Metaepistemology and Relativism

This chapter has two primary aims. Firstly, the conclusions drawn from Chapters 2–8 will be situated within a wider context: that of the complicated relationship between metaepistemology, realism and relativism, with an eye to answering some questions left outstanding at the end of Chapter 1. The second thing I want to do is to motivate, in light of what’s been argued for already, an entirely different way of thinking about the relationship between mainstream epistemology and the kind of challenge to it that arguments for epistemic relativism stand to pose. If I am right, at least some arguments for epistemic relativism (particularly, new epistemic relativism) can , and despite what was insinuated at the end of Chapter 8, do have an important kind of relevance to mainstream epistemology, even if more traditional arguments of the sort canvassed in Chapters 3–5 do not. Though the kind of relevance is — I’ll argue — of a very different sort than is ordinarily thought.