Within collective epistemology, there is a class of theories that understand the epistemic status of collective attitude ascriptions, such as “the college union knows that the industrial action is going to plan” as saying that a sufficient subset of group member attitudes has the relevant epistemic status. I will demonstrate that these summativist approaches to collective epistemology are incompatible with epistemic permissivism, the doctrine that a single body of evidence may rationalize multiple doxastic attitudes. In particular, we can use epistemic permissivism to generate so-called divergence cases, which demonstrate situations in which rationality requires group-level and member-level attitudes to diverge.

‘Reductive Evidentialism’ seeks to explain away all ‘structural’ requirements of rationality—including norms of logical coherence—in terms of ‘substantive’ norms of rationality, i.e., responsiveness to evidence. While this view constitutes a novel take on the source of the normativity of logic, I argue that it faces serious difficulties. My argument, in a nutshell, is that on the assumption that individuals with the same evidence can have different rational responses (interpersonal permissivism), the view lacks the resources to maintain its central tenet that an individual’s body of evidence cannot make it rationally permissible for the individual to believe logical inconsistencies (intrapersonal nonpermissivism).

One famous debate in contemporary epistemology considers whether there is always one unique, epistemically rational way to respond to a given body of evidence. Generally speaking, answering “yes” to this question makes one a proponent of the Uniqueness thesis, while those who answer “no” are called “permissivists”. Another influential recent debate concerns whether non-truth-related factors can be the basis of epistemic justification, knowledge, or rational belief. Traditional theories answer “no”, and are therefore considered “purists”. However, more recently many theorists have argued to the contrary, claiming that impurist factors, such as practical stakes, can sometimes encroach or even override truth-related considerations. This paper bridges the two debates by presenting and defending what I call “Impurist Permissivism”. I support Impurist Permissivism by showing how it can resist Roger White's famous Argument from Arbitrariness (2005).

In this paper I identify a family of explanatory demands facing permissivists, those who deny the uniqueness thesis, according to which every body of evidence rationally permits exactly one doxastic attitude for a person to have in light of that evidence. Call a pair of a body of evidence and a proposition a permissive case just in case there is more than one attitude that is permitted for someone who has that body of evidence to take to that proposition. Uniquers claim that there are no permissive cases, and permissivists deny this. The uniqueness thesis is a strong claim, and is vulnerable to counterexamples because it is a universal generalization, and indeed, many permissivists argue for their view by identifying putative counterexamples to the uniqueness thesis. However, in virtue of advancing these putative counterexamples, permissivists incur explanatory demands. If some, but not all, cases are permissive cases, then permissivists owe us an explanation of why some cases are permissive and others are not. Likewise, for each permissive case, permissivists must explain why some attitudes towards the proposition are permitted and others are not. Permissivists draw arbitrary lines between permissive and impermissive cases, and between permitted and impermitted attitudes, giving rise to distinctions which need explaining.

I shall argue that permissivists cannot discharge these explanatory burdens in a satisfying way. After carefully presenting these explanatory demands in section 2, I consider how permissivists might answer them in section 3. I argue that the only permissivists who are able to successfully answer the explanatory demands are extreme permissivists like subjective Bayesians. Most philosophers, however, will find this epistemological outlook implausible because it contains no substantive constraints on rational belief. I also show that previous attempts by permissivists to explain why there are permissive cases merely relocate, rather than answer, the explanatory demands I have identified. The final section argues that permissivists cannot soften up the explanatory demands, either. I show that permissivist cannot appeal to the vagueness of the notion of a permissive case, or of an attitude's being permitted, in order to make the line between the permitted and the impermitted attitudes appear less arbitrary. Nor, I argue, can the permissivist hold that our ignorance of which cases are permissive, and how permissive they are, lessens the explanatory burdens they face.

Unfortunately, permissivists have been most interested in attempting to identify a counterexample to the uniqueness thesis, and have not been concerned with the explanatory demands which they incur in so doing. If my arguments are successful, then, permissivism is a much less plausible view than it is currently given credit for, and, at the very least, permissivists have a lot of work to do in further articulating and generalizing their view so as to provide an adequate explanation of the scope of epistemic permission.

When a belief has been influenced, in part or whole, by factors that, by the believer's own lights, do not bear on the truth of the believed proposition, we can say that the belief has been, in a sense, arbitrarily formed. Can such beliefs ever be rational? It might seem obvious that they can't. After all, belief, supposedly, “aims at the truth.” But many epistemologists have come to think that certain kinds of arbitrary beliefs can, indeed, be rational. In this paper, I want to do two things. First, I want to show that the claim that arbitrary beliefs can be rational is inconsistent with the conjunction of two other attractive claims: one saying that rationality requires a certain kind of epistemic immodesty, and one saying that rationality forbids certain kinds of self-ascriptions of epistemic luck. Second, I want to evaluate different ways one might respond to this inconsistent triad. I won't defend any response in particular, but I'll draw out some notable costs and benefits of each response, which may help shed light on the question of whether arbitrary beliefs can be rational.

The debate between Uniqueness and Permissivism concerns whether a body of evidence sometimes allows multiple doxastic attitudes towards a proposition. An important motivation for Uniqueness is the so-called ‘arbitrariness argument,’ which says that Permissivism leads to some unacceptable arbitrariness with regard to one's beliefs. An influential response to the argument says that the arbitrariness in beliefs can be avoided by invoking epistemic standards. In this paper, I argue that such a response to the arbitrariness argument is unsuccessful. Then I defend a new response: contrary to common conception, the arbitrariness resulted by Permissivism is acceptable. The basic idea is that the arbitrariness resulted by Permissivism is analogous to the arbitrariness in permissive actions and the latter arbitrariness is intuitively acceptable. I answer three possible objections against this analogy, which are all motivated by the thought that beliefs aim at the truth. In addressing the last objection, I draw inspiration from the recent debate on transformative experience.

Subjectivist permissivism is a prima facie attractive view. That is, it's plausible to think that what's rational for people to believe on the basis of their evidence can vary if they have different frameworks or sets of epistemic standards. In this paper, I introduce an epistemic existentialist form of subjectivist permissivism, which I argue can better address “the arbitrariness objection” to subjectivist permissivism in general. According to the epistemic existentialist, it's not just that what's rational to believe on the basis of evidence can vary according to agents’ frameworks, understood as passive aspects of individuals’ psychologies. Rather, what's rational to believe on the basis of evidence is sensitive to agents’ choices and active commitments (as are frameworks themselves). Here I draw on Chang's work on commitment and voluntarist reasons. The epistemic existentialist maintains that what's rational for us to believe on the basis of evidence is, at least in part, up to us. It can vary not only across individuals but for a single individual, over time, as she makes differing epistemic commitments.

Permissivism is the view that there are evidential situations that rationally permit more than one attitude toward a proposition. In this paper, I argue for Intrapersonal Belief Permissivism (IaBP): that there are evidential situations in which a single agent can rationally adopt more than one belief-attitude toward a proposition. I give two positive arguments for IaBP; the first involves epistemic supererogation and the second involves doubt. Then, I show how these arguments give intrapersonal permissivists a distinct response to the toggling objection. I conclude that IaBP is a view that philosophers should take seriously.