I think the mountain analogy really is the center of the rationality anti-realist argument.
It’s very intuitive to think of us perceiving facts about e.g. epistemology as if gazing upon a mountain. There is a clean separation between us, the gazer, and that external mountain, which we perceive in a way that we can politely pretend is more or less directly. We receive rapid, rich data about it, through a sensory channel whose principles of operation we well understand and trust, and that data tends to cohere well together with everything else, except when sometimes it doesn’t but let’s not worry about that. Etc.
The rationality anti-realist position is that perceiving facts about epistemology is very little like looking at a mountain. I’m reminded of a Dennett quote about the quality of personal experience:
Just about every author who has written about consciousness has made what we might call the first-person-plural presumption: Whatever mysteries consciousness may hold, we (you, gentle reader, and I) may speak comfortably together about our mutual acquaintances, the things we both find in our streams of consciousness. And with a few obstreperous exceptions, readers have always gone along with the conspiracy.
This would be fine if it weren’t for the embarrassing fact that controversy and contradiction bedevil the claims made under these conditions of polite mutual agreement. We are fooling ourselves about something. Perhaps we are fooling ourselves about the extent to which we are all basically alike. Perhaps when people first encounter the different schools of thought on phenomenology, they join the school that sounds right to them, and each school of phenomenological description is basically right about its own members’ sorts of inner life, and then just innocently overgeneralizes, making unsupported claims about how it is with everyone.
So, the mountain disanalogy: sometimes there are things we have opinions about, and yet there is no clean separation between us and the thing. We don’t perceive it in a way that we can agree is trusted or privileged. We receive vague, sparse data about it, and the subject is plagued by disagreement, self-doubt, and claims that other people are doing it all wrong.
This isn’t to say that we should give up entirely, but it means that we might have to shift our expectations of what sort of explanation or justification we are “entitled” to. Everyone would absolutely love it if they could objectively dunk on all those other people who disagree with them, but it’s probably going to turn out that a thorough explanation will sound more like “here’s how things got the way they are” rather than “here’s why you’re right and everyone else is wrong.”
So, the mountain disanalogy: sometimes there are things we have opinions about, and yet there is no clean separation between us and the thing. We don’t perceive it in a way that we can agree is trusted or privileged. We receive vague, sparse data about it, and the subject is plagued by disagreement, self-doubt, and claims that other people are doing it all wrong.
This isn’t to say that we should give up entirely, but it means that we might have to shift our expectations of what sort of explanation or justification we are “entitled” to.
So this depends on two things—first, how likely (in advance of assessing the ‘evidence’) something like normative realism is, and then how good that evidence is (how coherent it is). If we have really good reasons in advance to think there’s ‘no separation between us and the thing’ then no matter how coherent the ‘thing’ is we have to conclude that while we might all be able to agree on what it is, it isn’t mind independent.
So, is it coherent, and is it mind-independent? How coherent it needs to be for us to be confident we can know it, depends on how confident we are that its mind-independent, and vice versa.
The argument for coherence comes in the form of convergence (not among people, to be clear, but among normative frameworks), but as you say that doesn’t establish its mind independent (it might give you some strong hint, though, if its really strongly consistent and coherent), and the argument that normativity is mind-independent comes from the normativity argument. These three posts deal with the difference between those two arguments and how strong they are, and how they interact:
I think the mountain analogy really is the center of the rationality anti-realist argument.
It’s very intuitive to think of us perceiving facts about e.g. epistemology as if gazing upon a mountain. There is a clean separation between us, the gazer, and that external mountain, which we perceive in a way that we can politely pretend is more or less directly. We receive rapid, rich data about it, through a sensory channel whose principles of operation we well understand and trust, and that data tends to cohere well together with everything else, except when sometimes it doesn’t but let’s not worry about that. Etc.
The rationality anti-realist position is that perceiving facts about epistemology is very little like looking at a mountain. I’m reminded of a Dennett quote about the quality of personal experience:
So, the mountain disanalogy: sometimes there are things we have opinions about, and yet there is no clean separation between us and the thing. We don’t perceive it in a way that we can agree is trusted or privileged. We receive vague, sparse data about it, and the subject is plagued by disagreement, self-doubt, and claims that other people are doing it all wrong.
This isn’t to say that we should give up entirely, but it means that we might have to shift our expectations of what sort of explanation or justification we are “entitled” to. Everyone would absolutely love it if they could objectively dunk on all those other people who disagree with them, but it’s probably going to turn out that a thorough explanation will sound more like “here’s how things got the way they are” rather than “here’s why you’re right and everyone else is wrong.”
So this depends on two things—first, how likely (in advance of assessing the ‘evidence’) something like normative realism is, and then how good that evidence is (how coherent it is). If we have really good reasons in advance to think there’s ‘no separation between us and the thing’ then no matter how coherent the ‘thing’ is we have to conclude that while we might all be able to agree on what it is, it isn’t mind independent.
So, is it coherent, and is it mind-independent? How coherent it needs to be for us to be confident we can know it, depends on how confident we are that its mind-independent, and vice versa.
The argument for coherence comes in the form of convergence (not among people, to be clear, but among normative frameworks), but as you say that doesn’t establish its mind independent (it might give you some strong hint, though, if its really strongly consistent and coherent), and the argument that normativity is mind-independent comes from the normativity argument. These three posts deal with the difference between those two arguments and how strong they are, and how they interact:
Normative Anti-realism is self-defeating
Normativity and recursive justification
Prescriptive Anti-realism