Ethan Lai will lead a discussion on ‘What are epistemic standards’ by Laura Frances Callahan and Michael G. Titelbaum. This is the abstract for the paper:

Abstract: Over the past two decades, a new concept has gained prominence in epistemology: “epistemic standards”. We catalog the functional roles of epistemic standards, including their role in explaining reasonable (philosophical) disagreement, if there is any. Given these roles, the nature of epistemic standards should be of interest to permissivists, uniqueness theorists, subjectivists, and objectivists alike, despite their somewhat different understandings of standards’ normative role. Our central question is: What are the real mental phenomena in virtue of which an agent counts as having a particular set of epistemic standards? We consider whether agents have standards in virtue of their beliefs, their epistemic dispositions, their intentions/plans, their epistemic goals/desires, or their epistemic (“confirmational”) commitments. We ultimately find the last possibility most promising.