OBJECTION: "You argue, perhaps correctly, that any reason for epistemic anti-realism would either be a reason external to epistemology, or internal to epistemology. You then argue that an external epistemic reasons makes no sense, and that an internal epistemic reason doesn't make any sense either. External epistemic reasons would have to be epistemic reasons that don't draw on epistemology, so I'll give you that one. But internal reasons seem OK to me. You say that such reasons would be paradoxical or self-defeating in nature, since they would be reasons that say "Don't listen to me!" or "What I say doesn't really matter."
But let's give this a closer look. It seems as if you're assuming that a thinker must be able to retain the reasons for her belief even after a change in view prompted by accepting that belief. And that doesn't seem to be generally true.
Consider the case of skepticism about the external world. Suppose you think that you have a theory about how perception works--light bounces off stuff, hits eyes, gets processed--and suppose that same theory tells you that you could be dreaming. You also think that this fact undermines your claims to knowledge of the external world. Now, once you no longer believe that you know what the external world is like, you've also lost your grounds for accepting the particular theory of perception. But that doesn't undermine the skeptical position. So: it looks as if it's not generally required for you to retain your reasons for belief even after the change accepting that belief prompts."
REPLY: This is a complicated case that the objector raises, and we owe it to him to go through it carefully and slowly. I think that doing so reveals that the objection fails to hit the mark.
Let's start by saying what it would take to ruin my argument. In order to ruin my argument, you would have to show that internal epistemic reasons can give us reason to reject epistemic norms. I've claimed that they can't, because self-defeating norms fail to give one a reason to believe something. But this objection alleges that this is not true, and that such a reason, though "self-defeating" in some uninteresting sense, are capable of telling you "reject epistemology!" or "don't believe epistemic realism!" So this is what we need to consider.
The objection alleges that my argument goes like this...
(1) A thinker must be able to retain the reasons for her belief even after a change in view prompted by accepting that belief
(2) Therefore, if a person has a reason to reject epistemic realism, then they must still have such a reason even AFTER rejecting epistemic realism
(3) This, however, is impossible.
(4) So we can project back and say that a person never had an epistemic reason after all.
...and that (1) is false. So let's first consider whether (1) is really false, and then we'll consider whether the objector has got my argument right.
Is (1) false? Well, we would have to show that a person need not retain a belief after a change prompted by accepting that belief. The example brought is from perception, so let's deal with that case. Suppose you have a theory of perception that tells you how you gain perceptual knowledge, and something in your theory of perception tells you that you have reason to doubt perception--your understanding of perception entails that everything could seem the same to you if you were dreaming--and so you reject...well, now let's be careful. What are you rejecting? Are you rejecting your theory of perception, or are you rejecting the belief that your observations are trustworthy? The objector needs the former, but the skeptical argument needs the latter.
I think, personally, that the perceptual case is awfully confused as raised by the objector. Why not focus on an easier case? You have a book that urges you to believe many things. One of the things that the book urges your to believe is the following sentence: "Do not believe anything written in this book." The objector wants to say that we have no problem understanding what this means. After all, the book tells us to reject everything written in it, so if we trust the book then we should reject everything written in it. Only after do we realize that--Surprise!--our reason was undermined. This seems strange. Imagine if you were told, "Believe that p, though you won't have any reason to believe that p five minutes from now." This seems odd.
This reminds me of the discussion in "Possibility of Altruism" of a person plotting against oneself. There are a lot of examples that go against what the objector alleges. Here.
In short, I think it's far from clear that (1) is false, and the example marshaled by the objector certainly doesn't prove that.
But let's say that the objector is correct, and that (1) ought to be rejected. Is it true that my argument relies on this premise? I'm going to think about this a little bit more. I'll continue this train of thought tomorrow. But I think that this is enough to remove the objection from my argument.
ON SECOND THOUGHT: The above response was confused. I think that a proper reply will show that there's a difference here between beliefs and reasons, and I'll argue for that tomorrow.
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