Thursday, March 11, 2010

The Master Argument

1. We have some beliefs that are necessarily neither justified nor unjustified.
1.1 A belief in Epistemic Realism cannot possibly be justified, and cannot possibly be unjustified.
1.11 That is, nothing could possibly count either for or against it.
1.12 Any justification of epistemic realism would beg the question against the nihilist, and any justification of epistemic nihilism would be self-defeating.
1.13 Since epistemology is a normative domain, Normative Realism follows from Epistemic Realism.
1.2 Our basic beliefs about what counts as justification, are like Epistemic Realism in this regard.
1.21 Anything may count as a basic belief
1.211 There's no significant difference if we talk about coherentism here. First, because the decision to believe in coherentism isn't basic--if we favor it over foundationalism, we favor it for some reason. Perhaps we don't take on beliefs as basic, though, and instead I should talk of taking coherent sets of beliefs as basic. Fine; that doesn't alter the problem significantly. Restated we would simply say "One must start with one set of beliefs, and there's no way to tell us which one to start with."
1.22 One might build an entire epistemology that looks entirely different from our own, and there would be nothing wrong with that. Nothing could possibly be wrong with that.
1.23 This includes an epistemology that allows one to believe in contradictions, or that doesn't require our beliefs to cohere.
1.24 If you do require your beliefs to cohere, then as you build up your epistemology various beliefs might come into tension. These pressures help form coherent belief systems. This is why we don't believe in ghosts, though we can imagine an epistemology that does require us to believe in ghosts.
1.241 There is legitimate epistemic disagreement, and it's a disagreement about what to take as basic.
1.3 Epistemology is what we use to recognize true features of the world.
1.31 Epistemology is how we discover facts about the world.
1.32 If Epistemology is false then we have no knowledge, since justification is part of knowledge.
1.33 What it means to believe in Epistemic Realism is that there are epistemic truths.

2. There is nothing wrong with someone who has a principle that supports Moral Realism as basic.
2.1 [Continue to fill in! Need way more detail to make this plausible.]

3. Given the above, parity arguments between moral and epistemic realism systematically fail.
4. Given the above, an argument like Enoch's is basically irrelevant, and likely to fail.

5. There is a different kind of parity argument that often works, one that deals with moral beliefs that are at the same level as moral realism. This is where we should focus our attention, because this is the real threat to moral realism. But since much of epistemology is implicated, the task is easier.

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