Hinge Epistemology and Scepticism: Critical Observations on the Extended Rationality View

In Extended Rationality (2015), Annalisa Coliva provides an important contribution to a family of possible views about epistemic justification which are mainly inspired by Wittgenstein's notion of hinges. According to Coliva, the extended rationality view fares much better than alternative candidates of the same genus in dealing with the sceptical challenge as it is expressed by the Agrippan trope of arbitrary assumption. On the sceptical view, the fact that Wittgensteinian hinges are neither justified nor warranted would seemingly entail that they are not epistemically rational. It is the aim of this article to assess Coliva's way of facing up to this challenge, as well as to show that Coliva's arguments fall short of their target, or so it appears. One might say that, in spite of Coliva's explicit claims to the contrary, her approach falls prey of a cognitive account of the notion of reason, and that her view is driven by the same illusion driving the sceptic: the uncritical adoption of a passive view of how the human mind is primarily related to the world.