The point of the argument is that it doesn’t matter what the probability is.
Right, but I can’t imagine a UMCAist thinking this is a matter of probability. That is, the UMCAist will insist that this is a necessary feature of minds. The burden may be up to them, but that’s not EY’s argument (its not an argument against UMCA’s at all). And I took EY to be giving an argument to the effect that UMCA’s are false or at least unlikely. You may be right that EY has successfully argued that if one has no good reasons to believe a UMCA exists, the probability of one existing must be assessed as low. But this isn’t a premise the UMCAist will grant, so I don’t know what work that point could do.
The Kant formulation you give seems explicitly about humans, only humans and exclusively humans and nothing else.
You might be able to argue that, bu that’s not the way Kant sees it. Kant is explicit that this applies to all minds in mind-space (he kind of discovered the idea of mind-space, I think). As to what ‘committed to accepting’ means, you’re right that this needs a lot of working out, working out I haven’t done. Roughly, I mean that one could not have reasons for denying the UMCA while having consistant beliefs. Kant has to argue that it is structural to all possible minds to be unable to entertain an explicit contradiction, but that’s at least a relatively plausible generalization. Still, tall order.
On the whole, I entirely agree with you that a) the burden is on the UCMAist, b) this burden has not been satisfied here or maybe anywhere. I just wanted to raise a concern about EY’s argument in this post, to the effect that it either begs the question against the UCMAist, or that it is invalid (depending on how it’s interpreted). The shortcomings of the UCMAist aren’t strictly relevant to the (alleged) shortcomings of EY’s anti-UCMAist argument.
Right, but I can’t imagine a UMCAist thinking this is a matter of probability. That is, the UMCAist will insist that this is a necessary feature of minds. The burden may be up to them, but that’s not EY’s argument (its not an argument against UMCA’s at all). And I took EY to be giving an argument to the effect that UMCA’s are false or at least unlikely. You may be right that EY has successfully argued that if one has no good reasons to believe a UMCA exists, the probability of one existing must be assessed as low. But this isn’t a premise the UMCAist will grant, so I don’t know what work that point could do.
You might be able to argue that, bu that’s not the way Kant sees it. Kant is explicit that this applies to all minds in mind-space (he kind of discovered the idea of mind-space, I think). As to what ‘committed to accepting’ means, you’re right that this needs a lot of working out, working out I haven’t done. Roughly, I mean that one could not have reasons for denying the UMCA while having consistant beliefs. Kant has to argue that it is structural to all possible minds to be unable to entertain an explicit contradiction, but that’s at least a relatively plausible generalization. Still, tall order.
On the whole, I entirely agree with you that a) the burden is on the UCMAist, b) this burden has not been satisfied here or maybe anywhere. I just wanted to raise a concern about EY’s argument in this post, to the effect that it either begs the question against the UCMAist, or that it is invalid (depending on how it’s interpreted). The shortcomings of the UCMAist aren’t strictly relevant to the (alleged) shortcomings of EY’s anti-UCMAist argument.