Reasons for Reason - The New York Times - 0 views
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How do we rationally defend our most fundamental epistemic principles? Like many of the best philosophical mysteries, this a problem that can seem both unanswerable and yet extremely important to solve.
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Any way you go, it seems you must admit you can give no reason for trusting your methods, and hence can give no reason to defend your most fundamental epistemic principles.
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A legitimate challenge is presumably a rational challenge. Disagreements over epistemic principles are disagreements over which methods and sources to trus
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That is, whether I can give reasons for them that can be appreciated from what Hume called a “common point of view” — reasons that can “move some universal principle of the human frame, and touch a string, to which all mankind have an accord and symphony.”
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we should take the project of defending our epistemic principles seriously is that the ideal of civility demands it.
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We need to justify our epistemic principles from a common point of view because we need shared epistemic principles in order to even have a common point of view.
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Without a common background of standards against which we measure what counts as a reliable source of information, or a reliable method of inquiry, and what doesn’t, we won’t be able to agree on the facts, let alone values.
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But we can’t decide every issue that way, and we certainly can’t decide on our epistemic principles — which methods and sources are actually rationally worthy of trust — by voting
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They are valuable because almost everyone can appeal to them. They have roots in our natural instincts, as Hume might have said. If so, then perhaps we can hope to give reasons for our epistemic principles. Such reasons will be “merely” practical, but reasons — reasons for reason, as it were — all the same.