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[killtacular]

So, this is tangential to what I've been studying, but I've been thinking about it recently. If anyone has any thoughts or reading suggestions that would be cool.

Comments

[ethanator]

This is very interesting and I'm not sure I completely understand it, but here are some ideas.

As for things to read, I was reminded of an article by Stewart Cohen ("Contextualism and Skepticism") where he tries to suggest - if I remember correctly - that it's a priori rational to believe non-skeptical scenarios even if they are not entirely justified, at least within a regular non-skeptical context. I remember him being quite hazy about what it means to be "a priori rational" but it sounds like it might fit in with what you're saying (although I have no idea if you go in for contextualism).

I was also reminded of an Alvin Goldman article ("Epistemic Folkways and Scientific Epistemology") in which he makes a distinction between UNjustified and NON-justified beliefs. Unjustified means that a belief comes from a process that is known to be unreliable, whereas non-justified means that it does not come from a known reliable process. In this article Goldman (somewhat unsuccessfully) tries to dress up reliablism in categories of epistemic virtue and vice. It sounds to me like you don't want to go the reliabilist route (Goldman also thinks that predictive success is a component of justification, which you seem to deny), so this might not be useful, but I think it might be a way to construe a belief that is non-justified, but rational.

One thing that occured to me is whether you can deal with the objection that you're using a question begging argument here. Especially toward the end, it almost starts to sound like your argument boils down to the following: "We assume that it is rational to accept simplicity, conservatism, abduction, etc., therefore it is rational to accept simplicity, conservatism, abduction, etc." I don't THINK you're doing that, but I don't exactly see why you're not.

I should note that I am of the heretical belief that simplicity and conservatism, while epistemically virtuous and reliable for the most part, do not ALWAYS count either as virtues or reliable processes, as in some cases in biology, for example. (Certainly human males would be simpler without having nipples). But I'm also something of an externalist, naturalized reliabilist, so you might want to discount everything I say on those counts!

[killtacular]

that it's a priori rational to believe non-skeptical scenarios even if they are not entirely justified, at least within a regular non-skeptical context.

I read that paper a while ago, if I am not mistaken. That might fit into what I am saying, although I hadn't thought about how contextualism would work here. I don't really know enough to know to what degree I "go in for contextualism" yet :).

I was also reminded of an Alvin Goldman article ("Epistemic Folkways and Scientific Epistemology") in which he makes a distinction between UNjustified and NON-justified beliefs

Awesome, I have been trying to remember what article that was for a little while now, because that is very relevant to what I want to do my master's thesis on. Thanks!

As for what I am trying to do here, you are right that I'm not really thinking of reliabilist justification, however an article by someone like goldman talking about NONjustified, but not UNjustified, beliefs is pretty relevant. Also to clarify about predictive success, I think it is certainly intimately connected to justification. I think predictive success should be explicated in terms of probability, however, and as I mentioned at the top of this post, I was taking probability to tell the story of justification. So, when talking about rational but non-justified beliefs, I wanted to exclude probabilistic talk from what would make something rational to be safe. In other words: predictive success for justification, but not for "rational nonjustification" or whatever. Does that make sense?

One thing that occured to me is whether you can deal with the objection that you're using a question begging argument here

You certainly put your finger what (I see anyways) as the biggest problem for actually turning the musings in the OP into an actual good argument, which is that I have no way that I know of to argue that simplicity, conservatism etc provide us with strong reasons to think something is rational. However, I don't think it is question begging, because I don't intend to argue that it is "rational" to accept those epistemic virtues. Rather, if we assume that those epistemic virtues can warrant considering something rational, and if those virtues apply to inductive justification, then inductive justification might be "rational". I tried to explicitly separate inductive justification from the virtues that I see as grounding abduction (simplicity, conservatism, etc), and so I would think that using those virtues to render inductive justification rational wouldn't be in danger of question begging. I hope so, anyways.

[ethanator]

I'm glad I could provide a few useful citations.

I think your response to my question-begging question is good. I could kind of see that from the original, but now that you say it more explicitly, it makes sense. Good luck with your project, or at least thinking about it!