Belief beyond reason: a radical relativist hinge epistemology

Abstract

Hinge epistemology is sometimes thought to have controversial relativist and non-evidentialist commitments. This paper develops and motivates an explicitly relativist and radically non-evidentialist version of hinge epistemology, following and combining aspects of Ashton’s (2019) defense of relativist hinge epistemology and Pritchard’s (2016) defense of a non-epistemic reading of hinge commitments. I argue that radical relativist hinge epistemology shares in a main attraction of hinge epistemology in general, namely, offering a dissolution of closure-based radical skeptical problems. I then motivate RR as a social hinge epistemology by showing that it is particularly well-suited for fruitful applications in topics such as deep disagreement, testimonial injustice, and hermeneutic injustice.