Published Work

Wu, J. Y.-C. (2024). A Defense of Impurist Permissivism. Episteme, 21(4), 1138–1158. doi:10.1017/epi.2023.22

One famous debate in contemporary epistemology considers whether there is always one unique, epistemically rational way to respond to a given body of evidence. Generally speaking, answering “yes” to this question makes one a proponent of the Uniqueness thesis, while those who answer “no” are called “permissivists”. Another influential recent debate concerns whether non-truth-related factors can be the basis of epistemic justification, knowledge, or rational belief. Traditional theories answer “no”, and are therefore considered “purists”. However, more recently many theorists have argued to the contrary, claiming that impurist factors, such as practical stakes, can sometimes encroach or even override truth-related considerations. This paper bridges the two debates by presenting and defending what I call “Impurist Permissivism”. I support Impurist Permissivism by showing how it can resist Roger White's famous Argument from Arbitrariness (2005).

[Name redacted for review purposes]

A puzzling asymmetry exists in our evidential standards for assertions about the future versus the past. The day before an election, one can assert, “Smith is going to win the election”, based on polling data and expert analysis. However, upon waking the next morning without further information, asserting, “Smith won the election”, would be infelicitous — suggesting that claims about the past require stronger evidential justification than analogous claims about the future. This past-future asymmetry, first noted by Ninan (2022), raises the question of why such a discrepancy in justification arises. Existing solutions fall into two camps. Epistemic accounts (Harman 1973, Ninan 2022) focus on justificatory standards but overlook morpho-syntactic evidentiary signaling in natural language. Semantic accounts (Cariani 2021, Cumming 2024) emphasize modality, tense, and evidentiality but underestimate the role of epistemic and psychological factors. I argue that aspect marking and proximate future constructions influence evidentiality, shaping assertability conditions cross-linguistically. Additionally, so-called “exception cases” (e.g., planned future events) do not truly undermine the asymmetry but reveal a graded felicity contrast. The asymmetry is mediated through linguistic structure but also interacts with epistemic considerations, revealing a deeper conceptual puzzle that calls for an integrated account.