Summary |
Epistemic permissivism and impermissivism are about the way that bodies of evidence relate to rational attitudes. More precisely, epistemic impermissivism (or uniqueness) is the view that: necessarily, the evidence epistemically permits at most one doxastic attitude to a proposition. In contrast, epistemic permissivism is the view that: possibly, the evidence epistemically permits more than one doxastic attitude to a proposition. Suppose we’re trying to decide whether Smith committed some crime based on a particular body of evidence. According to impermissivists, if you have that body of evidence, there’s at most one rational attitude to take toward Smith’s guilt—if two people disagreed on Smith’s guilt, they’d either have different evidence or one of them would be irrational. Furthermore, a single person couldn’t rationally change their mind about Smith’s guilt without a change in their evidence. Permissivists, on the other hand, allow for rational disagreement, even when evidence is shared, and some permissivists—intrapersonal permissivists—go so far as to think that a single person could rationally change her mind about something without a change in evidence. |