One thing that has come to annoy me about a fair few contemporary debates in epistemology is that they are framed at an excessively high level of abstraction where nothing interesting is actually in question. It is not hard to explain why debates of this kind evolve; they give not very technical philosophers something to do. But the debates seem to me in no way intellectually interesting, and based on silly assumptions about what this sort of inquiry is likely to 'uncover'.
Here are some examples of this phenomenon, as I see it: the permissivism-'uniquism' debate; the debate about the nature of justification between internalism and externalism; and all kinds of 'evolutionary debunking' arguments. These are pointless and uninteresting debates. With respect to the first, any Bayesian knows that if someone you regard as an 'epistemic peer' or 'epistemic superior' (who has done a similar level of research and has good training, etc) disagrees with you on something, you should probably temper your confidence in your view. Ok, that's it: debate over. There's not like some overarching determinate solution to how to resolve debates; that's a really stupid thought. As for justification, well, heck, justification is not a unitary notion. There's a hell of a lot of work to do in elaborating that point (many people have done it): the point is that it means that some really general debate about the nature of justification is not useful. As for the 'evolutionary debunking' argument applied to morality, we all know that, with a different evolutionary history, we'd have different emotions, blah blah blah. That doesn't mean you can just opt out of properly engaging with meta-ethical debates over the nature of reasons, Parfit's arguments in Part I of On What Matters, etc. You can't just say "Evolution tells us we shouldn't believe in mind-independent evaluative judgments" (like this kind of shit: http://fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/1177/DarwinianDilemma.pdf). Mate, that language is so vague! It's far too slippery. It's cheating to float on this level of abstraction; it's a cop-out from the serious arguments. You haven't shown, e.g., that we can't derive determinate principles from 'veil of ignorance'-type reasoning. Hey, maybe, you're not trying to, but then what are you trying to do? If you're not trying something that ambitious, you've just said some obvious shit that Darwin already said in The Descent of Man: our limbic system was contingently, historically developed. Wow, dude, who gives a shit?
Oh, and Plantinga's evolutionary debunking argument against naturalism only seems to work at all because it is absurdly vague. It's chock-full of weasel words and really shitty reasoning enabled by an absurd degree of vagueness.
(begun and finished within a philosophy tutorial)
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