Entitlement, epistemic risk and scepticism

Episteme 18 (4):576-586 (2021)
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Abstract

Crispin Wright maintains that the architecture of perceptual justification is such that we can acquire justification for our perceptual beliefs only if we have antecedent justification for ruling out any sceptical alternative. Wright contends that this principle doesn’t elicit scepticism, for we are non-evidentially entitled to accept the negation of any sceptical alternative. Sebastiano Moruzzi has challenged Wright’s contention by arguing that since our non-evidential entitlements don’t remove the epistemic risk of our perceptual beliefs, they don’t actually enable us to acquire justification for these beliefs. In this paper I show that Wright’s responses to Moruzzi are ineffective and that Moruzzi’s argument is validated by probabilistic reasoning. I also suggest that Wright cannot answer Moruzzi’s challenge without weakening the support available for his conception of the architecture of perceptual justification.

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Luca Moretti
University of Eastern Piedmont

Citations of this work

Epistemic Entitlement, Epistemic Risk and Leaching.Luca Moretti & Crispin Wright - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (3):566-580.
Problems for Wright's entitlement theory.Luca Moretti - 2021 - In Luca Moretti & Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen, Non-Evidentialist Epistemology. Leiden: Brill. pp. 121-138.

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References found in this work

Knowledge and lotteries.John Hawthorne - 2004 - New York: Oxford University Press.
The skeptic and the dogmatist.James Pryor - 2000 - Noûs 34 (4):517–549.
Knowledge and Lotteries.John Hawthorne - 2005 - Philosophical Quarterly 55 (219):353-356.
Warrant for nothing (and foundations for free)?Crispin Wright - 2004 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 78 (1):167–212.

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