evidential support unidirectional also make it impossible that more than one epistemic standard is rationally permissible for an agent. If the two arguments in this chapter succeed, we can conclude that people can permissibly disagree about the strength of various evidential considerations only if some other burden of judgment is in play. This leaves the second variation of permissivism which is consistent with intrapersonal uniqueness about standards.

In each of the next three chapters, I address one version of permissivism consistent with intrapersonal uniqueness about standards. That is to say, I shall present and object to versions of permissivism according to which the standard which is most suited for any given agent depends on some feature of the agent, like her cognitive capacities, her epistemic values or her prior credences.

In the Chapter 5, I shall discuss the view according to which the epistemic standard that is appropriate for an agent depends on her cognitive capacities. I shall present Simpson’s exposition of this view and show that it ultimately depends on the claim that epistemic standards can be lowered if one’s cognitive capacities are limited. I then show how this claim is implicit in Rawls’s first, third and fifth burdens of judgment and is present more explicitly in Gaus’s account of rational disagreement. I shall then argue that any conception of rationality in which epistemic standards can be lowered in this way has more implausible implications than the alternative. If my argument is successful, epistemic standards cannot be lowered because people have limited cognitive resources. It follows that epistemic standards cannot vary on the basis of differing cognitive capacities.

In Chapter 6, I shall discuss a version of permissivism according to which the epistemic standard which is most appropriate for an agent depends on how she values the twin epistemic goals of acquiring truths and avoiding falsehoods. This version of permissivism aligns with one way of interpreting the fourth burden of judgment. The thought here is that as per the fourth burden, one of the ways in which people’s different backgrounds can cause them to rationally disagree is by causing them to have different attitudes to epistemic risk and different ways of

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valuing the twin epistemic goals. I shall argue that on any such version of epistemic instrumentalism, all except a few ways of valuing the two goals, result in committing the agent to two different likelihoods about the proposition in question and are hence, impermissible. Moreover, all of the permissible valuations generate the same epistemic standard. Therefore, even if there are different permissible ways of valuing these goals, they do not license different epistemic standards.

In Chapter 7, I shall discuss a version of permissivism according to which the epistemic standard that an agent ought to adopt depends on her pre-existing beliefs. This aligns with the second way in which the fourth burden can be a source of rational disagreement: People’s different backgrounds might cause people to rationally disagree by causing them to have different initial beliefs. This version relies on some sort of epistemic conservatism. I shall present what I take to be the standard version of epistemic conservatism and present some considerations in its favour and show why it is ultimately implausible. I shall then discuss attempts to weaken Standard Conservatism, and show that on any version of conservatism that is weak enough to avoid the costs of Standard Conservatism, no permissive case can be constructed. In addressing these three versions of permissivism, I shall have demonstrated that there is no plausible epistemological theory according to which people ought to adopt different epistemic standards. If this is resolved, then permissivism is false.

In Chapter 8, the concluding chapter, I shall summarise the main arguments in the thesis, flag certain unresolved issues and propose avenues for further research.

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Chapter 2: The Burdens of Judgment and Permissivism