Epistemic Permissivism And Dominance Argument

Epistemic Permissivism claims that,given one’s total evidence,sometimes there is more than one rational doxastic attitude toward a proposition.Ginger Schultheis(2018)offers a novel ‘Dominance Argument’(hereinafter referred to as DA)against Permissivism.DA claims it is irrational for an agent to hold a credence at the edge of the permissive range because the edge credence has a greater risk of being irrational than a credence in the middle of the permissive range.Hawthorne and Isaacs(2021)and Bradley(forthcoming)reply that DA inappropriately assumes that the agent knows(or is certain)that the middle credence is rational and does not know(or is not certain)that the edge credence is rational.Their replies are unconvincing.As I will explain in this paper,DA requires only a weaker condition: edge credence has a greater risk of being irrational than middle credence.In this paper,I propose two new responses to DA.First,a central premise of the DA,which says that a credence’s having greater risks of being irrational makes it is not rational to hold this credence,is NOT true.Second,even if DA’s premises are all true,they do not imply that Permissivism is false but only that it is unstable,and such instability is something that permissivists can accept.