This reminds me of this passage of Richard Rorty (could not link in a better way, sorry!). Rorty considers whether someone could ever be warranted in believing p against the best, thoughtfully considered opinion of the intellectual elites of his time. He answers:
Only if there was some way of determining warrant sub specie aeternitatis, some natural order of reasons that determines, quite apart from S’s ability to justify p to those around him, whether he is really justified in holding p.
Now, Rorty is a pragmatist sympathetic to postmodernism and cultural relativism (though without admitting explicitly to the latter), and for him the question is rhetorical and the answer is clearly “no”. From the LW point of view, it seems at first glance that the structure of Bayesian probability provides an objective “natural order of reasons” that allows an unequivocal answer. But digging deeper, the problem of the priors brings again the “relativist menace” of the title of Rorty’s essay. In practice, our priors come from our biology and our cultural upbringing; even our idealized constructs like Solomonoff induction are the priors that sound most reasonable to us given our best knowledge, that comes largely form our culture. If under considered reflection we decide that the best priors for existing humans involve the elite opinion of existing society, as the post suggests, it follows that Hume (or Copernicus or Einsten!1905 or…) could not be justified in going against that opinion, although they could be correct (and become justified as elites are convinced).
(Note: actually, Einstein might have been justified according to the sophisticated relativism of this post, if he had good reasons to believe that elite opinion would change when hearing his arguments—and he probably did, since the relevant elite opinion did change. But I doubt Hume and Copernicus could have been justified in the same way.)
This reminds me of this passage of Richard Rorty (could not link in a better way, sorry!). Rorty considers whether someone could ever be warranted in believing p against the best, thoughtfully considered opinion of the intellectual elites of his time. He answers:
Now, Rorty is a pragmatist sympathetic to postmodernism and cultural relativism (though without admitting explicitly to the latter), and for him the question is rhetorical and the answer is clearly “no”. From the LW point of view, it seems at first glance that the structure of Bayesian probability provides an objective “natural order of reasons” that allows an unequivocal answer. But digging deeper, the problem of the priors brings again the “relativist menace” of the title of Rorty’s essay. In practice, our priors come from our biology and our cultural upbringing; even our idealized constructs like Solomonoff induction are the priors that sound most reasonable to us given our best knowledge, that comes largely form our culture. If under considered reflection we decide that the best priors for existing humans involve the elite opinion of existing society, as the post suggests, it follows that Hume (or Copernicus or Einsten!1905 or…) could not be justified in going against that opinion, although they could be correct (and become justified as elites are convinced).
(Note: actually, Einstein might have been justified according to the sophisticated relativism of this post, if he had good reasons to believe that elite opinion would change when hearing his arguments—and he probably did, since the relevant elite opinion did change. But I doubt Hume and Copernicus could have been justified in the same way.)