Many philosophers have found in Hume’s skeptical doubts concerning the operations of the understanding the materials for an argument that generalizes from induction to other domains, like our beliefs in the external world, other minds, and the past. This chapter offers a novel reconstruction of that argument and identifies the principles that are responsible for its capacity to generalize beyond induction. Next, it presents a classical reading of Hume’s skeptical solution and shows that Crispin Wright’s entitlement theory is close in (...) spirit to it. After that, it develops two objections to entitlement theory: it relies on the truth of deeply contingent propositions that are not a priori rational, and it does not manage to redefine the concept of epistemic rationality while offering an effective anti-skeptical response. The chapter concludes with a constructive suggestion: some passages that support a non-classical reading of Hume’s positive views on induction offer the materials to reject the steps of the skeptical argument that cause trouble for entitlement theory. (shrink)

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. (shrink)