25 Juin In Defence of a Reidian Moderate View of Our Hinge Certainties
Abstract of the paper: What is the epistemic status of our hinge commitments? Within the Hinge Epistemology field, different views try to account for the specific status for our hinges – that is, of these general and implicit commitments, such as “there is an external world” or “my cognitive situation is unproblematic”. Their challenge is to account for a seeming paradox: while these hinge commitments are not taken for granted for any specific reasons, it seems that it is plainly legitimate for us to assume them, and that our not accepting these things on the basis of specific reasons does not outright entail scepticism.
In Extended Rationality (2016), while Annaliva Colisa contends that our hinge commitments play a rule-like role and are deprived of warrant, she takes them as “propositions” in the broader sense of the term, she attributes to them the property of truth within the limits “of a very minimal understanding of truth”, and she regards them as assessible in terms of epistemic (ir)rationality. To support this thesis, Coliva develops a Moderate account of perceptual justification.
In the paper, I take the path of the Moderate view, while developing another species of it, so as to escape some of the difficulties Coliva’s view faces. I start by expounding the background of Coliva’s Moderte view (that is to say, the dilemma between Concervatism and Liberalism concerning the question of the ingredients of the justification of our particular perceptual judgments). I then present Coliva’s view, and explain why her Moderate account needs to be supplemented by the extended rationality theory. Given the difficulties to which this view gives rise, in a last moment, I develop a Reidian Moderatism, and explain why it is better suited to account for the peculiar epistemic status of our hinge commitments.