Finding small comforts in one’s doxastic home:

a new defense of epistemic conservatism

Chad Mohler

Truman State University

Epistemic conservatism contends that our beliefs enjoy a certain degree of prima facie justification simply in virtue of being held. The theory, if true, provides us with an attractive response to the global skeptic— the default status of our beliefs is “innocent until proven guilty,” not “guilty until proven innocent” as the skeptic may claim. Epistemic conservatism has been defended many times on practical grounds, but it has never really enjoyed a defense on epistemic grounds— a defense that would indicate why the fact that a person believes p should give that individual a reason to think p is true. In this paper, I hope to supply the missing epistemic defense. The defense rests on the intuitively compelling idea that for consistency’s sake, we must take various classes of our beliefs to be reliably produced in us. That perception of reliability, in turn, supplies one with an epistemic reason for individual beliefs within those classes. The paper concludes with a defense of my argument against the objection that the reliability considerations I highlight cannot provide us with evidence for our beliefs.