ONLINE FIRST
published on July 23, 2016
Clayton Littlejohn
Pritchard’s Reasons
Pritchard’s epistemological disjunctivist thinks that when we come to know things through vision our perceptual beliefs are based on reasons that provide factive support. The reasons that constitute the rational basis for your belief that the page before you is white and covered in black marks entails that it is and includes things that could not have provided rational support for your beliefs if you had been hallucinating. There are some issues that I would like to raise. First, what motivation is there for thinking that this sort of view is preferable to a more traditional internalist view that insists that the rational support for our beliefs is always limited to things that are common to the cases of knowledge and subjectively indistinguishable cases of non-knowledge? I suspect that an important part of the motivation for the view comes from worries about skepticism. Second, if we’re worried about skepticism, can we resist these skeptical pressures without an appeal to metaphysical disjunctivism? Pritchard’s epistemological disjunctivist differs from McDowell’s in that Pritchard’s epistemological disjunctivist doesn’t take up controversial positions in the philosophy of perception. Is this kind of neutrality tenable? Third, should we follow Pritchard in thinking that the rational basis for our perceptual beliefs involves reasons? What specifically is the relationship between cases in which there is something the subject knows and cases in which there is something that is the subject’s reason for believing what she does?