The Weaknesses of Weak Preemptionism

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Contributors

Abstract

According to preemptionism, a layperson should treat the fact that an epistemic authority believes p as a reason to believe p that replaces her other reasons relevant to believing p and is not simply added to them. Many authors have found the unqualified version of preemptionism, as defended by Linda Zagzebski, too strong. At the same time, a number of them have recently advocated weakened or qualified preemptionist accounts. In this paper, I criticise these accounts. I argue that some of them cannot explain the possibility of rational persistent disagreements between laypeople and epistemic authorities, while those that can explain it fail to account either for the extent to which justification is a holistic phenomenon or for the role of what I call ‘control reasons’ in the laypeople’s epistemic conduct.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)37-55
Number of pages19
JournalThe Philosophical Quarterly
Volume71
Issue number1
Publication statusPublished - 2021
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

Scopus 85100159154

Keywords