From the two types of analytic knowledge discussed in my previous thread, we can derive a set of principles of discourse analogous to the principles called "rights" when applied to acts rather than speech, principles that we might call "epistemic rights".

(I recall hearing by word of mouth many years ago that an approach like this has already been put forward by some professional philosophers, but I don't recall ever getting a name to look up, and if anyone here has any pointers in that regard I'd appreciate it).

These epistemic rights really introduce nothing new beyond the critical rationalist epistemology already discussed in an earlier thread, but only reformulate much of it in an interpersonal context rather than an individual one.

Rights in the traditional sense can be formulated in terms of obligations and their negations, and since the descriptive equivalent of prescriptive obligation is necessity, these epistemic rights can similarly be formulated in terms of necessities and their negations.

Rights in the traditional sense have been categorized, following the work of authors such as Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, into four groups organized across two different distinctions: the distinction between active and passive rights (not to be confused with positive and negative rights; either an active or a passive right can be either positive or negative), and the distinction between first-order and second-order rights. The epistemic rights I will discuss can be similarly organized into the same four categories of active first-order rights or "liberties", passive first-order rights or "claims", passive second-order rights or "immunities", and active second-order rights or "powers", but with each of the epistemic versions defined in terms of necessity rather than obligation.


An epistemic liberty is something that it is not necessarily wrong to assert or to believe. It is the negation of the necessity of a negation, and so it is equivalent to a possibility. Something you have the epistemic liberty to assert or believe may nevertheless be false, but you are not necessarily wrong in doing so; it is a position that might be defensible, and you are within your epistemic rights, so to speak, to try to defend it.

An epistemic claim, conversely, is a limit on others' epistemic liberty: it is something that it is necessarily wrong to disagree with, which is just to say that it is logically necessary. Per the epistemological principles already spelled out in my earlier thread of critical rationalism, I hold that people have maximal epistemic liberty, limited only by the epistemic claim to non-contradiction: the only things necessarily wrong to assert or believe, the only indefensible positions to hold, are ones that flatly contradict the meaning of the very words used to assert or defend them.

But there is in turn an exception to that epistemic claim: there is still epistemic liberty to contradict the meanings given to words by those contradicting the rightful meanings of words, analogous to how in many common conceptions of rights in the traditional sense, it may be considered generally wrong to act upon another person's body, but an exception is made when acting upon someone who was already wrongly acting upon someone else.

For a concrete example using the word "bachelor" as discussed in my previous thread on analytic a posteriori knowledge: one person may have the epistemic liberty to assert that all bachelors regularly drink alcohol, inasmuch as that is something that might or might not be true, it is not necessarily false, and so it is a position that could feasibly be defended; but other people may have the epistemic claim to assert that no bachelor is married, and so the first person's epistemic liberty to assert the contrary, that some bachelors are married, is curtailed, given that "bachelor" just means "unmarried man"; but those other people may in turn have the epistemic liberty to assert that not all bachelors regularly drink alcohol, even if that contradicts the meaning of the word "bachelor" used by the first person (say, "someone who lives the lifestyle of Bacchus"), if that person is contradicting the true meaning of the word "bachelor".


That all depends, of course, on what the true meaning of the word "bachelor" actually is, which is where the second-order rights come in to play, which have to do with changing what is or isn't logically necessary, by changing the meanings of words. An epistemic power is the liberty to do so, to assign or reassign meanings to words. An epistemic immunity, conversely, is a limit on others' epistemic power, just as an epistemic claim is a limit on others' epistemic liberty.

Per the epistemological principles already spelled out in my previous thread on analytic a posteriori knowledge, I hold that people have maximal epistemic immunity – nobody gets to redefine words out from under others, words continue to rightfully mean whatever they have meant before – limited only by the epistemic power to mutually agree to definitions (analogous to the power to form contracts in the domain of traditional rights), which power is how those words got their initial meanings to begin with.

That power, in turn, has its own exception, in the reflexive case just as with the exception to the epistemic claim to non-contradiction above: nobody has the power to agree to agree to someone else's definitions, such as by agreeing that some word means whatever some supposed authority says it means (ala "an X is whatever Oxford says an X is"), or that it means whatever it is popularly used to mean (ala "an X is whatever people call an X"). The mutual agreement that establishes a rightful meaning has to be an agreement to something specific, not a reflexive agreement to agree with someone.


At first glance, one would think a maximally freethinking society would be one in which there were no epistemic claims at all (because every claim is a limit on someone else's epistemic liberty), and no epistemic powers at all (because powers at that point could only serve to increase epistemic claims, and so to limit epistemic liberties). But that would leave nobody with any epistemic claims against others using fallacious arguments to establish epistemic authority in practice even if not in the abstract rules of knowledge, and no epistemic power to hold people to their definitions either, making tractable discourse nigh impossible. So it is necessary that epistemic liberties be limited at least by claims against such fallacies, and that people not be immune from the epistemic power to establish mutually agreed-upon definitions between each other.

But those epistemic claims and powers could themselves be abused, with those who violate the claim against such fallacies using that claim to protect themselves from those who would refute them, and those who would like for definitions not to require mutual agreement to leverage practical power over others to establish broader epistemic power over them. So too those epistemic claims to consistency and powers to define, which limit the unrestricted epistemic liberty and immunity that one would at first think would prevail in a maximally freethinking society, must themselves be limited as described above in order to better preserve that liberty.