introductory - dept-wp.nmsu.edu · web viewa word of clarification about the disputants about the...
TRANSCRIPT
Hinge Propositions, Skeptical Dogmatism, and External World Disjunctivism
Dr. Mark WalkerNew Mexico State University [email protected]
Abstract
Following Wittgenstein’s lead, Crispin Wright and others have argued that hinge propositions are
immune from skeptical doubt. In particular, the entitlement strategy, as we shall refer to it, says that hinge
propositions have a special type of justification (entitlement justification) because of their role in our
cognitive lives. Two major criticisms are raised here against the entitlement strategy when used in attempts
to justify belief in the external world. First, the hinge strategy is not sufficient to thwart underdetermination
skepticism, since underdetermination considerations lead to a much stronger form of skepticism than is
commonly realized. Second, the claim that hinge propositions are necessary to trust perception is false.
There is an alternative to endorsing a particular hinge proposition about the external world, external
world disjunctivism, which permits us to trust perception (to a point), while skirting the difficulties raised
by skepticism.
Keywords: hinge proposition, skepticism, external world, underdetermination, Crispin Wright, skeptical dogmatism
Introductory
One deployment of Wittgenstein’s notion of hinge propositions, specifically what we shall refer to as the
‘entitlement strategy’ as championed by Crispin Wright and others, is said to offer an antidote to some
forms of skepticism.1 As we shall see, the basic anti-skeptical thrust of the entitlement strategy is the claim
that skepticism depends on too narrow a conception of ‘justification’: Skeptics fail to realize that hinge
1 The idea of hinge propositions comes, of course, from Wittgenstein’s On Certainty: “…the questions that we raise and
our doubts depend upon the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn.”
(2009, 376). As is often noted, On Certainty is incomplete and fragmentary in many respects, which has led to a number of
different developments of Wittgenstein’s ideas. See Pritchard (2005) for more on this point. For a good overview of some of the
interpretative issues, see McGinn (2008) and Coliva (2010a, 2015).1
propositions are epistemically justified in terms of their importance in serving epistemic goals other than
evidential concerns.
I will argue on two fronts against the entitlement strategy as an antidote to skepticism about the
external world based on underdetermination considerations.2 First, the entitlement strategy is not sufficient
to thwart skeptical underdetermination considerations, since underdetermination considerations lead to a
much stronger form of skepticism than is commonly realized. Second, the claim that hinge propositions are
necessary to trust perception is false. In particular, it will be shown there is an alternative, a view I shall
refer to as ‘external world disjunctionism’, which permits us to trust perception (to a point), while skirting
the difficulties raised by skepticism.3 We will begin with a look at underdetermination skepticism and the
entitlement strategy in the next couple of sections before turning to the two criticisms of the entitlement
strategy.
The External World and Underdetermination Skepticism
It will help to begin with a clarification of the term ‘external world’. If ‘external world’ means ‘something
other than me’, then strictly speaking, any number of skeptical hypotheses may qualify as an ‘external
world’. For example, Berkeley’s immaterial world and Descartes’ evil demon world count as ‘external to
me’. We will reserve the term ‘external world’ for this rather vague sense of ‘something other than me’ and
use ‘Mundane World Hypothesis’ (hereafter ‘1MWH’) to refer to the more specific sense of ‘external
world’ that many have in mind:
1MWH: (i) We have bodies, (ii) we have brains located inside our bodies, (iii) and we have sense
organs which process visual information. (iv) The direct cause of our perceptual judgments is
typically macroscopic material objects (tables, trees, teacups, etc.), and (v) we live in a material
world. In addition, (vi) our epistemic relationship to the world is autonomous: evil demons,
advanced aliens, and so on, do not get involved in our epistemic lives (Walker, 2015).
2 I should add that the present argument does imply that the entitlement strategy is ineffective in all domains. For all that is said
here, the entitlement strategy may, for example, supply an antidote to skepticism about mathematical truths, induction, or logical
laws even if it fails to answer skepticism about the external world. See, for example, Wright (2004a).
3 In section 8, I briefly discuss the difference between disjunctionism and disjunctivism, where I suggest that they are quite
different responses to the problem of skepticism. 2
Underdetermination skeptics ask us to consider a competitor to 1MWH, like The Matrix World Hypothesis:
2MtWH: I am in ‘The Matrix.’ I live in a virtual reality maintained by a computer system that
interfaces with my brain. The computer system is controlled by advanced Artificial Intelligences
(AIs) who have taken control of the world.
2MtWH denies (iv), proposing instead that a computer program (The Matrix) is the typical cause of our
experience. 2MtWH also denies (vi) by claiming that our lives in the virtual world are orchestrated by
agents (AIs) controlling the Matrix. Thus, the 1MWH explanation for why it appears there is a desk in front
of me is that there is a material desk in front of me that reflects light to my eyes, which is processed by my
brain to produce a visual image of a desk. 2MtWH says that electrodes feed minute electrical impulses into
nerve endings in my brain, producing an experience that is subjectively indistinguishable from seeing a
material desk. The electrical impulses are controlled by a computer program designed to realistically
simulate a three-dimensional world of material objects. The explanation for the appearance of a desk is
something like a ‘desk file’ that is designed to simulate a material desk to all inhabitants of the virtual
world. Such hypotheses we will term ‘metaphysical’ in the sense that they are said to explain appearances.
A word of clarification about the disputants about the justificatory status of 1MWH and other
metaphysical hypotheses is also in order. ‘Skeptics’, as we will understand the position, maintain that
hypotheses like 1MWH are not justified. There is less agreement about the name for the skeptic’s usual
opponent. Following the ancients, we will use the term ‘dogmatist’ to designate those who we believe have
justified belief about some subject matter.4 In the present case, then, a dogmatist about 1MWH is someone
who believes we have justified belief about 1MWH. Most philosophers, and indeed most humans, are
dogmatists in this non-pejorative sense.
Underdetermination skeptics challenge dogmatists to cite evidence that favors 1MWH over
2MtWH. They argue that any such evidence would have to be either a priori or empirical and add:
(I) We have no empirical access to the nature of the cause of our sensory experience that favors
1MWH, since subjectively, our experience would be indistinguishable if 2MtWH were true. That is,
4 Hence, the usage is close to that of Sextus Empiricus. See Mates (1996, 1.1-3).3
if the cause of our sensory experience is 2MtWH, it would be subjectively indistinguishable from
the counterfactual possibility that 1MWH is the cause of our sensory experience, and, if the cause of
our sensory experience is 1MWH, it would be subjectively indistinguishable from the
counterfactual possibility that 2MtWH is the cause of our sensory experience.
(II) We have no a priori access to the nature of the causes of our experiences which favor 1MWH over
2MtWH.
The underdetermination skeptic concludes that we are not justified in believing 1MWH because it has no
more going for it, evidentially speaking, than 2MtWH.
We may summarize the structure of the underdetermination argument (UA) for skepticism about the
1MWH thus:
UP: If h1 and h2 are incompatible hypotheses and e is all S’s evidence, then S is justified in
believing h1 only if Pr(h1/e) > Pr(h2/e).5
UM: It is not the case that Pr(1MWH/e) > Pr(2MtWH/e) for these incompatible hypotheses.
UC: We are not justified in believing in 1MWH.
The major premise, UP, states one version of the underdetermination principle where ‘Pr’ stands for
‘epistemic probability’. UP states this necessary condition for justified belief: a justified belief about some
hypothesis must have greater epistemic probability than its competitor.
The skeptic’s defense of the minor premise (UM) was outlined above: skeptics claim (I) sensory
evidence does not favor 1MWH over some skeptical competitor, and (II) we have no a priori evidence that
favors 1MWH over its incompatible skeptical competitor.
The Entitlement Strategy
This brief rehearsal of the familiar underdetermination argument should be enough for us to understand the
entitlement strategy’s main counterclaim: underdetermination skepticism focuses only on justification
5 There are different formulations of UP in the literature. This formulation is mostly borrowed from Hazlett (2006, 200). See
Walker (2016b) for some discussion of different versions of the principle.4
understood as an evidentiary notion. According to the entitlement strategy, hinge propositions may enjoy a
different type of justification.6 Crispin Wright writes:
Suppose there is a type of [justification] which one does not have to do any specific
evidential work to earn: better, a type of [justification] whose possession does not require the
existence of evidence in the broadest sense encompassing both a priori and empirical
considerations for the truth of the [justified] proposition. Call it entitlement. If I am entitled
to accept P, then my doing so is beyond rational reproach even though I can point to no
cognitive accomplishment in my life, whether empirical or a priori, inferential or non-
inferential, whose upshot could reasonably be contended to be that I had come to know that
P, or had succeeded in getting evidence justifying P (2004b, 174-175). 7
To clarify further, let us distinguish between ‘evidential justification’ and ‘entitlement justification’. The
usual sense of ‘justification’, as Wright indicates, involves empirical or a priori considerations in support of
some proposition. ‘Entitlement justification’ is the type of justification for propositions that serve the
epistemic goal of having lots of knowledge. Allan Hazlett’s example of ‘Liars’ nicely illustrates the point:
“I learn that 50% of people are terrible liars, that they lie almost all the time, and about the most mundane
things, and that I’m not that different from everyone else. I’m justified in believing this, and am in spite of
this justified in trusting testimony” (2006, 205).8 As Hazlett notes, there may be several senses in which
one is justified in trusting testimony. One might be morally justified or pragmatically justified. For
example, the goal of getting along with others might require that one trusts the testimony of others.
6 I’ll discuss competing conceptions of ‘hinge proposition’ at the end of this section.
7 I have replaced ‘rational warrant’ with ‘justification’ in Wright’s quote in order to keep terms straight. Wright uses ‘warrant’ to
encompass the disjunction of what we will call below ‘entitlement justification’ and ‘evidential justification’ where we will use
simply ‘justification’. Wright’s understanding of ‘justification’ encompasses just evidential justification.
8 While there are some differences in the way they draw the distinction between evidential and entitlement justification, for our
purposes, two similarities are most important: (i) Evidential justification is not the only form of epistemic justification, and (ii)
both invoke a defeater condition (discussed below). One difference between Wright and Hazlett is that Hazlett’s discussion
seems to lean more to what I describe below (footnote ??24) as the teleological interpretation of entitlement. 5
However, trusting testimony also serves a specific epistemic goal: the goal of having lots of knowledge.
For example, suppose I claim to know that China is the most populous country in the world. How do I
know this? Not by reasoning a priori about the concept of China, and not through my own empirical
observation—I’ve never been to China. The answer, of course, is by testimony. If I did not trust testimony,
then I would lose such knowledge.
The connection with hinge propositions is spelt out by Hazlett as follows, “If one failed to believe
in the external world, one would be forced, if rational, to distrust perception at the very least…” (2006,
205). What Hazlett means by ‘external world’ appears to be pretty much what is meant by ‘1MWH’. We
may summarize the response to the skeptic by saying that the entitlement strategy suggests that the
evidential justification for 1MWH does not exhaust the justification for 1MWH. 1MWH also has
entitlement justification because of the role of 1MWH in trusting perception as a source of knowledge.
It is important to note that with respect to skepticism, the entitlement strategy is concessive. As
Wright observes:
This line of reply concedes that the best sceptical arguments have something to teach us—
that the limits of [evidential] justification they bring out are genuine and essential—but then
replies that, just for that reason, cognitive achievement must be reckoned to take place
within such limits. The attempt to surpass them would result not in an increase in rigour or
solidity but merely in cognitive paralysis (2004b, 191).
In other words, Wright concedes that on the question of evidential justification, the skeptic is correct. Let
us think of this as ‘evidential poverty’: evidentially speaking, hinge propositions have no more going for
them than their denials.9 Some anti-skeptical strategies do not concede evidential poverty. For example,
there is a long history attempting to show that 1MWH is evidentially superior to its competitors because
1MWH has super-empirical virtues that its competitors lack. The most common virtue cited is that of
simplicity: 1MWH is simpler than its rivals, and simplicity is evidence for truth, hence 1MWH is not
evidentially impoverished, that is, it is not underdetermined.10 11 Another possibility is to argue that 1MWH
9 I’ll say more about what I take Wright to concede to the skeptic towards the end of the following section.
10 To invoke Swinburne’s phrase (1997).
11 For an overview of this strategy, see Beebe (2009).6
is empirically supported after all. Some externalists, for example, say that justification amounts to beliefs
formed by reliable processes; so there is nothing wrong (in principle) with using perception to confirm that
perception is reliable (Van Cleve, 2003). Both strategies are less concessive than the entitlement strategy
since neither concedes that the skeptic has shown there are genuine limits to justification that undermine
the idea that 1MWH is evidentially justified.12 What makes the entitlement strategy of particular interest is
that it agrees with the skeptic about evidential poverty, but it questions the usual assumption that the fate of
the dogmatists’ position rests on the question of evidential poverty.
It will be useful to consider the entitlement strategy’s response to UA. The skeptic, recall, claims a
hypothesis must be evidentially justified in either an empirical or an a priori manner. It is precisely this
assumption that the entitlement strategy questions: justification comprises more than empirical and a priori
evidential justification. So, if the entitlement strategy is correct, UP must be false, because it ignores other
possible sources of justification. Hazlett has proposed the following principle that encapsulates an
entitlement strategy alternative to UP:
Security Principle (SP): “S’s justified hinge belief that P is defeated only if S has sufficient reason
to believe ~P.” (2006, 206).
One way to highlight the difference between UP and SP is in terms of defeaters. There is a common
distinction made between rebutting and undercutting defeaters (Pollock, 1986, 38-39). There is a rebutting
defeater for some belief p if there is a reason to believe not-p, or some proposition q that is logically
incompatible with p. There is an undercutting defeater for some belief p if there is no longer reason to
believe p, but no reason to believe not-p, or some logically incompatible proposition q. We shall refer to the
former as ‘dogmatic defeaters’ and the latter as ‘skeptical defeaters’ for reasons that will become apparent
as we proceed.
We can see the effectiveness of SP in disarming the underdetermination argument. For suppose
1MWH is evidentially underdetermined: it has as much evidential weight in its favor as 2MtWH.
According to UP, it would follow that 1MWH is not justified. However, assuming 1MWH is a hinge
proposition, SP says that the underdetermination argument does not show that 1MWH is not justified, since
12 For criticisms of the former, see Walker (2016b). For criticism of the latter, see Walker (2016a). 7
the underdetermination argument offers no reason to believe ~P. That is, the underdetermination argument
offers only a skeptical defeater (2MtWH) to 1MWH, but what is required to show that 1MWH is not
justified according to SP, is a dogmatic defeater.
Wright’s formulation of the entitlement strategy also features a similar standard for defeat: “(i) X
has no sufficient reason to believe that P is untrue; and (ii) in all contexts, it is a dominant strategy for X to
act exactly as if he had a justified belief that P” 13 (2004b, 183). In terms of defeat, it is the first condition
that is important. It offers a higher standard for defeat in the sense that a skeptical defeater is not sufficient,
contrary to the underdetermination skeptic, a dogmatic defeater is required to defeat P. Thus, Wright too
offers reason to reject UP.
One of the most important insights of the entitlement strategy, touched on briefly above, is that it
takes seriously the idea that skepticism comes with a heavy epistemic cost—in addition to any practical
costs.14 In terms of epistemic cost, the choices are these: Either we do not trust perception, and so we must
renounce the possibility of having lots of knowledge about the external world, or, we trust perception and
accept the risk of false belief. The entitlement strategy says there are good epistemic reasons to prefer the
second choice. The point might be expressed in terms of epistemic risk and epistemic reward. Wright notes
that the entitlement strategy licenses a certain amount of risk:
…. we should view each and every cognitive project as irreducibly involving elements of
adventure—I have, as it were, to take a risk on the reliability of my senses, the
conduciveness of the circumstances, etc., much as I take a risk on the continuing reliability
of the steering, and the stability of the road surface every time I ride my bicycle (2004b,
190).15
13 Wright’s use of ‘justified’ here is the narrow sense indicated above, namely: evidential justification.
14 The claim that hinge propositions are epistemically justified, as opposed to merely pragmatically justified, has been challenged
by a number of authors. For the sake of the dialectic here, I will make the concessive assumption that this criticism is
unsuccessful. With specific reference to Hazlett’s paper, see Brueckner (2007). For a response to Brueckner, see Hazlett (2014).
For criticisms along the lines that Wright’s understanding of hinge propositions gives us, at best, pragmatic justification, see
Pritchard (2005 and 2015), Jenkins (2007) and Coliva (2015). For a response, see Wright (2012 and 2014).8
The risk, as noted, is false belief, and the reward is true belief. In most general terms, skeptics emphasize
the possibility of false belief. The entitlement strategy says that the cost of being risk aversive with the
skeptic is that we must renounce the possibility of justified belief or knowledge in the relevant area.
Clearly, assuming this line of reasoning is correct, this is a heavy epistemic price to pay.16
While this is not the place to review in detail competing conceptions of the notion of ‘hinge
proposition’, it is perhaps worth noting how the entitlement strategy differs from at least a couple of
competitors.17 One conception of ‘hinge propositions’ offers a non-propositional interpretation. For
example, Danièle Moyal-Sharrock understands hinge propositions as non-factual rules: “The
nonpropositional nature of basic certainties is one with their being ways of ‘acting’ and to their being
15 It is perhaps worth pointing out that Wright is at least wary of applying the entitlement strategy to ontological questions in his
(2004b), for reasons I can’t quite fathom. Hazlett has been the most forthright in applying the strategy to the ‘external world’.
16 There is an interpretative question for understanding Wright that I should mention here. Wright writes:
No doubt that will stand refinement, but the general motif is clear enough. If a cognitive project is
indispensable, or anyway sufficiently valuable to us—in particular, if its failure would at least be no worse than
the costs of not executing it, and its success would be better—and if the attempt to vindicate (some of) its
presuppositions would raise presuppositions of its own of no more secure an antecedent status, and so on ad
infinitum, then we are entitled to—may help ourselves to, take for granted—the original presuppositions
without specific evidence in their favour (2004b, 192).
The interpretative question is whether Wright is committed to what we might term a ‘Kantian,’ as opposed to ‘teleological,’
conception of what is at risk. The teleological understanding says the risk is some sacrifice which might be spelt-out in terms of
some ratio between true beliefs/false beliefs. The Kantian interpretation is that some hinge proposition is a constituent of some
cognitive project. That is, if we are to engage in some cognitive project, then we must accept some hinge proposition P. The
second sentence of the quote suggests that Wright may have both conceptions in mind. Here I often assume the teleological
interpretation, but clearly there are important differences between these two conceptions. However, the differences are not
important for present concerns because in either case, the entitlement strategy claims that something epistemically valuable (as
opposed to merely pragmatically valuable) is at risk. Thanks to Allan Hazlett for helping me work through this point.
17 For some helpful review of some of the different understandings of ‘hinge proposition’, see Pritchard (2015).9
‘animal’” (2016, 105). Another conception, due to Duncan Pritchard, has it that “rational support for our
hinge commitments are impossible” (2015, 71).18 On Pritchard’s conception, it is something like a category
mistake to look for justification—evidential or entitlement—for hinge propositions, for they are in some
sense arational. It should be clear from what has been said above that the entitlement strategy differs from
both the non-propositional and arational conceptions. On the entitlement strategy, hinge propositions are
truth-apt, and they are subject to rational support, that is, we may have a certain sort of justification for
them (albeit, not a traditional evidential justification). The importance of this going forward is that the
subsequent argument does not apply, at least not straightforwardly, to all attempts to invoke hinge
propositions as a means to address skepticism. In other words, the argument of this paper is somewhat
circumspect: I do not claim that a nonfactual or arational understanding of hinge propositions is subject to
the same sort of critique as the entitlement strategy.
This completes the initial sketch of the entitlement strategy. Some further features of the view will
be discussed in the following section as a possible rejoinder to radical underdetermination considerations.
Radical Underdetermination
As intimated above, the first criticism we will make is that evidential poverty leads to a stronger skeptical
conclusion than is commonly acknowledged. I will argue that it leads to a dogmatic defeater, and so
entitlement strategists, by their own understanding of defeasibility, should accept that 1MWH is defeated.
That is, by the entitlement strategy’s own account of hinge propositions, 1MWH is not a hinge proposition
because the radical underdetermination argument serves as a dogmatic defeater to 1MWH.
The basic issue turns on how we should respond to underdetermination considerations when there
are more than two competitor hypotheses. Consider that Berkeley’s immaterialism is sometimes discussed
in connection with the underdetermination argument for skepticism (Fumerton, 1992 and 2013). We should
consider:
3BWH: There are only minds and ideas; there is no material world.
18 It is worth noting that Pritchard argues that Wittgenstein’s notion of hinge propositions is better suited in application to
closure-based arguments, while epistemic disjunctivism is better suited to the sorts of underdetermination considerations
discussed in section 2. 10
3BWH is incompatible with 1MWH because 3BWH rejects (i), (iv) and (v) of 1MWH. We will assume too
that Berkeley’s explanation for immaterial substance does not invoke the idea of a computer simulation,
hence it is incompatible with 2MtWH.19
Once we see that there are at least three hypotheses to consider, we should ask: Do we have
evidential justification to favor 3BWH over 2MtWH, or vice versa? One thought here is that the skeptic
and the entitlement dogmatist will say the same thing about the pair-wise comparison of 3BWH and
2MtWH as was said about 1MWH and 2MtWH. Accordingly, let us imagine that 3BWH and 2MtWH are
evidentially equal. But once we expand our attention beyond the simple pairwise comparison, there is an
obvious difficulty: Our initial presentation of underdetermination skepticism in section 2 saw the skeptic
affirming that Pr(1MWH/e) = Pr(2MtWH/e), and now we are imagining the skeptic suggesting that
Pr(2MtWH/e) = Pr(3BWH/e), so it seems we are entitled to conclude Pr(1MWH/e) = Pr(3BWH/e) =
Pr(2MtWH/e). In which case, we have a positive reason to suppose that each hypothesis is probably false,
since the maximum epistemic probability of each can be no more than 0.33.20
A slightly less ambitious version of this argument, the disjunctive radical underdetermination
argument, may be summarized as follows:
DRU1: Radical Disjunctive Underdetermination Principle: If h2 and h3 are competitor
hypotheses to h1 and to each other, and e is all S’s evidence; and S’s evidence for believing
h1 is less than S’s evidence for believing (h2 or h3), then S is justified in believing h1 is
probably false.
DRU2: S’s evidence for believing 1MWH is less than S’s evidence for believing (2MtWH
or 3BWH).
DRUC: S is justified in believing that 1MWH is probably false (Walker, 2016b).
The argument is less ambitious because DRU1 does not depend on the oft criticized Principle of
Indifference: the idea that when we have no information favoring any alternative over another, then
19 3BWH and 2MtWH would have to be dressed up further to make sure they are logically incompatible. Adding these
complications adds nothing to our discussion, so I will leave it to the interested reader.
20 Here and below I will not fuss about small probabilities (0.01 and less).11
alternatives have equal epistemic probability.21 That is, DRU1 does not make the claim that the three
hypotheses are evidentially equal; rather, it makes the much more modest claim that no single hypothesis is
more likely than the combined epistemic probability of the other two.
The resulting view, that each of the metaphysical hypotheses about the external world is probably
false, is a form of error skepticism, or what we will refer to as ‘skeptical dogmatism’. Skeptical dogmatism
is the view that we ought to disbelieve each hypothesis, that is, we should believe each hypothesis is
probably false (Walker, 2015, 2016a, and 2016b). The reason that skeptical dogmatism is of relevance to
entitlement dogmatists is that the radical underdetermination argument extends the idea of evidential
poverty in pairwise comparisons to consideration of multiple hypotheses that are incompatible with a
(putative) hinge proposition. Indeed, although I cannot make the case here in detail, the argument above
shows there is reason to suppose the conditional claim is plausible: if you accept evidential poverty in the
pairwise comparison of 1MWH and 2MtWH, then you ought to accept that the radical underdetermination
argument shows that 1MHW is probably false (Walker, 2015).
It is worth pausing to consider one line of objection to the radical underdetermination argument.
The dogmatist might suggest that 2MtWH and 3BWH are simply ways of illustrating ~1MWH. So, the
entitlement strategy might claim:
A: Pr(1MWH/e) = Pr(2MtWH/e or 3BWH/e).
The trouble with this response is that unless the probability of 3BWH is 0.0, that is, unless we are certain
that 3BWH is false, it will follow that Pr(1MWH/e) > Pr(2MtWH/e), in which case, it is no longer clear
that the original underdetermination argument, which pitted 1MWH against 2MtWH, is a threat to
dogmatism. Hence, this line of response seems to call into question the need for the entitlement strategy in
the first instance. That is, if there is evidence that 1MHW is more epistemically probable given the same
batch of evidence than 2MtWH, then why do we need the entitlement strategy? It may be remarked that
indeed it is the case that Pr(1MWH/e) > Pr(2MtWH/e), but this is just to concede that the usual way of
illustrating the underdetermination argument is a bit sloppy. Since the upshot of the underdetermination
21 I happen to think that, when properly understood and properly qualified, the Principle of Indifference is far more plausible than
is generally assumed. For an interesting defense of the Principle of Indifference, see White (2010). 12
argument is supposed to be that Pr(1MWH/e) = Pr(~1MWH/e), it is just a bit careless to express the second
premise of the underdetermination argument above as:
UM: It is not the case that Pr(1MWH/e) > Pr(2MtWH/e).
Really, the premise should be stated as:
UM*: It is not the case that Pr(1MWH/e) > Pr(~1MWH/e).
This doesn’t really advance the issue though, because if 2MtWH and 3BWH both have some positive
probability, the following inequalities must be admitted:
IN1: Pr(1MWH/e) > Pr(2MtWH/e).
IN2: Pr(1MWH/e) > Pr(3BWH/e).
So, the difficulty for the underdetermination skeptic is to say what evidence favors 1MWH over 2MtWH,
and 1MWH over 3BWH. The argument in section 2 suggests that the evidence for favoring 1MWH must
be either empirical or a priori. But this puts those who endorse the view that there is not a dogmatic
defeater for 1MWH, e.g., proponents of the entitlement strategy, in the embarrassing position of having to
say that there is either empirical or a priori evidence that favors 1MWH over 2MtWH, and there is either
empirical or a priori evidence that favors 1MWH over 3BWH. If there is such evidence, then surely we are
owed some account of this. What evidence is there that favors 1MWH over each of the disjuncts, 2MtWH
and 3BWH? It would seem that the entitlement strategy will need to help itself to one or more of the
aforementioned anti-skeptical strategies, e.g., appealing to the super-empirical virtues of 1MWH, etc., to
say why 1MWH is evidentially superior to each of 2MtWH and 3BWH. Of course, the entitlement
strategist will need to be careful that such reasons for favoring each of the disjuncts do not lead to favoring
1MWH over the entire disjunction of skeptical possibilities, for then the need for entitlement justification is
far less urgent. It is far from clear that such a delicate (miraculous?) balancing act can be carried out.
Certainly it is not one that entitlement strategists have even attempted at this point.
13
To illustrate a further difficulty, let us suppose that there are only two competitor hypotheses to
1MWH, so that ~1MWH = 2MtWH or 3BWH.22 In which case, the claim that Pr(1MWH/e) = Pr(2MtWH/e
or 3BWH/e) seems entirely arbitrary. Suppose Berkeley adopts the entitlement strategy to defend his
idealism. He claims:
B: Pr(3BWH/e) = Pr(1MWH/e or 2MtWH/e).
His concession to evidential poverty is that while his writings show the superiority of 3BWH over each of
the disjuncts 1MWH and 2MtWH, still he concedes that their combined probability exactly equals 3BWH.
But, if the epistemic probability of 2MtWH is not 0.0, then propositions A and B are incompatible. It would
seem entirely arbitrary, given the acceptance of evidential poverty, to choose A in preference to B.
The challenge to the entitlement strategy is readily apparent. If the radical underdetermination
argument is correct, and 1MWH, 2MtWH, and 3BWH are competitor hypotheses, then each hypothesis is
defeated by a dogmatic defeater. In each case, there is reason to favor the negation of each hypothesis, that
is, Pr(~1MWH) > Pr(1MWH), Pr(~2MtWH) > Pr(2MtWH), and Pr(~3BWH) > Pr(3BWH). In which case,
Wright and Hazlett must concede that each hinge proposition, 1MWH, 2MtWH, and 3BWH is defeated by
a dogmatic defeater.
In other words, the dilemma for the entitlement strategy is this: Either the entitlement strategy takes
evidential poverty seriously or it doesn’t. If it takes evidential poverty seriously, then the entitlement
strategy must concede that each of the individual explanatory hypotheses for perceptual experience,
1MWH, 2MtWH, and 3BWH, is defeated. If evidential poverty is renounced in order to save 1MWH from
defeat, e.g., by claiming that 1MWH has greater evidential weight than each of 2MtWH and 3BWH, then
the need for the entitlement strategy is less clear, since 1MWH seems to have something special going for it
—evidentially speaking. If it is maintained that 1MWH has just enough going for it, evidentially speaking,
such that it is favored over each of the disjuncts, but not the disjunction, then we are owed some account of
how this very delicate balance is achieved, and how it is not arbitrary. In either case the sufficiency of the
entitlement strategy, at least as it has been articulated thus far in combatting underdetermination
skepticism, is called into question.
22 This assumption clearly favors the dogmatist about 1MWH (Walker, 2015). 14
Consider the following objection to the above dilemma.23 Suppose evidential poverty is accepted,
hence, 1MWH has nothing more going for it, evidentially speaking, than its alternatives. However, what an
entitlement provides us with is justification for putting to one side probabilistic considerations and
accepting 1MWH as true anyway. Given that probabilities naturally go together with evidence, and that
entitlement is a non-evidential species of justification, it follows that entitlement isn't best thought of in
terms of justifying a particular evidential probability. Rather, what entitlements do is justify a certain non-
probabilistic acceptance of 1MWH. This is compatible with there being entitlements for 2MWH and
3MWH also.
I believe there is something right—indeed, helpful—about this ‘non-probabilistic’ line of objection,
and something wrong depending on whether we are reasoning in the ‘everyday mode’ or the ‘reflective
mode.’ By ‘everyday mode,’ I mean the idea that we make use of our entitlement to hinge propositions
when making everyday claims. By ‘reflective mode,’ I mean the idea that we enquire about the status of
candidate hinge propositions. Let us take these in turn.
The non-probabilistic understanding of hinge propositions in the everyday mode may be understood
as follows: the evidential uncertainty of hinge propositions is ‘bracketed’ in such a way that it does not
affect my thinking and responses to questions about the probability of everyday matters. To ‘bracket’ such
concerns means simply to acknowledge that the justification I have for a hinge proposition is not entirely
determined by its evidential standing. In Wright’s bicycle analogy, in a moment of quiet philosophical
reflection, I may acknowledge that without such bracketing there are a number of risks associated with
riding a bike. But when riding a bicycle, I typically bracket such concerns and fully trust in the reliability of
the steering, that the road will not turn to liquid, etc.
We can think further about probabilistic reasoning by using another example from Wright. Consider
this line of reasoning:
(I) My current experience is, in all respects, as if it is raining.
(II) It is raining.
(III) There is a material world (Wright, 2004b).
23 My thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this objection. 15
According to Wright, when we reason from type (I) propositions to type (II) propositions we presuppose
the truth of type-III propositions.24 What seems clear is that on the entitlement strategy, the evidential
uncertainty associated with (III) does not affect our evidential probability estimate of the everyday
proposition asserted in (II). It would be wrong, for example, to answer your spouse’s question about the
likelihood of rain tomorrow as 0.25 based on the following line of reasoning: The tv report says that there
is a 0.5 chance of rain tomorrow, and, because of evidential poverty, you believe that there is a 0.5 chance
that there is a material world, and a 0.5 probability that it is not a material world. (You understand your
spouse to be asking about material rain, rather than any non-material thing that looks like rain.) Wright’s
entitlement view, as I understand it, is committed to saying that the correct answer is 0.5. To use the lower
number is to, in effect, double-count, evidential poverty. On such an understanding, in the reflective mode
we may acknowledge the risk of the entire cognitive project, in this case perception, and acknowledge
evidential poverty again in the everyday mode for everyday propositions. Instead, the entitlement strategy
is better seen as suggesting that we are permitted to bracket questions of evidential poverty for everyday
propositions and the associated risks when we have entitlement justification for the associated hinge
propositions. So, if we have entitlement justification for (III), we are required (or at least permitted) to use
the 0.5 probability estimate for rain.
To question whether a candidate hinge proposition is in fact a hinge proposition is to engage in the
reflective mode. In this mode, we ask whether a candidate hinge proposition meets the conditions for being
a hinge proposition. As we noticed on Wrights’ version of the hinge strategy, two conditions must be met.
The candidate hinge proposition must be indispensable for some cognitive project and there must be no
dogmatic defeater for the candidate hinge proposition. Suppose, for example, that I take the claim, “It will
not rain on Saturday” as a hinge proposition. When asked by a friend why I treat this proposition non-
probabilistically, for example, ignoring my friend’s observation that the forecast says there is a 50% chance
of rain on Saturday, I claim that good weather is an indispensable condition for my wedding plans. Since it
is a hinge proposition, I understand it non-probabilistically, hence, I am permitted to ignore such
probabilistic considerations in my reasoning about the weather on my wedding day. But clearly this
putative hinge proposition, “It will not rain on Saturday,” is not in fact a hinge proposition. The proposition
is not indispensable for a cognitive project no matter how important its truth might be for my wedding
24 This is similar to the point Wright has pressed against Moorean-type responses to skepticism. See, for example, (2007). 16
plans. So, it would be wrong to appeal to the non-probabilistic understanding of a hinge proposition in this
case to explain my non-probabilistic understanding of “It will not rain on Saturday,” since the proposition
fails to meet one of the requirements for a hinge proposition. In other words, if there is some reason to
suppose that I am permitted to use the non-probabilistic understanding of “It will not rain on Saturday,” it
cannot be because this proposition is a hinge proposition.
A similar point applies when considering the second, no-dogmatic defeater condition: in the
reflective mode, one might find that a candidate hinge proposition does not meet the no-dogmatic defeater
condition. Think of the example of the character Neo from the Matrix movies. It is plausible to assume that
Neo originally met the conditions for accepting (III) as a hinge proposition: it is indispensable for the
cognitive project of perception (let us grant), and the movie initially depicts Neo living an ‘epistemically
normal’ life where he has no-dogmatic defeater for (III). As the movie progresses, Neo encounters
mounting evidence against his previous acceptance of (III). That is, Neo learns about how the virtual reality
of the Matrix operates, and how it was designed to deceive him and all those immersed in the Matrix, so
Neo acquires a dogmatic defeater for his previous acceptance of (III). The non-probabilistic understanding
of hinge propositions will not help in this instance, for let us suppose the question before Neo in the
reflective mode, where he asses this evidence against (III), is whether (III) meets Wright’s conditions for a
hinge proposition. But after learning about the machinations of the Matrix, Neo cannot rationally accept
(III) as a hinge proposition, since (III) fails to meet the no-dogmatic defeater condition. Wright himself
cites ‘The Matrix’ as an example where beliefs are “detached from reality in a certain way” (2004b, 168).
The movie may be interpreted as making a compelling case for the idea that Neo, in the reflective mode,
has very good evidence—sufficient for a dogmatic defeater—that his former beliefs suffered from exactly
this sort of detachment from reality.
A similar point applies to thinking about (III) in the reflective mode in light of the radical
underdetermination argument: (III) cannot have the status of a hinge proposition for anyone who accepts
the radical underdetermination argument, precisely because the no-dogmatic defeater condition is not met
for (III). Again, the non-probabilistic understanding of hinge propositions is of no avail here in defending
(III) because, trivially, for the non-probabilistic understanding of hinge propositions to apply, the candidate
proposition must in fact be a hinge proposition. Since (III) fails to meet one of the necessary conditions for
candidate hinge propositions on Wright’s account, (III) cannot be a hinge proposition for those who have
17
mental state dogmatic defeaters for (III). In other words, the non-probabilistic understanding of hinge
propositions cannot be used to address the logically prior question of whether a candidate proposition is, in
fact, a hinge proposition.
So, it may be granted (at least for the sake of the argument) that the non-probabilistic understanding
of hinge propositions provides a good explanation for reasoning probabilistically in the everyday mode. In
the reflective mode, however, the non-probabilistic interpretation cannot be invoked to save candidate
hinge propositions from the radical underdetermination argument. The reason, again, is that the radical
underdetermination argument’s conclusion implies that 1MWH, 2MtWH, and 3BWH fail to meet Wright’s
conditions for hinge proposition status.25
Entitlement and Competitor Hinge Propositions
In this section, we will lay the groundwork for the second criticism by focusing on the claim that hinge
propositions play some fundamental role in our epistemic lives. Their fundamental nature has been
described as “indispensable,” “non-optional,” “methodological necessities,” and “essential” for any
epistemic evaluation (Grayling, 2008; Pritchard, 2015, 199; Williams, 1991, 123; Pritchard, 2012b). Wright
explains this role in terms of a presupposition: “P is a presupposition of a particular cognitive project if to
doubt P (in advance) would rationally commit one to doubting the significance or competence of the
project” (2004b, 191). Consider a Moorean-type illustration:
1. I know I have hands.
2. If I know I have hands, I know 1MWH.
3. I know 1MWH.
25 The distinction between the everyday and reflective mode is similar, and may be the same as Wright’s distinction between
‘possession’ and ‘claims’ to warrant (2014, 219-221). One potential difference is that Wright emphasizes defending hinge
propositions in his discussion of claims to warrant, e.g., Wright writes: “As a first approximation to an answer [about the
meaning of ‘rational claims to warrant’], I have in mind whatever one might relevantly enter into an attempt to substantiate the
assertion, perhaps in the face of a challenge, that one is indeed warranted in accepting a certain proposition” (2014, 220). In the
reflective mode, candidate hinge propositions may be accepted or rejected. If Wright allows this when speaking about claims to
warrant, then the distinctions may be the same. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing out this parallel. 18
Doubting 3 seems to raise wholesale doubts about the competence of perception, for it seems we can run a
similar argument, mutatis mutandis (at least), for many claims to know about medium sized objects in our
local environment. If we doubt 3, then it seems we should doubt many claims about everyday objects (via
modus tollens). It seems then that 1MWH has a very good claim to be a presupposition, in Wright’s sense,
of the cognitive project of perception.
Notice however that at best, this line of argument shows that 1MWH is a hinge proposition. It does
not show that other hinge propositions might also be appealed to. Consider for example the possibility of
appealing to 3BWH as a hinge proposition. Berkeley, as is well-known, spent considerable energy thinking
about the “competence and significance” of perception, given his idealism. Berkeley agrees, indeed stresses
at great length, that we see, interact with, and know about macroscopic objects, tables, trees, teacups, etc.,
but adds that we perceive only ideas, so macroscopic objects are ideas (Winkler, 1989, 138). Berkeley
writes:
I do not argue against the existence of any one thing that we can apprehend by sense or
reflexion. That the things I see with my eyes and touch with my hands do exist, really exist,
I make not the least question. The only thing whose existence we deny is that which
philosophers call Matter or corporeal substance. And in doing of this there is no damage
done to the rest of mankind, who, I dare say, will never miss it (1982, §35).
To see this point in relation to hinge propositions we might imagine an alternate history. In actuality,
Berkeley sought and failed to find sufficient economic and political support to establish a school in
Bermuda. Suppose, however, that he had succeeded in establishing his school and an idealistic metaphysics
is the norm for those in the Bermuda academic community that persists long after Berkeley has gone. We
can also imagine a philosopher named ‘Less’ teaching at Berkeley’s school a couple of hundred years after
Berkeley’s death, promulgating the following sort of argument:
1. I know I have hands.
2*. If I know I have hands, I know 3BWH.
3*. I know 3BWH.
19
Imagine too, Professor Less claims that while 3* is subject to worries that arise from evidential poverty, 3*
is justified because it is a hinge proposition that enjoys entitlement justification. These reflections show that
even if we concede that there must be some hinge proposition associated with the cognitive project of
perception, it does not follow that it must be 1MWH. 3BWH would serve just as well for members of an
idealistic community as 1MWH does for a materialistic community.
Similar things can be said about the possibility that 2MtWH might serve as a hinge proposition.
Suppose one of your high school friends, after watching the movie The Matrix for the two hundredth time,
comes to believe 2MtWH and rejects 1MWH. He insists that you call him ‘Neo’ (the aforementioned
protagonist in the movie) and out of respect for his stupid wishes, you do. Neo believes his perception is
reliable. When he sees a virtual mailbox, he avoids it. He knows that running into virtual mailboxes in the
Matrix hurts. Thus, 1MWH is not the only hypothesis compatible with trusting perception. And indeed, in
those possible worlds where Neo is correct that he is living in 2MtWH, his perception is working reliably.
(By ‘working reliably’ I have in mind the Goldmanian sense of a method for generating true beliefs.) While
Neo’s friends may be deceived if 2MtWH is true (since they believe 1MHW), Neo himself will have all
sorts of true beliefs about virtual objects in their shared virtual environment.
What should we say about whether the Berkeleyian community is justified in believing 3BWH, or
whether Neo is justified in believing 2MtWH? The entitlement dogmatist about 1MWH may say that
1MWH is justified to a greater degree than 2MtWH or 3BWH for us because of its role as a hinge
proposition in our thinking. But of course Neo will make the same argument for his preferred hinge
proposition: the belief in 2MtWH is as much a hinge proposition for him as 1MWH is for dogmatists about
1MWH. If we accept that 2MtWH is a hinge proposition, then we have reason to think that 2MtWH is
justified for Neo. The same point will apply, mutatis mutandis, for the Berkeleyians and their hinge belief
that 3BWH is true.
Notice that the additional justification each ‘home’ hinge proposition enjoys for each group is
entitlement justification, not evidential justification. After all, by assumption, evidential poverty applies, so
each hypothesis is equally justified when focusing on specifically evidential considerations. The different
entitlement justification for each group stems from the fact that each group employs different hinge
propositions in their cognitive lives.
20
I don’t mean to suggest that this is any sort of reductio of the entitlement strategy. To make such an
argument depends upon, among other things, the idea that this sort of epistemic relativism is an
unacceptable consequence. Here ‘epistemic relativism’ means that the same total body of evidence may
equally support two or more incompatible hypotheses, such that there is “faultless disagreement” (Luper,
2004; Pritchard, 2009).26 At least some proponents of the entitlement strategy—e.g., (perhaps) Wittgenstein
and Hazlett—seem willing to endorse the idea of epistemic relativism in this sense.27
The main point for us here is about the necessity of believing 1MWH in order to trust perception.
Recall Hazlett says, “If one failed to believe in the external world [i.e., 1MWH], one would be forced, if
rational, to distrust perception at the very least, and this would result in the sort of confusion described”
(2006, 206). As the Neo example illustrates, it is possible to adopt an incompatible proposition to 1MWH
yet not distrust perception. Neo believes 2MtWH and trusts his perception: he believes he is seeing virtual
artifacts and he uses perception to navigate in the virtual world. So, the choice is not distrusting perception,
or adopting 1MWH as a hinge proposition. At best, what follows from the entitlement strategy premises are
that one must adopt a hinge proposition that says something about the trustworthiness of perception, and as
we have seen with Less and Neo, nothing in the entitlement hinge proposition strategy mandates that it
must be 1MWH.
I suspect that most dogmatists about 1MWH believe that (1) 1MWH is justified, and (2)
competitors to 1MWH are not justified. Skeptics, of course, challenge (1) and allow (2). As we have just
seen, the entitlement strategy allows that (1) is true and (2) is false. This is perhaps not too surprising given
that, as Wright says, the entitlement strategy is “concessive” to skepticism. So perhaps we should not be
surprised that the entitlement strategy does not single out a particular hinge proposition, since evidence
does not settle the issue (according to the entitlement strategy), and entitlement justification does not
differentiate between competitor hinge propositions. For dogmatists who hope to be in a position to assert
both (1) and (2), the hinge strategy can only disappoint.
26 Also seemingly relevant here is the uniqueness/permissiveness debate in the disagreement literature.
27 For Hazlett’s take on relativism, see his (2014). It is pretty common to interpret Wittgenstein as an epistemic relativist. For
some review and dissent, see Coliva, (2010b).21
Phenomenalism
The argument so far does not address an important point—perhaps the fundamental point of the entitlement
strategy—that there is a huge epistemic cost to pay if we do not accept hinge propositions, namely, we
must distrust perception as a source of justified belief and knowledge. In effect, we may understand the
entitlement strategy as proposing the ‘entitlement conditional’:
EC: If we trust perception, then we have entitlement justification for some hinge proposition
about the external world.
Assuming EC, and the previous argument that there is not entitlement justification for each of the particular
hinge propositions about the external world (since they each face a dogmatic defeater), then by modus
tollens, it would seem we ought not to trust perception. This would be a rather difficult conclusion to accept
—to put it mildly. The rest of the paper will focus on showing how EC might be denied by two different
epistemological theories: phenomenalism and external world disjunctionism.
Let me say right off that I’m not suggesting we revive phenomenalism; the problems with
phenomenalism are well-known.28 Rather, the main reason for our quick review of phenomenalism is to see
that even where evidential poverty is conceded, there is at least one alternative to the dilemma suggested by
EC: either we distrust our senses entirely or we endorse the entitlement strategy. The idea then, will be to
look for an alternative to phenomenalism that has phenomenalism’s virtues but not its vices.
Perhaps phenomenalism’s greatest sales pitch is that it offers a way to purge ourselves of
skepticism and metaphysics in one fell swoop. As Barry Stroud notes, it offers a strategy to close the
epistemic gap between perception and the world: “One strategy was to try to bring the world we believe in
closer to what we can perceive; every meaningful and potentially knowable proposition about the world
was to be expressed exclusively in terms of possible sense experience” (2004, 182). So, according to
phenomenalism, to believe there is a desk in front of me is just to believe that certain sense data are being
28 A classic statement can be found in Ayer (1954). The locus classicus against a reductive equivalence can be found in Chisholm
(1948). A good summary of various problems for phenomenalism can be found in BonJour, (2007). For a recent defense of
phenomenalism, see Pelczar (2018). 22
experienced (e.g., a brown patch in my visual field) in one version, and in another, by reducing talk about
the material world to “permanent possibilities of sensation” (Mill, 1889).
Thus, one of the advantages phenomenalism offers is a means to dissolve the metaphysical
differences between 1MWH, 2MtWH, and 3BWH. The hope is that whatever sense data story is told about
a brown material desk, there is an equivalent sense data story in terms of a virtual brown desk or an
immaterial brown desk. That is, the hope is that with phenomenalism, the definition (or the ‘definition in
use’, as Ayer used to like to say) for a brown material desk, a brown immaterial desk, or a brown virtual
desk is the same in the language of phenomenalism (e.g., ‘a brown patch in my visual field’). And of
course, perception is important for phenomenalists as a means (or perhaps the means) to become
acquainted with sense data. So, if phenomenalism is viable, it at least holds the promise of eliminating the
metaphysical dispute—since metaphysical claims can be reduced to the common language of sense data.29
With respect to underdetermination considerations, phenomenalism denies that 1MWH, 2MtWH,
and 3BWH are incompatible, for, to the extent that they are meaningful, all can be reduced to the common
language of possible sense data. Thus, phenomenalists are in a position to reject U2 of the
underdetermination argument and RU2 of the radical underdetermination argument precisely because
1MWH, 2MtWH, and 3BWH are not incompatible, but merely notational variants. In other words, the
skeptic’s argument and the skeptical dogmatist’s argument assume that the metaphysical hypotheses are
incompatible. If successful, the reductive program of phenomenalism would show this assumption is false
and hence, neutralize any skepticism based on this assumption.
On the other hand, phenomenalism would permit us to trust perception. According to
phenomenalism, I am in a position to trust perception to justify my belief that there is a brown desk in front
of me because for it to be true that there is a brown desk in front of me is simply to have a certain set of
sensations. So, for there to be a brown desk in front of me is just to have a set of sensations, “to be
appeared to brown deskly.” In other words, I am entitled to reason as follows: Since there appears to be a
brown desk in front of me, there is a brown desk in front of me.
External World Disjunctivism
As noted, it is commonly thought that phenomenalism’s reductive program of translating ‘world talk’ into
talk of ‘possible experience’ turned out to be implausible, if not impossible. Let us assume this thought is
29 For criticisms of the plausibility of this sort of response to skepticism, see Coliva (2015).23
true. The question for us is whether there is a way to neutralize the metaphysical differences between
1MWH, 2MtWH, and 3BWH without having to commit to the reductive program of phenomenalism.
I will argue that external world disjunctionism (EWD) satisfies these desiderata. The notion of
‘external world’ in EWD is the one noted above: the rather generic sense that simply means any sense of
the world other than me. 1MWH, 2MtWH, and 3BWH are to be understood as different hypotheses about
the nature of the external world in this sense. (So, ‘external world’ does not mean the same thing as
1MWH.) The idea behind EWD, in a nutshell, is to refuse to play metaphysical favorites by using
disjunction. The key methodological principle is:
External World Disjunctionism Principle: If M1 and M2 are evidentially equal competitor
metaphysical hypotheses about the external world, and M1 is accepted as justified as part of our
metaphysics, then M2 should be accepted as part of our metaphysics.30
EWD says that if we accept 1MWH and concede that 2MtWH is evidentially equal to 1MWH, then we
should accept 2MtWH as part of our metaphysics. That is, we should accept:
1EWD: 1MWH or 2MtWH is true.
Similarly, if it is conceded that 3BWH is evidentially equal to 2MTWH, then 3BWH should also be
included as part of our metaphysics.31 In which case, we should accept:
30 I use the generic ‘acceptance’ here to cover whatever propositional attitude is appropriate with respect to metaphysical
hypotheses. Acceptance covers such possibilities as ‘acceptance’ in Wright’s (2004b) sense, as well as belief and knowledge. For
our purposes, it does not matter.
31 To avoid unnecessary complications in the exposition, I will assume that the metaphysical hypotheses are evidentially equal.
As noted above in connection with the radical disjunctive underdetermination argument, this assumption can be relaxed—we do
not need to endorse the principle of indifference. Similarly, EWD could be formulated in a more modest fashion in terms of the
denial that any particular hypothesis is evidentially weightier than the combined epistemic probability of two other incompatible
hypotheses. 24
2EWD: 1MWH, or 2MtWH, or 3BWH is true.
In terms of its virtues, I will suggest that EWD does not pose an obstacle to trusting perception to
obtain knowledge about our environment sufficient for everyday purposes, even while conceding that
perception cannot discriminate amongst the various metaphysical hypotheses to explain experience. To
illustrate, imagine for the moment that you believe EWD and you are trying to persuade three companions,
a materialist, an idealist, and a virtualist (someone like Neo, who believes we are in a virtual reality), of
EWD virtues as you walk down a street. Your companions, incredulous of such a position and dead-set on
dogmatism with respect to their preferred hinge positions, are so engrossed in the conversation that they are
oblivious to an object in their path. You call out, “Watch out for the material mailbox, or the immaterial
mailbox, or the virtual mailbox in front of you.” True, the ‘mailbox disjunction’ is a bit wordy, but it shows
that even as a proponent of EWD you can trust perception enough to help your companions avoid one of
three different potential pitfalls. After all, although you accept that while your sensory evidence is not
sufficient to distinguish material, immaterial, and virtual mailboxes, past experience suggests that running
into a mailbox, however ‘mailbox’ is disambiguated, can be very painful.32
A few points are worth noticing here. First, your companions are not in a position to plausibly
question the truth of what you have said, since each will be committed to the truth of one of the disjuncts.
Hence, rationally, they should be committed to the truth of the disjunction. So this means that there is an
interesting asymmetry here: each of your companions may agree with you about the mailbox disjunction
even while they disagree with each other. If your companions have any complaint with respect to EWD, it
is that your statement is too generic; you should commit to one of the disjuncts (presumably, their preferred
disjunct).
Second, the vital role of perception for EWD is obvious when we reflect that it does not follow
trivially that if we are in a material world, then there is a material mailbox in the path of your companions;
and it does not follow trivially that if we are in an immaterial world, then there is an immaterial mailbox in
the path of your companions; and it does not follow trivially that if we are in a virtual world, then there is a
32 One could, of course, question inductive reasoning, but here we confine our attention to underdetermination skepticism about
the senses. 25
virtual mailbox in the path of your companions. Trusting perception is vital to obtaining justified belief
about the presence of the object referred to by the mailbox disjunction.
To put the point starkly: imagine the ever-cruel god of epistemology offers a tragic choice. She will
tell you which of the various metaphysical hypotheses (1MWH, or 2MtWh, or 3BWH) offered to explain
the character of our experience is true, but the price is that all your perceptual capacities will be
incapacitated forever. Or, you can use your perceptual capacities to navigate your environment, but the true
metaphysical hypothesis (1MWH, or 2MtWH, or 3BWH) will never be revealed to you. I suspect that most
of us would choose the latter. But for our purposes it does not matter which option is preferred. What
matters for our purposes is this point: knowing which metaphysical hypothesis is true provides only a part
of what we might like to know. Conversely, there is still much we can know about our world, like the
mailbox disjunction, even if we do not have the additional knowledge of which particular disjunct is true.
Third, EWD provides immunity from the underdetermination skepticism previously considered. For
example, consider attempting to mount an underdetermination argument against belief in 2EWD. The
skeptic or the skeptical dogmatist might suggest that there are other competitor hypotheses to those
mentioned in 2EWD. For example, the idea that we are brains in a vat living in a virtual world orchestrated
by a mad scientist (4BIVWH), or there is an evil demon causing us to have experiences (5EDWH), or that
we are in some deep dream state that is being manipulated by others as in the movie Inception (6IWH).33
The skeptic then suggests that the following hypothesis has as much going for it, evidentially speaking, as
2EWD:
3EWD: Either 4BIVWH, or 5EDWH, or 6IWH is true.
The skeptic claims that 2EWD and 3EWD are equally potent, so the underdetermination argument is not
thwarted. However, EWD directs us to include the three additional hypotheses, so we should accept:
4EWD: Either 1MWH, or 2MtWH, or 3BWH, or 4BIVWH, or 5EDWH, or 6IWH is true.
33 An even larger variety of competitor hypotheses can be found in Walker (2015).26
The point then, is that such underdetermination considerations can always be thwarted by adding disjuncts
to the disjunction.34
Fourth, even EWD’s recommendation for a more modest role for perception in justifying belief is
consistent with perception ruling out some metaphysical hypotheses that might be used to explain the
nature of our world. For example, the author’s wish world hypothesis:
7AWWH: Everything I wish for comes true.
My senses confirm that 7AWWH has less going for it, evidentially speaking, than say 1MWH. It appears to
me that many of my wishes do not come true. I wish for an end to war and violence. I wish for an end to
starvation, disease, and death. I wish for fewer committee assignments. It might be remarked that perhaps
all these things have come true, but I have been deceived about the satisfaction of these wishes, so the fact
that my senses provide evidence that 7AWWH is false does not show that 7AWWH is false. However, one
of my wishes is that I am not in error about such matters, so I still have confirmation that 7AWWH is false
since it appears to me that none of these things is true. It seems that reflecting on the nature of our
perception might also lead to rejecting a neo-Parmenides hypothesis that Being is unchanging. My
perceptual experience itself seems to be changing. Since my perceptual experience is part of Being in
general, a hypothesis like 1MWH has more going for it, evidentially speaking, than the neo-Parmenides
hypothesis.35
34 While this is not to make the argument in detail, it should be clear that EWD promises some help with closure-based
arguments for skepticism.
35 I refer to this as a ‘neo-Parmenides hypothesis’, as it is inspired by Parmenides, but it may be different depending on how one
understands Parmenides’ notion of ‘Being’. On the one hand, Parmenides appears to contrast Being with how Being is perceived,
and on the other, the notion of Being sounds very totalizing, seeming to include all that is. This is the line of thought that inspires
the notion that even perceivers are unchanging qua parts of Being. I am neutral on the attribution to Parmenides here, since I’m
not sure what to make of this interpretative problem. I owe a debt a gratitude to an anonymous referee for prompting this
distinction. 27
Disjunctionism or Disjunctivism
It may help to distinguish disjunctionism from disjunctivism, given the recent surge of interest in the latter,
and apparent similarities—at least in name—between the views. It is common in expounding disjunctivism
to classify perceptual experience into ‘good cases’ and ‘bad cases,’ the former covering veridical perceptual
experience, and the latter, illusions and hallucinations (Soteriou, 2010). Very roughly, disjunctivism says
that veridical and non-veridical cases of perception may be treated differently. In what is known as its
‘metaphysical form,’ disjunctivism says that the ‘components’ of experience differ in good and bad cases.36
In its epistemological form, disjunctivism says that there may be an evidentiary (reasons or justification)
difference between perception in good and bad cases.37 I will concentrate on disjunctivism in its
epistemological form, as it is the one most commonly associated with having anti-skeptical consequences. I
shall suggest that they are logically independent responses to the radical underdetermination skeptic’s
reasoning in the sense that the truth or falsity of one does not imply the truth or falsity of the other.
However, given the variety of disjunctivists views that have been developed, and their complexity, it will
be necessary to address these issues in very broad strokes. A more detailed treatment of the issue would
require a much longer discussion than is appropriate here.38
To simplify the discussion, let us suppose that we know that the mailbox disjunction is true and ask
what the radical underdetermination skeptic, the disjunctivists, and disjunctionist make of this fact. The
radical underdetermination skeptic, we may suppose, will point out that (i) it is subjectively indiscernible
whether the materialist, immaterialist, or virtualist in fact sees a material, virtual, or immaterial mailbox;
(ii) hence, experience supplies the materialist, immaterialist, and virtualist with the same reasons for their
36 See, for example, Martin (2002).
37 Perhaps the clearest exposition of this view can be found in Pritchard (2012). In this work, Pritchard notes the seminal role
John McDowell’s work has played in formulating epistemological disjunctivism.
38 To indicate just some of the difficulties here, to the best of my knowledge, no epistemological disjunctivist has addressed
radical underdetermination skepticism. Consider that perhaps most sustained recent discussion of epistemological disjunctivism
with respect to external world skepticism is due to Pritchard (2012 and 2015). Pritchard develops an account of disjunctivism
which incorporates a notion of defeaters, including misleading defeaters. One question going forward is whether radical
underdetermination skepticism can be used to show against disjunctivism that we have defeaters for our perceptually-based
beliefs. 28
perceptually-based beliefs; (iii) hence, we should distrust perception. Let us take it that all parties agree that
(i) is true.39
The epistemological disjunctivist, let us suppose, claims that the inference from (i) to (ii) is
problematic, for disjunctivists allow that there is an asymmetry in the evidence that experience supplies in
the mailbox case. For either the materialist, immaterialist, or the virtualist, experience provides a reason
that it is the case that her belief is true, for the other two it does not provide such a reason.40 In McDowell’s
terminology, two of the three are deceived: the object of their perception is “mere appearance,” but for the
third, it is the case that “the fact itself being disclosed to the experiencer.”41 With reference to the radical
underdetermination argument, we might suppose that the epistemological disjunctivist rejects the reasoning
which leads to DRU2. The disjunctivist’s thought here is that DRU2 is supported by the anti-disjunctivist
assumption that because 1MWH, 2MtWH, and 3BWH are subjectively indistinguishable, it follows that
perception provides no more reason for perceptually based beliefs in both the good and bad cases. But as
we have just seen, the disjunctivists rejects this inference. To show the independence of disjunctionism and
disjunctivism on this point, suppose in addition that disjunctionism is false. This will not affect the
disjunctivist’s claim that the inference from (i) to (ii) ought to be rejected. So, disjunctivism may be true
while disjunctionism is false.
The disjunctionist, on the other hand, may grant that the radical underdetermination skeptic is
correct in pressing (ii), but will deny the inference to (iii). In effect, the disjunctionist’s counterclaim is to
deny that we must distrust perception completely, even if we should distrust perception to distinguish
39 For more on what indistinguishability amounts to in such cases, and why epistemological disjunctivists may grant this, see
Pritchard (2012) and Fish (2008).
40 As is often emphasized, if disjunctivism is importantly different from externalism in ascribing a different epistemological
standing to subjects in good cases, then disjunctivism must be understood along internalist lines (Pritchard, 2012a). Here we
follow McDowell and Pritchard in thinking that experience in the good case actually entails the truth of the believed proposition.
41 As suggested by this famous passage from McDowell: “As before, the object of experience in the deceptive cases is a mere
appearance. But we are not to accept that in the non-deceptive cases too the object of experience is a mere appearance, and hence
something that falls short of the fact itself. On the contrary, the appearance that is presented to one in those cases is a matter of
the fact itself being disclosed to the experiencer. So appearances are no longer conceived as in general intervening between the
experiencing subject and the world” (1998, 386-387). 29
between each of the mailbox disjuncts. Nothing in the radical underdetermination argument shows that
perception does not provide us with reason to believe the mailbox disjunction, even if we have reason to
suppose that each disjunct is probably false. To show the logical independence of disjunctionism and
disjunctivism on this point, suppose in addition that disjunctivism is false. This will not affect the
disjunctionist’s claim that the inference from (ii) to (iii) ought to be rejected. So, disjunctionism may be
true while disjunctivism is false.
If we allow that radical underdetermination skepticism is a possible position, then we have a case
where both disjunctivism and disjunctionism are false. After all, in this case we are to imagine that
disjunctivism is wrong to question the inference from (i) to (ii), and disjunctionism is wrong to question the
inference from (ii) to (iii).
Nothing about disjunctionism requires granting that the inference from (i) to (ii) is correct, that is,
the disjunctionist could agree with the disjunctivist in questioning this step in the radical
underdetermination argument. Suppose, in the mailbox example, the materialist is in a good case and
disjunctivists are correct: the skeptic is wrong to think that materialists’ perception does not supply her with
reason to believe there is a material mailbox simply because it is subjectively indistinguishable from bad
cases. But it seems then that for the disjunctionist, perception will also supply a reason to believe the
mailbox disjunction, since the disjunction includes one good case. So, disjunctivism and disjunctionism are
co-possible.
Now it may be objected that even if they are co-possible, disjunctionism would be theoretically
gratuitous in this case, since the radical skeptic’s critique is neutralized by disjunctivism. Perhaps this is so.
I will not weigh in on this issue here. As noted above, my limited aim here is to show that the two doctrines
are logically independent. I do not make the further claim that neither is theoretically gratuitous in light of
the other. So, it may well be that if one endorses disjunctivism the need for disjunctionism is obviated. 42 As
indicated, a detailed comparison of the two theories is beyond the scope of this work.
Concluding Remarks
It might be protested by entitlement strategists that any claim by EWD to answer skepticism is a bit like
claiming to have won the war by going over to the enemy’s side. After all, saying that we cannot know
which of the disjuncts is true sounds an awful lot like skepticism.
42 I owe this point to an anonymous referee. 30
To assess this line of thought, let us start with a brief recap of the dialectic: In the first part of this
paper, it was argued that 1MWH is not merely underdetermined, but radically underdetermined, because
there is a dogmatic defeater for 1MWH, namely, it is more epistemically likely that some other hypothesis
about the cause of our sensory experience is true. According to entitlement’s own standards for entitlement,
this means that 1MWH (and other external world hypotheses) cannot be accepted as a hinge proposition.
Second, as argued in section 7, it is simply a false dilemma that conceding evidential poverty requires us to
either adopt the entitlement strategy or suffer the catastrophic epistemic consequence of having to
completely ‘distrust perception’ or be mired in ‘cognitive paralysis.’ Such a sweeping skepticism would
deny that we have justified belief about even the mailbox disjunction. So EWD lies between two extremes.
On the one hand, it claims contra the entitlement strategy, that we are not justified in believing particular
hinge metaphysical hypotheses, or particular disjuncts about everyday matters. On the other hand, EWD
allows that we may have justified belief or knowledge about the disjunctions themselves, contra the more
sweeping skepticism suggested by the ideas of cognitive paralysis or distrusting perception.
I want to offer here a very tentative suggestion as to why the (wrong) idea of cognitive paralysis or
distrusting perception might seem compelling when giving up justified belief about particular hinge
propositions about the external world. To do this, let me first address the problem that living according to
EWD would seem to carry a heavy burden in terms of verbosity. As we saw above, an EWD proponent
must use the mailbox disjunction to refer to the object in the path of one’s companions. It is easy to imagine
how quickly it would become very tiresome to refer to objects in one’s environment via disjunction. If your
spouse, a dogmatist about 1MWH, asks where his keys are, you might reply, “I do not know where your
keys are. However, your material keys, or your immaterial keys, or your virtual keys are on the material,
immaterial, or virtual kitchen counter.” If speaking in such a manner is the only option, then EWD
proponents are likely to lead very solitary lives.
However, imagine you have an EWD ‘coming-out’ party, where you gather your friends and family
and publicly announce the following:
I am going cold turkey; I’m swearing off dogmatic metaphysics. I believe there is nothing
evidentially special about 1MWH that favors it over competitor hypotheses. Sometimes, when
speaking with others, I will allow myself liberties. I will allow myself to say, for example, “the ball
31
is under the car” to the kids playing street hockey. But when I say such things, I will mean “the
material ball is under the material car,” or “the immaterial ball is under the immaterial car,” or “the
virtual ball is under the virtual car.” Those of you who know me will know this is what I mean as a
result of listening to this public avowal. Strangers, such as the kids playing hockey, may mistake me
for a dogmatic metaphysician. But I can live with their scorn for the sake of Gricean verbal
efficiency.
This is a bit over the top, but the basic idea seems sound enough: even if our everyday vocabulary is
semantically loaded in favor of a particular hypothesis (e.g., the material world hypothesis), semantic
reform is at least an option.
Returning now to the question of why cognitive paralysis might seem like a consequence of
rejecting hinge propositions, my tentative explanation is that our everyday language may be semantically
loaded in terms of a preferred metaphysical hypothesis, e.g., the material world hypothesis.43 If there were
no alternative but to use our everyday language committed to something like 1MWH to describe the
experience of our environment—think of this as being ‘semantically locked-in’—then perhaps we really
would have to distrust perception and face cognitive paralysis. As noted, disjunction and various qualifiers,
e.g., ‘immaterial’, ‘virtual’, ‘dream’ etc., allow us to neutralize the metaphysical commitments of our
language, hence we are not semantically locked-in. We may reject the stark choice offered by the
entitlement strategy between accepting a particular metaphysical hypothesis of our current language, and
accepting the sweeping skepticism suggested by completely distrusting perception. 43 The idea that what we mean by some of our terms having metaphysical implications is suggested by Moore:
If I say of anything which I am perceiving, 'That is a soap-bubble', I am, it seems to me, certainly implying that
there would be no contradiction in asserting that it existed before I perceived it and that it will continue to
exist, even if I cease to perceive it. This seems to me to be part of what is meant by saying that it is a real soap-
bubble, as distinguished, for instance, from an hallucination of a soap-bubble…. (1993, 164-165).
It is an interesting question whether our everyday vocabulary really is semantically loaded in the way that Moore claims. I won’t
pursue this question here but concede it for the sake of the argument. I say ‘concede’ because if our language is less semantically
loaded than what Moore seems to indicate, then it may well be that there is less semantic reform necessary to endorse EWD. 32
It is worth noting that I have not argued for skeptical dogmatism or EWD directly, since the
arguments presented here depend on the un-argued assumption of evidential poverty. Still, for those who
would like to maintain dogmatism about 1MWH to the exclusion of other metaphysical hypotheses, the
lesson here is not to concede evidential poverty in the first instance, or perhaps adopt a different conception
of hinge propositions (such as those mentioned at the end of section 3). On the other hand, to echo
Berkeley, EWD is at least suggestive that the rest of humankind may not miss dogmatic metaphysics about
particular world hypotheses all that much.44
References
Ayer, A. J. (1954). Philosophical Essays. Macmillan.
Beebe, J. (2009). The Abductivist Reply to Skepticism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,
79(3), 605–636.
BonJour, L. (2007). Epistemological Problems of Perception. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-episprob/.
Brueckner, A. (2007). Hinge Propositions and Epistemic Justification. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly,
88(3), 285–287.
Chisholm, R. M. (1948). The Problem of Empiricism. The Journal of Philosophy, 512–517.
Coliva, A. (2010a). Moore and Wittgenstein: Scepticism, Certainty, and Common Sense. Palgrave
Macmillan.
Coliva, A. (2010b). Was Wittgenstein an Epistemic Relativist? Philosophical Investigations, 33(1), 1–23.
Coliva, A. (2015). Extended Rationality: A Hinge Epistemology. Palgrave MacMillan.
44 For help with this paper, I would like to thank Tim Cleveland, Allan Hazlett, and Jean-Paul ‘Eudicus’ Vessel. I owe a
special debt of gratitude to the supererogatory efforts of anonymous referee at this journal. Thanks also to hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of anonymous referees at other journals. 33
Echeverri, S. (2011). McDowell’s Conceptualist Therapy for Skepticism. European Journal of Philosophy,
19(3), 357-386.
Fish, W. (2008). Disjunctivism, Indistinguishability, and the Nature of Hallucination. In Haddock, A., &
Macpherson, F. (Eds). Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge, Oxford University Press,
144–167.
Fumerton, R. (1992). Skepticism and Reasoning to the Best Explanation. Philosophical Issues, 2, 149–169.
Fumerton, R. (2013). The Challenge of Refuting Skepticism. In Steup, M., Turri, J., & Sosa, E. (Eds.)
Contemporary debates in epistemology. John Wiley & Sons, 120-132.
Grayling, A. C. (2008). Scepticism and the Possibility of Knowledge. Continuum.
Hazlett, A. (2006). How to Defeat Belief in the External World. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 87, 198–
212.
Hazlett, A. (2014). Entitlement and Mutually Recognized Reasonable Disagreement. Episteme, 11(01), 1–
25.
Jenkins, C. S. (2007). Entitlement and Rationality. Synthese, 157(1), 25–45.
Luper, S. (2004). Epistemic Relativism. Philosophical Issues, 14(1), 271–295.
Martin, M. G. (2002). The Transparency of Experience. Mind & Language, 17(4), 376–425.
Mates, B. (1996). The Skeptic Way. New York: Oxford University Press.
McDowell, J. H. (1998). Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality. Harvard University Press.
McGinn, M. (2008). Wittgenstein on certainty. In Oxford Handbook of Skepticism. Oxford University
Press.
Mill, J. S. (1889). An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy: and of the Principal
Philosophical Questions Discussed in His Writings. Longmans, Green, and Company.
Moore, G. E. (1993). Proof of an External World. In Philosophical Papers (pp. 147–170). Routledge.
Moyal-Sharrock, D. (2016). The Animal in Epistemology. International Journal for the Study of
Skepticism, 6(2–3), 97–119.34
Pelczar, M. (2018). Defending Phenomenalism. The Philosophical Quarterly.
https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqy064
Pollock, J. L. (1986). Contemporary Theories of Knowledge. Rowman & Littlefield.
Pritchard, D. (2005). Wittgenstein’s On Certainty and Contemporary Anti-scepticism. In D. Moyal-
Sharrock & W. H. Brenner (eds.) Investigating on Certainty: Essays on Wittgenstein’s Last Work,
Palgrave, 189–224.
Pritchard, D. (2009). Defusing Epistemic Relativism. Synthese, 166(2), 397–412.
Pritchard, D. (2012a). Epistemological Disjunctivism. Oxford University Press.
Pritchard, D. (2012b). Wittgenstein and the Groundlessness of Our Believing. Synthese, 189(2), 255–272.
Pritchard, D. (2015). Epistemic Angst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing.
Princeton University Press.
Soteriou, M. (2010). The Disjunctive Theory of Perception. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Stroud, B. (2004). The Epistemological Promise of Externalism. In Richard Schantz (ed.) The Externalist
Challenge V.2, Walter de Gruyter, 181-192.
Swinburne, R. (1997). Simplicity as evidence of truth. Marquette University Press Milwaukee, Wisconsin:
Van Cleve, J. (2003). Is Knowledge Easy-or Impossible? Externalism as the Only Alternative to
Skepticism. In Steven Luper (ed.) The Skeptics: Contemporary Essays. Hamshire: Ashgate.
Walker, M. (2015). Underdetermination Skepticism and Skeptical-Dogmatism. International Journal for
the Study of Skepticism, 5(3) 218–251.
Walker, M. (2016a). Externalism, Skepticism, and Skeptical Dogmatism. The Journal of Philosophy,
113(1), 27–57.
Walker, M. (2016b). Occam’s Razor, Dogmatism, Skepticism, and Skeptical dogmatism. International
Journal for the Study of Skepticism, 4(1), 1–29.
White, R. (2010). Evidential Symmetry and Mushy Credence. Oxford Studies in Epistemology, 3, 161–186.
Williams, M. (1991). Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological Realism and the Basis of Scepticism. Blackwell. 35
Winkler, K. P. (1989). Berkeley: An Interpretation. Clarendon Press Oxford.
Wittgenstein, L. (2009). Major works: Selected Philosophical Writings. HarperCollins.
Wright, C. (2004a). Intuition, Entitlement and the Epistemology of :ogical Laws. Dialectica, 58(1), 155–
175.
Wright, C. (2004b). Warrant for Nothing (and Foundations for Free)? In Aristotelian Society
Supplementary Volume 78,167–212.
Wright, C. (2007). The Perils of Dogmatism. In Nuccetelli, S., & Seay, G. (Eds.) Themes from GE Moore:
New Essays in Epistemology and Ethics, 25–48.
Wright, C. (2012). Replies. In Mind, Meaning, and Knowledge: Themes from the Philosophy of Crispin
Wright. Oxford University Press.
Wright, C. (2014). On epistemic entitlement (II): Welfare state epistemology. In Dodd, D., & Zardini, E.
(Eds.). Scepticism and Perceptual Justification, Oxford university Press, 213-247.
36