Abstract
In ‘Practical and Scientific Rationality: A Difficulty for Levi's Epistemology,’ Wayne Backman points to genuine difficulties in Isaac Levi's epistemology, difficulties that Backman attributes to Levi's having required, and for no good reason, that a rational person adopt but one standard of possibility for all her endeavors practical and scientific. I argue that Levi's requirement has, in fact, a deep and compelling motivation that tips the scales in favor of a different diagnosis of Levi's ills — i.e., that Levi's error lies simply in his having set insufficiently high qualifications for admission into the corpus that determines a person's standard of possibility.
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This paper was read as a comment on Wayne Backman's “Practical and Scientific Rationality: A Difficulty for Levi's Epistemology” at the American Philosophical Association Western Division meetings held in April 1983.
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Kaplan, M. Practical and scientific rationality: A Bayesian perspective on Levi's difficulty. Synthese 57, 277–282 (1983). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01064699
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01064699