> I'm not claiming that these are *principles*. I just think they're obviously true claims about what we ought to believe. (It remains an open question *why*.)
Ok, sorry about that. I don’t understand yet, though. Is the idea that
1) it’s just a brute normative fact that our prior should have that property? (I guess when I said “principle”…
> I'm not claiming that these are *principles*. I just think they're obviously true claims about what we ought to believe. (It remains an open question *why*.)
Ok, sorry about that. I don’t understand yet, though. Is the idea that
1) it’s just a brute normative fact that our prior should have that property? (I guess when I said “principle” I meant to include this kind of view, probably I’m not using standard terminology.)
2) you have the strong intuition that there are more fundamental, as-yet-unidentified normative facts that imply that property?
I'm remaining neutral about what the deeper explanation is (if any). I'm personally fine with taking the correct prior to be brute -- explanation has to stop somewhere -- but if further systematization turns out to be possible, that would certainly be nice. I just don't think that commonsense wisdom should be held hostage to that sort of philosophizing.
Of course, if someone comes up with a surprising new argument for why I should positively find it more likely that the world is only 5 mins old, or that nuclear war is more likely to be positive than negative on net, I'm open to considering those arguments. Maybe they'll change my mind! But in the absence of any such first-order argument, I don't regard my current beliefs to be susceptible to higher-order debunking or undermining. Whatever abstract philosophical premises of that sort that the skeptic tries to appeal to are going to be vastly less plausible to me than the "Moorean" first-order datum of commonsense that I started with. And if two claims are in conflict, we should give up the least credible of the two.
If you find your abstract epistemic principles more obviously credible than the reality of the past, or the instrumental badness of nuclear war, etc., then (again) I don't expect to be able to persuade you otherwise. But I do think such an epistemic prioritization would constitute a kind of poor judgment. (I also grant that the situation is symmetric, in that - from your perspective - you could equally judge my epistemic priorities to constitute poor judgment, in that case.)
> I'm not claiming that these are *principles*. I just think they're obviously true claims about what we ought to believe. (It remains an open question *why*.)
Ok, sorry about that. I don’t understand yet, though. Is the idea that
1) it’s just a brute normative fact that our prior should have that property? (I guess when I said “principle” I meant to include this kind of view, probably I’m not using standard terminology.)
2) you have the strong intuition that there are more fundamental, as-yet-unidentified normative facts that imply that property?
3) something else?
I'm remaining neutral about what the deeper explanation is (if any). I'm personally fine with taking the correct prior to be brute -- explanation has to stop somewhere -- but if further systematization turns out to be possible, that would certainly be nice. I just don't think that commonsense wisdom should be held hostage to that sort of philosophizing.
Of course, if someone comes up with a surprising new argument for why I should positively find it more likely that the world is only 5 mins old, or that nuclear war is more likely to be positive than negative on net, I'm open to considering those arguments. Maybe they'll change my mind! But in the absence of any such first-order argument, I don't regard my current beliefs to be susceptible to higher-order debunking or undermining. Whatever abstract philosophical premises of that sort that the skeptic tries to appeal to are going to be vastly less plausible to me than the "Moorean" first-order datum of commonsense that I started with. And if two claims are in conflict, we should give up the least credible of the two.
If you find your abstract epistemic principles more obviously credible than the reality of the past, or the instrumental badness of nuclear war, etc., then (again) I don't expect to be able to persuade you otherwise. But I do think such an epistemic prioritization would constitute a kind of poor judgment. (I also grant that the situation is symmetric, in that - from your perspective - you could equally judge my epistemic priorities to constitute poor judgment, in that case.)