Speaker: Paul Conlan (St Andrews)

Entitlement of Cognitive Project and The Adoption Problem
Keywords: Epistemology of Logic, Entitlement Epistemology, Adoption Problem

Wright (2004) argues that we are warranted in the belief that modus ponens (MPP) is valid via an entitlement of cognitive project. Wright’s entitlement epistemology extends further, however: Wright (2014), suggests that the warrant for ‘cornerstone’ beliefs like ‘there is an external world’ is generated by epistemically consequentialist Reichenbachian dominance reasoning. One strand of objections to the 2014 position is that the warrant provided is pragmatic rather than epistemic (see e.g. Pritchard (2007), Jenkins, (2007)). This paper aims to suggest that the objection that the anti-sceptical warrants are merely pragmatic easily generalises to warrants generated by entitlement of cognitive project, and Wright cannot avail himself of the strategy used to disarm the objection in the case of the anti-sceptical entitlement to fend off the objection that the entitlement to the validity of MPP provides merely pragmatic warrant. Instead, I suggest that the entitlement to the validity of MPP cannot generate a pragmatic warrant at all. I will argue that given a plausible principle regarding pragmatic warrants and Kripke’s ‘Adoption Problem’ (See Padro (2015), Finn (2019)), the warrant for the validity of MPP provided by entitlement of cognitive project must be something other than a pragmatic warrant.