Liberalism versus Conservatism in Epistemology of Perception

According to liberalism, if you have an experience as if P, you acquire prima facie justification for believing that P that doesn’t require independent justification for taking your experience to be reliable. Conservatism, on the other hand, states that you have justification for believing that P, when you experience as if P, only if you possess independent justification for taking your experience to be reliable. In current epistemology of perception, Jim Pryor for instance defends liberalism by appealing to perceptual dogmatism. Crispin Wright endorses conservatism by adducing his epistemic entitlement theory to explain why we have independent justification for taking our experience to be trustworthy. Conservatism and liberalism have different merits and problems. For example, liberalism offers a neat response to perceptual scepticism but seems to yield “easy” justification, looks incoherent with Bayesian reasoning, and is threatened by the awkward phenomenon of cognitive penetration. Conservatism is not affected by these difficulties but engenders scepticism unless a credible explanation of why we have independent justification for taking experiences to be reliable is provided. A PhD thesis should analyse this important debate and contribute original research outcomes to the conversation on this topic.>