Incommensurability, Circularity and Epistemic Relativism

Abstract

This chapter outlines and evaluates a strategy for motivating epistemic relativism which draws from considerations to do with the incommensurability of epistemic systems. Such arguments can usefully be understood as beginning in the same place as dialogic arguments. But rather than to attempt, as dialogic arguments did, to establish the epistemic relativist’s conclusion by appealing to dialogue facts, incommensurability arguments attempt to get there via appeal to epistemic circularity. Once the structure of these arguments is suitably sharpened, it is shown that the variety of circularity such arguments betray bears some tight commonalities with a variety of circularity that is most often discussed in connection with contemporary debates about perceptual warrant (e.g. Pryor 2000; 2004; Wright 2008). It is concluded that, while incommensurability arguments can lay claim to a serious threat to the cogency of our attempts to justify our epistemic principles, this threat to cogency fails to motivate epistemic relativism over dogmatist, conservativist or sceptical alternatives.