How cognitive abilities shape epistemic standards: A defense of permissivism against the arbitrariness objection

A well-known debate in contemporary epistemology revolves around this question: given a body of evidence E, is there always one epistemically rational doxastic attitude to the proposition P? While Uniqueness is known as the position which gives a positive answer to this question, the one which gives a negative answer is known as Permissivism. Proponents of Uniqueness object that Permissivism leads to an undesirable consequence about rational belief: if Permissivism is true, then it is rational for an agent to have a doxastic attitude arbitrarily—which is called the arbitrariness objection. This thesis defends Permissivism against the arbitrariness objection. In Chapter 1, I start with framing the dispute between Uniqueness and Permissivism. In Chapter 2, I introduce the arbitrariness objection and some leading responses to it, especially Miriam Schoenfield's Standard-Permissivism and Robert Mark Simpson's proposal regarding the interaction between epistemic standards and cognitive abilities. In Chapter 3, I examine the notion of arbitrariness in detail by considering different conceptions of it as well as Jenny Yi-Chen Wu's Impurist Permissivism. In Chapter 4, I develop Simpson's view by providing an account of cognitive abilities and epistemic standards, and then build my defense of Permissivism against the arbitrariness objection upon his view. In Chapter 5, I conclude that even though an agent can rationally accept being in a permissive case, this does not follow that her doxastic attitude is formed arbitrarily, as it is systematically or non-randomly guided and shaped by her epistemic standards and cognitive abilities. As a result, the arbitrariness objection does not hold; and therefore, one can still rationally accept that she is in a permissive case.