An ‘Intrapersonal Permissivist’ Worry about Epistemic Utility-Based Arguments for Bayesianism

Abstract

Leitgeb and Pettigrew (2010a, 2010b) have offered epistemic utility-based arguments for Bayesianism. However, in this paper, my purpose is to show that, on the assumption that epistemic rationality is solely grounded on accuracy, the following two conditional claims are true: (i) If Intrapersonal Permissivism is true, Leitgeb and Pettigrew’s arguments for Bayesianism are unsound; (2) more generally, if Intrapersonal Permissivism is true, any epistemic utility-based arguments that rely on Propriety would be unsuccessful. As is well known, Propriety is one of the minimum requirements in Epistemic Utility Theory. Thus, my results show that many of the results of Epistemic Utility Theory rely crucially on a particular view of permissive rationality.