8 - Immediate warrant, epistemic responsibility, and Moorean dogmatism

Summary

For Jim Pryor, with gratitude, in order to find out exactly where we disagree.

According to the “Moorean dogmatist” response to external world skepticism (notably, Pryor 2000), our sensory experience provides us with prima facie (defeasible) immediate justification, warrant, or reason to believe certain propositions about the world. In addition to this core claim, many Moorean dogmatists also hold that there is an acceptable form of reasoning arising from this warrant: an ideal rational agent who considers whether she is being deceived by an evil demon could (1) start from a position which presupposes no beliefs at all about the world, (2) consciously take her current experience as a ground for believing that she has hands and so come to believe that she has hands on that basis, (3) consciously reason from that belief to the conclusion that she is not a disembodied spirit being deceived by an evil demon, and (4) thereby form the latter belief for the first time and in a fully epistemically satisfactory way. The Moorean dogmatist thus hopes to satisfy the perennial epistemological aspiration, post-Descartes, of explaining how an ideally rational agent could arrive at fully epistemically satisfactory beliefs about the world – including the belief that she is not being deceived by an evil demon – by reasoning from an initial position that takes for granted no initial claims about the world.