A dialectical strategy

pp. 175-214

in: Steven Bland, Epistemic relativism and scepticism, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Abstract

In light of the findings of earlier chapters that anti-sceptical responses to epistemic relativism are unsuccessful, this chapter outlines other strategies of addressing the threat of relativism. Following Boghossian, Seidel attacks the relativist's doctrine of epistemic pluralism. In doing so, he engages in a foundational analysis into the relations of justificational dependence between epistemic methods. This chapter argues that this is the wrong tool for the job; instead, epistemic relativism should be addressed by analyses that uncover relations of presuppositional dependence. Using this tool, we find that non-naturalistic methods depend on basic naturalistic methods for their application, and therefore, the former can be no more truth-conducive than the latter. We also find that the basic empirical and non-empirical methods that naturalists use depend on one another for their application, such that neither can be more truth-conducive than the other. Together, these findings constitute definitive grounds in favour of the absolutist and naturalist presumptions, though they do nothing to address the threat of Pyrrhonian scepticism.