Abstract
Recent years have seen the rise of a new family of non-probabilistic accounts of epistemic justification. According to these views—we may call them Normalcy Views—a belief in P is justified only if, given the evidence, there exists no normal world in which S falsely beliefs that P. This paper aims to raise some trouble for this new approach to justification by arguing that Normalcy Views, while initially attractive, give rise to problematic accounts of epistemic defeat. As we will see, on Normalcy Views seemingly insignificant pieces of evidence turn out to have considerable defeating powers. This problem—I will call it the Easy-Defeat Problem—gives rise to a two-pronged challenge. First, it shows that the Normalcy View has counterintuitive implications and, second, it opens the door to an uncomfortable skeptical threat.
Highlights
Many epistemologists have embraced the idea that epistemic justification amounts to something along the lines of high probability
Weak Normic Reliabilism (WNR) In order for S to have justification for believing a proposition P, it is necessary that S’s belief was reliably produced—it is necessary that (i) the belief that P was produced by a belief-forming method M that would not, in any normal world, have produced the belief that P if P were false and (ii) that the believer has no reason to believe that conditions are abnormal or if the believer has reason to believe that conditions are abnormal, it is reasonable to assume that the method remains highly reliable across modal space
I argued that Normalcy Views of justification, i.e. accounts of justification committed to (NT), whilst providing the perhaps most promising framework for preserving (MPC), face a serious problem when it comes to the notion of epistemic defeat
Summary
Many epistemologists have embraced the idea that epistemic justification amounts to something along the lines of high probability. What makes threshold views so popular is that justification is almost universally believed to come in degrees and to be fallible, i.e. to require less than probability 1 With these two commitments in place, there is something very natural about the idea that epistemic justification must amount to something along the lines of high probability.. I argue that since the problem is structural in nature there is little hope that other views following (NT) will be able to avoid this problem In the end it appears that there are good reasons for rejecting the central claim of Normalcy Views: that in order for a belief to be justified it is necessary that there does not exist a single normal world in which S falsely believes that P
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