Steadfastness, deference, and permissive rationality

Abstract

Recently, Levinstein (Philos Phenomenol Res, 2015) has offered two interesting arguments concerning epistemic norms and epistemic peer disagreement. In his first argument, Levinstein claims that a tension between Permissivism and steadfast attitudes in the face of epistemic peer disagreement generally leads us to conciliatory attitudes; in his second argument, he argues that, given an ‘extremely weak version of a deference principle,’ Permissivism collapses into Uniqueness. However, in this paper, I show that when we clearly distinguish among several types of Permissivism (what I call Permissivism\(_{1}\), Permissivism\(_{2}\), and Permissivism\(_{3}\)), we can see that any type of Permissivism fits well with steadfast attitudes. Further, even though Levinstein’s ‘extremely weak version of a deference principle’ does rule out a possibility for some types of Permissivism (Permissivism\(_{1}\) and Permissivism\(_{2}\)), it is still compatible with the other type of Permissivism (Permissivism\(_{3}\)), so we may regard at least that version of a deference principle as a viable position in connection with that particular type of permissive rationality.