Against Pritchard's refutation of epistemic relativism

Abstract

This paper reconstructs Duncan Pritchard’s (2011, pp. 278-284; 2021, pp. 1120-1122; 2025, pp. 56-58) refutation of epistemic relativism and presents an objection to it. This refutation presupposes that epistemic relativism would be true in case there were rationally irresolvable deep disagreements. Pritchard’s refutation, thus, amounts to an argument purporting to show that all deep disagreements are rationally resolvable. Our objection, in turn, aims to show that the examples of rationally resolvable deep disagreement Pritchard presents have particular features that, while making them rationally resolvable, not all deep disagreement has. In order for these examples to be representative of all deep disagreements we need to accept a particularly strong notion of rationality. Pritchard’s (2011) notion of a truth-seeker presupposes a strong notion of rationality that could play that role. In recent papers, in contrast, Pritchard (2023, pp. 305-308; 2025, p. 53) makes use of a weaker rationality notion in characterizing deep disagreements. Both these alternatives prove to be problematic for Pritchard’s refutation. On the one hand, if the notion of rationality used to characterize deep disagreements secures their rational resolvability, it will already presuppose the falsehood of epistemic relativism. On the other hand, if the refutation treads on a weaker rationality notion, it will simply fail to give reasons to think that all deep disagreements can be rationally resolved. Be that as it may, we claim that Pritchard’s work allows us to identify a subset of deep disagreements that have a particular structure that makes them rationally resolvable.