Developing an argument against Cuneo

I intend to continue writing about Cuneo's specific arguments--right now I'm 1/3 of the way done evaluating his extension of arguments against moral realism to arguments against epistemic realism. But I want to jump the gun, because I'm am impatient man. I want to put down on electronic paper what I think the difficulties facing Cuneo are. As always, this is intended with a sense of modesty that comes from knowing that I'm probably wrong, but here we go anyway.

What's the deal with companion in guilt style arguments? They seem to be very difficult to make. Say that we suspect A of something bad, and we wish to vindicate it by comparing it to B, which we don't suspect of something bad. This comparison has to be based on some shared features, and so A and B share a great many features. However there is at least some features that they don't share. How do we know this? From the very fact that our belief in the goodness of B. If B isn't bad, there must be some features that are keeping it from being bad. And that means that B is different from A in some regard. So what good is the argument, then? The argument can show that the bad features aren't that bad, that they don't settle the question of whether A is bad or not. But we can't actually vindicate A, because A is lacking the features that made us secure in B in the first place.

Let's bring this back to ethics and epistemology. What is an companion in guilt style argument going to be able to show? Ethics and Epistemology, arguably, share certain features. These features are bad features, insofar as its been argued that possession of these features makes a ethics less like to be real. These features include metaphysical queerness, queer supervenience relations, lack of access (or some stronger version of that argument, following Enoch). And if Epistemology has them, then the argument goes to show that these features aren't killers, they don't settle the question of whether a discourse is real or not. This works because we're sure (let's say) that epistemology is real, and epistemology has these features.

But why are we sure that epistemology is real? We must have a good reason--otherwise, maybe epistemology has these features because it isn't real! No, we do have good reason to think that epistemology is real. This is because if epistemology isn't real, then we have no reason to believe anything. But we do have reason to believe things! Specifically, there's a big difference between the good ways of knowing things and the bad ways of knowing things. The good ways of knowing things are called science. And so epistemology is real because it has a close connection, and helps to support, science.

(And doesn't this mean that, according to Harman, epistemology should have a place in our world, because if epistemology was wrong then there wouldn't be a difference between our good methods of knowing things and our bad ones. But experiment can confirm that the good ways of knowing things can correctly predict more observations than the bad ones, and our observation that certain methods are better than others needs to be explained. Isn't the most plausible explanation that epistemology is real, and that some methods of investigation really are better than others? Am I missing something--why does Cuneo think that he is right that epistemology plays no explanatory role? I'll deal with this in a post analyzing the explanatory requirement again, but I guess it's because this is just a case of epistemology explaining an epistemic observation. But wouldn't the foundational role that epistemology plays in justifying our ordinary observations make epistemology relevant for ultimately explaining ALL of our observations? I need to think this mess of thoughts through more carefully.)

Ethics, on the other hand, doesn't have this close connection to science, it doesn't help to support science in this way. And it's not surprising to us--or at least, it shouldn't be--that there's an important difference between ethics and epistemology. In fact, the entire companion in guilt argument depends on there being an important difference that is relevant to the realness of a discourse. If there were not such an important difference, then ethics and epistemology would be on the same level.

Now, what I just said isn't necessarily true. It's possible that there could've been an argument whose aim is to reveal that ethics and epistemology are really on the same grounds, and that's because the good feature (what Cuneo calls a redeemer) isn't only present in epistemology, but also in ethics. In other words, maybe ethics also has the nice feature that epistemology does, the feature of supporting science and the possibility of some arguments or theories being better than others. But does ethics really play that role? Probably not. In which case the companion in guilt style argument starts seeming a bit misguided. What were we trying to show, anyway?

Well, here's what Cuneo definitely does show: that epistemic facts would be queer too, and that's because queerness arguments trade on the normativity of ethics, and epistemology is just as normative as ethics is. But how can he manage to show that ethics and epistemology are on the same grounds, as far as realism goes, when that argument seems to depend on there being an important difference between ethics and epistemology that stands in favor of the realism of epistemology?

Cuneo's response, if I understand him correctly, is to suggest that ethics and epistemology are really the same thing. Or that they're close enough that if you've accepted epistemic facts then you've also accepted ethical facts. I think that there are problems with this argument, a lot of them actually, and that leads me to wonder what else Cuneo could be saying, wondering if I've got him right. I need to read him more carefully, and this post is long enough. But I wonder: how exactly are companion in guilt style arguments supposed to work at all? I think I'll start reading the book "Companions in Guilt" to try and change my perspective.