Metaepistemology and Relativism Palgrave Innovations in Philosophy

Series Editors: Vincent F. Hendricks , University of Copenhagen and Duncan Pritchard , University of Edinburgh.

Titles include: Mikkel Gerken EPISTEMIC REASONING AND THE MENTAL Kevin Meeker HUME’S RADICAL SCEPTICISM AND THE FATE OF NATURALIZED EPISTEMOLOGY Ted Poston REASON AND EXPLANATION: A DEFENSE OF EXPLANATORY COHERENTISM Aidan McGlynn KNOWLEDGE FIRST? E.J. Coffman LUCK: ITS NATURE AND SIGNIFICANCE FOR HUMAN KNOWLEDGE AND AGENCY Jonathan Matheson THE EPISTEMIC SIGNIFICANCE OF DISAGREEMENT Annalisa Coliva EXTENDED RATIONALITY: A HINGE EPISTEMOLOGY Rachel McKinnon THE NORMS OF ASSERTION: TRUTH, LIES AND WARRANT

Forthcoming titles: Annalisa Coliva THE VARIETIES OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE Julian Kiverstein THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PHENOMENOLOGY David Pedersen POLITICAL EPISTEMOLOGY: EPISTEMIC THEORIES AND KNOWLEDGE INSTITUTIONS Christopher Pincock and Sandra Lapointe (editors ) INNOVATIONS IN THE HISTORY OF ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY

Palgrave Innovations in Philosophy Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–36085–3 (hardback) ( outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England Metaepistemology and Relativism

J. Adam Carter University of Edinburgh

Palgrave macmillan © J. Adam Carter 2016 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2016 978-1-137-33663-7 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2016 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-67375-9 ISBN 978-1-137-33664-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137336644 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carter, J. Adam, 1980– Metaepistemology and relativism / J. Adam Carter, University of Edinburgh. pages cm Includes bibliographical references.

1. Relativity. 2. Knowledge, Theory of. I. Title. BD221.C283 2016 121—dc23 2015032826 For Emma This page intentionally left blank Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements viii

1 Metaepistemology and Realism 1 2 Global Relativism 31 3 The Pyrrhonian Argument for Epistemic Relativism 59 4 Dialogic Arguments for Epistemic Relativism 77 5 Incommensurability, Circularity and Epistemic Relativism 107 6 Replacement Relativism: Boghossian, Kusch and Wright 137 7 A Different Kind of Epistemic Relativism 164 8 New Relativism: Epistemic Aftermath 192 9 Metaepistemology and Relativism 212

Notes 233 References 279 Index 293

vii Preface and Acknowledgements

A key idea of Wittgenstein’s in On Certainty that has always stood out to me as right is that in order to rationally investigate certain things, certain other things must already be in place in the background, and these other things in the background are simply taken for granted. The particular sort of thing I (qua epistemologist) usually end up investigating is what the epistemological facts are, and so maybe this seems a bit paradoxical. After all, the father of epistemology, Descartes, begins the Meditations by teaching us by example not to take things for granted – and this is a point that’s hard to miss the deeper Descartes digs downward, questioning what we’d ordinarily take to be completely and utterly obvious. But perhaps Descartes was already taking various general things for granted when doing this – when employing his method of doubt in the service of seeking sure foundations for human knowledge. And maybe epistemologists nowadays are taking broadly similar sorts of general things for granted, specifically, things about the kind of answers we’re looking for, when following in his footsteps. Even more, it’s not incon- ceivable that what it is epistemologists typically take for granted about the kinds of answers they’re seeking when inquiring about such things as knowledge, justification, rationality, etc. is mistaken. In order to find out, we just have to take a step back from doing ‘normal’ epistemology in order to get epistemology’s presuppositions in view – viz ., in order to think about the background itself. The principal topic of this book is the relationship between contemporary (mainstream) epistemology and a certain view – relativism – which is a provocative kind of thesis about the very nature of the sort of answers – viz ., about epistemological facts – which mainstream epistemologists working today take one another to be attempting to uncover when writing, thinking and talking as they typically do, about the things they typically write, think and talk about. Relativism is a very old and often reviled idea, but it never really died (though at various points in history many have tried to kill it off). In fact, as we’ll see, the past decade in particular has seen relativist proposals take on a whole new life and shape. Yet, despite its long lineage, relativism is an idea that’s difficult to get one’s head around. To get one’s feet wet with the idea of relativism, at least as it pertains to the kinds of

viii Preface and Acknowledgements ix issues that epistemologists have a clear stake in, a run-of-the-mill epistemological dispute will be illustrative. Take, as a representative example, the following case which has been riling up epistemology experts and students alike since 1976:

BARN FAÇADE: Using his reliable perceptual faculties, Barney non- inferentially forms a true belief that the object in front of him is a barn. Barney is indeed looking at a barn. Unbeknownst to Barney, however, he is in an epistemically unfriendly environment when it comes to making observations of this sort, since most objects that look like barns in these parts are in fact papier-mâché barn façades, erected as part of a plan to make the area he’s in appear more prosperous (adapted from Pritchard 2012).

Question: Does Barney, in the above case, know that what he’s looking at is a barn? What do you think? For readers not familiar with this particular case, it might already seem like a trick question: it seems we’d need to know a bit more about Barney. Was he drunk? Has his vision been tested recently? etc. While these are fair points, let’s just assume that all sorts of things like this are covered and that everything here is just exactly as it would be in a normal case where we’d be happy to attribute knowledge to Barney when he looks directly at a barn. Suppose the only difference between a normal (good) case, and BARN FAÇADE, is that in BARN FAÇADE, there happen to be fake barns nearby, and moreover, that although Barney didn’t actually look at a fake barn when forming his (true) belief that ‘There is a barn’, he very easily could have done so. The question of interest to epistemologists (an interest that’s remained more or less constant and at times heated for nearly 40 years now) is whether – and if so, why – the mere presence of nearby fakes should matter for whether Barney counts as knowing that he’s looking at a barn. As things stand now, in 2015, the majority position in mainstream epistemology is that (propositional) knowledge is simply not compatible with the kind of epistemic luck that features in BARN FAÇADE. Though there remains a vocal minority of epistemologists who demur and take the opposite view. Interestingly, empirical results from experimental philosophy suggest that non-philosophers will be much more inclined to say, and contrary to what most epistemologists think, that Barney does know. So who’s actually right about this? To put the rub of the question simply:

Fake barn question : Is (propositional) knowledge compatible with the kind of epistemic luck present in BARN FAÇADE, or is it not ? x Preface and Acknowledgements

While 40 years haven’t yet brought about unanimous agreement on the fake barn question (at least not yet), epistemologists on both sides behave just as if they are in agreement about a much more general point about what they’re disagreeing about when reaching opposing verdicts on the fake barn question. In short, the shared background agreement on both sides seems to be that parties who disagree about how to analyse BARN FAÇADE simply can’t both be right. Enter here the relativist . The relativist looks at things here very differ- ently. To a first approximation, the relativist is happy to say that ‘yes’ answers to the fake barn question can be true relative to some epistemic perspectives or standards, and ‘no’ answers to the fake barn question can be true relative to other epistemic perspectives or standards. But even more, the relativist wants to say that beyond these kinds of relative truths , there simply is no further perspective – or standard – independent sense in which ‘yes’ answers or ‘no’ answers to the fake barn question can aspire to correctness. There are just relative answers, nothing more. And so (as the relativist sees it) in an absolute sense, you’ll simply never – no matter how much epistemology you do – find out whether the chicken-sexer knows or whether virtue-epistemology can solve the Gettier problem because there are no absolute answers to these questions. The relativist relegates such questions to bad faith. This is, of course, a crude presentation (and oversimplification) of the relativist’s view, but it will do for now. If you feel a tension between what the relativist wants to say about epistemological facts and what mainstream epistemologists (e.g. the ones who keep arguing back and forth) seem to be presupposing about these very facts when they take themselves and their opponents to be trying to uncover them, then that’s good. I think there is a real tension here. One thing epistemologists can do is to simply ignore the tension – or at least bracket it – and keep on answering questions like the fake barn question in the affirmative or negative, and then defending these answers as carefully as they can. (This is usually what I do, and I might add it’s a lot of fun!) Another thing to do is a bit more uncomfortable. The other thing is to take a step back and ask (in a crisis-of-conscience sort of way) whether mainstream epistemologist’s knee-jerk tendency to proceed as though relativism can be brushed aside can ultimately be vindicated, or whether, instead, it turns out we should be taking the relativist more seriously than we actually do (at least, from within epistemology). The point of Metaepistemology and Relativism is to take this project on, and in doing so, to show where the complexities lie, to suggest why arguments Preface and Acknowledgements xi against more traditional kinds of epistemic relativism – once these arguments themselves are given their due – can’t easily be redeployed against the new (semantic) variety, and finally (by the end) to suggest why, to the extent that epistemic relativism constitutes a threat to mainstream epistemology, it’s probably a very different kind of threat than we might originally have been led to think. The book is divided into nine chapters. Chapter 1, ‘Metaepistemology and Realism’, is a big picture chapter. The goal is to show what mainstream epistemologist’s metaepistemological commitments are and where epistemic relativism stands in relation to these commitments. Since such commitments aren’t often articulated by epistemologists (unlike in metaethics, where this kind of thing is explicitly talked about), I focus on the metaepistemological commitments that are revealed as the pragmatic presuppositions of paradigmatic first-order epistemological disputes. If the way I set things up in Chapter 1 is right, then an interesting result is that the question of the compatibility of mainstream epistemology’s revealed metaepistemological commitments and epistemic relativism itself depends in a crucial respect on whether the arguments for epistemic relativism are any good in the first place – that is, whether the epistemic relativist’s wider picture of epistemic facts is one we should embrace or reject. The task of evaluating the merits of argument strategies for epistemic relativism (in its traditional and more contemporary guises) consumes most of this book, from Chapters 2–8, before I connect the conclusions drawn on this score to the wider question about the relationship between metaepistemology and relativism in Chapter 9. Chapter 2, ‘Global Relativism’, begins the investigation into the viability of epistemic relativism by considering whether there is any cause for taking a (very) quick road to epistemic relativism, one that proceeds through the comparatively more radical global version of the thesis. Global relativism, bizarre as it sounds, turns out to be much harder to dismiss than one would initially suspect, and thinking carefully about why this will be instructive in a number of ways which will be important later in the book (particularly, in Chapters 6 and 7) when engaging with the issue of how to best interpret what the epistemic relativist wants to say. Chapters 3–5 engage with three specific and popular template argument strategies for motivating epistemic relativism. Chapter 3, ‘The Pyrrhonian Argument for Epistemic Relativism’, evaluates an argument strategy, pursued in recent work by Howard Sankey, which creatively redeploys the ancient Pyrrhonian problematic (traditionally a sceptical xii Preface and Acknowledgements argument) in the service of motivating epistemic relativism rather than scepticism. Chapter 4, ‘Dialogic Arguments for Epistemic Relativism’, takes on a general argument strategy which points to certain properties of actual (or possible) dialogues (e.g., the famous case of Galileo and Bellarmine) and concludes on the basis of the presence of these properties that epistemic relativism is true. Chapter 5, ‘Incommensurability, Circularity and Epistemic Relativism’, outlines and evaluates a familiar strategy-type for motivating epistemic relativism which draws from considerations to do with incommensurability and epistemic circularity. Spoiler: I don’t think any of these strategy-types surveyed in Chapters 3–5 is compelling. A common theme I’ll suggest is that that none of these argument strategies ultimately gives us a decisive reason to embrace relativism rather than scepticism. That said, even if epistemic relativism could be philosophically motivated on the basis of the kinds of argument strategies surveyed in Chapters 3–5, there remains the separate but important issue of how to formulate the position in a satisfactory way. Chapter 6, ‘Replacement Relativism: Boghossian, Kusch and Wright’, engages with the plausi- bility of one popular semantic strategy for making sense of epistemic relativism – the replacement model – on which the relativist is interpreted as asking us to replace what must be rejected as absolutely false (e.g. unqualified claims of the form ‘S’s belief that p is justified’) with, as Boghossian puts it, the ‘nearest truths in the neighbourhood’ which the relativist can accept, which are on the replacement model explicitly rela- tional truths of the form ‘According to epistemic system X, S’s belief that p is justified.’ Boghossian thinks the replacement model leads to inco- herence. Kusch thinks, contra Boghossian, that there is a version of the replacement model that can be salvaged against Boghossian’s criticisms, and Wright thinks that anyone who attributes the replacement model to the relativist has in doing so failed to take the relativist seriously, by taking seriously the idea that epistemic claims can be true or false ‘albeit, relatively so’. On the interpretation of this standoff that I shall propose, we’ll come to see that the core principle central to Burnyeat’s (1976) reading of Plato’s attempt to show Protagoras’s global relativism to be self-refuting – what Burnyeat called the principle of translation (from Chapter 2) – will re-emerge as an insight about relative truth that is central to what is fundamentally at issue between Wright on the one hand, and Boghossian and Kusch on the other. Chapter 7, ‘A Different Kind of Epistemic Relativism’, shows what epistemic relativism might look like if we leave the replacement model (and the associated principle of translation) behind and think about Preface and Acknowledgements xiii relative truth in a very different way – where epistemic claims are ‘true, albeit, only relatively so’. This style of thinking about relativism has been championed in the main by John MacFarlane, whose brand of epistemic relativism takes the shape of an assessment-sensitive semantics for ‘knows’, according to which (for example) claims of the form ‘S knows that p’ get a truth value only relative to a context in which a use of the sentence ‘S knows that p’ is being assessed as true or false. After outlining MacFarlane’s rationale for giving ‘knows’ the relativist treat- ment he does, I raise several epistemologically grounded objections to MacFarlane’s project. In short, I show that MacFarlane-style relativism is in various ways at tension with a well-motivated position in epistemological metatheory called epistemic anti-individualism. Chapter 8, ‘New Relativism: Epistemic Aftermath’, quickly qualifies the epistemologically oriented objections raised against MacFarlane’s version of epistemic relativism before developing a new dilemma for a proponent of a MacFarlane-style semantics for ‘knows’. The overarching move can be stated simply. I suggest, in a fashion that draws some close parallels with Allan Hazlett’s (2010) recent work on knowledge, factivity and knowledge ascriptions, that the more compelling MacFarlane’s argument is for his conclusion that the ordinary concept ‘knows’ is assessment-sensitive, the more reason the epistemologist has for thinking that the ordinary concept of knowledge is epistemologically uninter- esting, and moreover, so are ordinary knowledge ascriptions. Crucial to the line advanced here will be an examination of what contemporary epistemology might look like if it were centred around an assessment- sensitive concept of knowledge. Chapter 9, ‘Metaepistemology and Relativism’, has two overarching aims. First, the conclusions drawn from Chapters 2–8 will be situated within a wider context: that of the complicated relationship between metaepistemology, realism and relativism, with an eye to answering questions left outstanding at the end of Chapter 1. The second thing I want to do is to motivate, in light of what’s been argued for already, an entirely different way of thinking about the relationship between mainstream epistemology and the kind of challenge to it that arguments for epistemic relativism stand to pose. If I am right, at least some arguments for epistemic relativism (particularly, new epistemic relativism) can , and despite what I insinuate in Chapter 8, have an important kind of relevance to mainstream epistemology, even if more traditional arguments of the sort canvassed in Chapters 3–5 do not. Though the kind of relevance is – I’ll argue – of an entirely different sort than is ordinarily thought. xiv Preface and Acknowledgements

Thanks to Matthew Chrisman, James Collin, Bolesław Czarnecki, Pascal Engel, Mikkel Gerken, Steven Hales, Allan Hazlett, Jesper Kallestrup, Martin Kusch, Michela Massimi, Robin McKenna, Paul Noordhoof, Orestis Palermos, Christian Piller, Brian Rabern, Conny Rohde, Shane Ryan, Stephen Ryan, Markus Seidel, Claudine Tiercelin and Kevin Wallbridge and to audiences at the University of Edinburgh, University of Vienna, York University for helpful feedback, discussion and comments on draft chapters. Thanks also to Natalie Ashton for organising and leading a stimulating relativism reading group at Edinburgh in 2014 and to Martin Kusch and Robin McKenna for organising a series of talks on my book at the University of Vienna as part of Kusch’s European Research Council funded ‘Emergence of Relativism’ grant. Special thanks go to Maria Baghramian for originally inspiring my interest in relativism and whose work has been important in shaping my thinking, to Duncan Pritchard for continual and unwavering support and encouragement throughout the planning and writing of the book, to Aidan McGlynn for detailed and helpful feedback on much of the book and to Modesto Gómez Alonso, whose enthusiasm and discussion, comments and conversation throughout the writing of the book was invaluable. Extra special thanks to my amazingly supportive partner Emma Gordon for reading drafts of every chapter just as soon as I finished them, for talking through the main ideas with me, and for her loving and patient support (and great music playlists) during those hundreds of nights of drinking instant coffee and staying up too late. J.A.C Edinburgh