Susanna Rinard aims to show that it is possible to rationally persuade an external world skeptic to reject external world skepticism. She offers an argument meant to convince a skeptic who accepts her views on “several orthogonal issues in epistemology” to give up their external world skepticism. While I agree with Rinard that it is possible to reason with a skeptic, I argue that Rinard overlooks a variety of good epistemic grounds a skeptic could appeal to in rejecting her argument (...) and its conclusion. More specifically, I argue that the external world skeptic can resist Rinard’s conclusion by (1) distinguishing between skepticism about knowledge and skepticism about justification, (2) by prioritizing obtaining accurate beliefs (maximizing true beliefs and minimizing false beliefs) over being rational, or (3) by treating suspension of judgment as the default rational doxastic attitude. (shrink)

According to a widely held norm of rationality, one should not change prior credences without new evidence. An important argument for this norm appeals to accuracy considerations, which says that changing priors doesn’t maximize expected accuracy. This is because accuracy measures are strictly proper, and thus any probabilistically coherent person regards her own priors as uniquely maximizing expected accuracy compared with other priors. -/- This paper attempts to resist the accuracy argument against changing priors. We argue that even if rational (...) epistemic decisions maximize expected accuracy according to strictly proper accuracy measures, it can still be rational to change priors sometimes. The core idea of our argument is that changing priors can be rational if one wants to maximize not just one’s current, short-term accuracy but also future, long-term accuracy. Our argument, if successful, shows that considering long-term accuracy has significant ramifications for the accuracy-first project. (shrink)