The Social Character of Entitlements

Abstract

According to the standard account of epistemic entitlement to be found in the contemporary literature, epistemic entitlement is an epistemic right grounded in perceptual states. The aim of this chapter is to challenge this view. As I suggested in the Introduction, the most natural response to a question as to whether a person bears a positive epistemic status often consists in pointing to her perceptual situation. The example I gave was someone who wonders why I take my girlfriend to be entitled to her expressed belief that there are plenty of onions in the cupboard. In this case, I simply have to point to the fact that she has just checked to see whether there are any in the cupboard. The example is meant to indicate that — as a matter of epistemic practice phenomenology — perceptual states do not normally come into play when determining epistemic status. In this chapter I offer a more general argument to the effect that entitlement should not be viewed as an epistemic status that is grounded in an internalist condition. The argument rests on the idea that epistemic rights — like other rights — provide presumptive criteria for how one ought to be treated by others, based on factors that are publicly accessible.KeywordsPerceptual ExperienceEpistemic StatusStandard AccountChallenge ConditionParking SpaceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.