Is epistemic anti-realism really the same thing as losing the authority of a system of norms? I know that this isn't obvious, and I haven't accepted it naively. The worry is that it isn't. That you can still accept a norm while independently questioning its metaphysical status--that these are just entirely different things.

I don't think that they are, though. As usual, I start with Epistemic Nihilism. If you think that there are no epistemic norms then it's hard to see why you should believe an argument for epistemic nihilism--that's my main argument. I think that nihilism can't help but make practical recommendations--you lose epistemology as a source of authority if there really are no epistemic norms. It's similar to saying that the teacher isn't a fount of reasons. It's the same with epistemic nihilism--epistemology isn't a fount of reasons. You don't actually have reason to believe anything. I take this case to be fairly strong.

And what about other forms of anti-realism? I think that this is a somewhat controversial claim, but that from the realist's perspective this isn't what epistemology means. Hmm...now that I write that I realize that there's something unclear there. Am I resting on the normativity of the meaning of epistemology? Am I saying that for the realist "epistemology" means something different than it does for the expressivist? A little bit. But if so this is kinda weird. The expressivist and the realist aren't even talking about the same domain? That doesn't sound right. Anyway, metaphysical status of norms should be independent of the identification of those norms, in the same way realists about numbers are talking about the same numbers as fictionalists.

So let me try that again. It's not about what epistemology means. It's rather about the reasons that the realist accepts. The realist doesn't accept the expressivist's reasons. Now, this isn't quite right either, because it's the same reasons for both--it's just the metaphysical status of those reasons that is in question.

OK, so let me try this one more time. The issue is whether the expressivist (or any other anti-realist) can give the realist reasons that the realist will respect. On the one hand, yes, they can. They can offer reasons to believe various things, and the realist will interpret them in a certain way, and they will interpret what they are doing in a different way. But all of this is only helpful to the extent that the realist is able to interpret the reason in a realist way. If she can't, then how can we expect her to respect it? It's not the sort of thing she recognizes as having force. Oy, this is problematic too because reasons aren't the sort of thing you choose to respect. I'm not sure. OK.

Parsimony and Burden of Proof

As I reread my thesis in preparation for my oral exam tomorrow, I'm particularly struck by a poorly thought out argument in the second chapter.

In short, the argument was that the burden of proof could be shifted away from the moral realist by noting there is an unavoidable arbitrariness in epistemology. The problem with this argument is that it doesn't really respond to the parsimony requirement, as provide a route for avoiding it. That wasn't the clearest sentence I've written in my life, so let me try again.

The problem for the Moral Realist is that parsimony requires that we don't believe that which we have no good reason to believe. And the response I offer, essentially, says that there are some cases in which parsimony isn't required. There's actually no parsimony requirement for our most basic beliefs.

Here are a couple concerns with this argument:

1) Does this mean that ANYTHING can avoid the parsimony requirement? Why only things like moral realism, treating our moral intuitions as ways of getting at moral facts?

Well, not anything. It's just that some epistemic beliefs/principles are prior to the parsimony requirement. They just happen to avoid it.

2) That's not going to cut it as a response. What if we took the parsimony requirement to be our first, most basic epistemic principle?

Then there's no room for epistemology, and you can't get going. You need to take some things on without having epistemic reason to if you're going to get anything at all.

3) What happens once we have the parsimony requirement? Don't we reflect on our prior principles and conclude that they turn out, in retrospect, to be problematic since we ought not believe them due to parsimony?

This is a pretty tough challenge, I think. One way to respond to it is to tweak the parsimony requirement so that it doesn't kill epistemology, and I actually think that this is pretty reasonable. It's overly simple to say that the parsimony requirement is that we simply never believe anything without having an epistemic reason. A fine way of putting it is that we don't believe extra things, and "extra" is glossed in the following way: non-elemental beliefs that we have no epistemic reason to believe.