Whats Next? (Epistemic Parity)

So in my last post I did a bit of negative work, but I do think that Independence is something to be maintained if possible. In the very least it prevents question-begging and bootstrapping from occurring, and while it might be possible to develop some kind of theory which deals with these worries independently, independence cuts quite cleanly on these issues. So, in the next few posts I plan on a bit more negative work and then some positive stuff (hopefully). First, I would like to look at personal information with a bit of a magnifying glass. I don’t think any way of cashing this notion out is going to do what we want with respect to epistemic parity judgments¹. In particular, I think either the appeal to personal information as a symmetry breaker will either violate independence itself or will need to be incorporated universally. If it is incorporated universally, however, we will be in a position where we evaluate ourselves as epistemic peers with those who have access to more first-order evidence than we do (since we have access to internal evidence as a counterweight)².

After these arguments, I will look at one or two possible positive theses. First, I think that perhaps we can get out of the evidence assymetry problem mentioned above by conditionalizing on the reliability of the testimony and jettisoning the evidence equality assumption altogether, but this program is going to need some chisholming, as we are going to have a generality problem looming regarding the process type or reference class we are specifying. Second, perhaps in conjunction with the first, we might move from a naive view of the disagreement with respect to a proposition p or ~p to a contrast class³. Given that in cases of disagreement we can individuate a particular question under discussion, we can determine a set of relevant possible alternatives to conditionalize on, and in this manner we can cut out the hard cases without violating independence.