Dialogic Arguments for Epistemic Relativism

Abstract

Galileo and Cardinal Bellarmine couldn’t agree about the truth of Copernican heliocentricism. But, as Richard Rorty (1979) famously highlighted, they also couldn’t agree about what evidential standards were even relevant to settling the matter. The inability of interlocutors to non-question-beggingly break the deadlock in cases like this — where there appears to be a deep clash at the level of epistemic systems — has led some philosophers to think that the only sense in which either party can be correct is relative to their own epistemic system. The present aim will be to critically engage with arguments for epistemic relativism that take this general shape — what I call dialogic arguments — which point to certain properties of actual (or possible) dialogues and conclude on the basis of the presence of these properties that epistemic relativism is true. Dialogic arguments can be ‘actualist’ or ‘possibilist’, depending on whether the dialogues meant to be doing the relevant work are regarded as actual. I argue on empirical grounds, with reference to the literature on cognitive biases, that actual dialogues are ill-suited to motivating epistemic relativism. I conclude by suggesting why retreating to a ‘possibilist’ strategy is not promising; finally, I show that even if the problems I’ve raised can be overcome, dialogic arguments leave us no closer to epistemic relativism than to scepticism.