Intrinsic indispensability of epistemology

I borrow the phrase "intrinsic indispensability" from Enoch, and I use it in a much more limited capacity than he does.

As Cuneo points out, there is no non-question-begging way to argue against epistemic nihlism (and let's pretend middle positions between nihlism and realism don't exist for this post, to make my life slightly easier) and for epistemic realism. Why? Because if epistemic nihlism is true then there are no arguments, evidence or reasons to believe anything. Hence, any argument against epistemic nihlism would beg the question against epistemic nihlism, simply by presupposing that there is anything such as an argument, or anything such as categorical reasons to believe anything.

So one can't argue against epistemic nihlism. Rather, one simply has to reject it for no epistemic reason. Your rejection of epistemic nihlism has to be because you want to, not because you have a good reason to. I think that this is a fairly secure conclusion.

Now, if you are embracing epistemic realism (because I'm pretending nihlism and realism are the only options) what exactly are you embracing without justification? Presumably, that epistemology can be true/false, some epistemic statements are true, and that they're true in a non-reductive way. But if this is all we embrace, we're still going to be lost, because we don't know which epistemic statements are true or false. This is more than a problem of epistemic access, but it's a built in problem; how can we justify belief in statements concerning what counts as good evidence or justification before we've determined the truth of ANY statements about what counts as good evidence or justification? There seems to be no good way to get started in the epistemic enterprise. So if one is going to reject epistemic nihlism and embrace epistemic realism, it's not enough to just embrace some kind of abstract realism, but one must also take certain epistemic beliefs for granted. (Unless you want to advocate the view that epistemic realism is true, and we just don't know anything about epistemology. This seems bad.)

I wonder if this is part of the answer to the challenge of epistemic access that exists parallel to epistemology in ethics. This is how epistemology gets started, and there's no corresponding story about ethics to be told.