TOTAL PRAGMATIC ENCROACHMENT AND EPISTEMIC PERMISSIVENESS

This article explores the relationship between pragmatic encroachment and epistemic permissiveness. If the suggestion that all epistemic notions are interest-relative is viable (as Jason Stanley has recently claimed), then it seems that a certain species of epistemic permissivism must be viable as well. For, if all epistemic notions are interest relative then, sometimes, parties in paradigmatic cases of shared evidence can be maximally rational in forming competing basic doxastic attitudes towards the same proposition. However, I argue that this total pragmatic encroachment is not tenable, and, thus, epistemic permissivism cannot be vindicated in this way.