White advances two central claims. The first is that a version of the problem of induction involves the reliability principle.

Social epistemology has to be admired for its courage in tackling those areas of human judgment that seem most epistemically problematic. When and how are we justified in accepting the testimony of a stranger? That looks like a hard question. Social epistemology has less obvious application to what might be considered the easy cases of epistemic justification: for example, the justification of judgments founded on explicit reasoning (‘there is no largest prime number’), or inner sense (‘I am presently feeling cold and a bit nervous’). My aim in what follows is to explore the social dimension of these ‘easy’ cases, and in fact also to discuss some hidden reasons why the epistemic justification of these judgments seems less problematic than the justification of judgments based on, for example, testimony and perception.

Jennifer Nagel suggests that Mercier and Sperber’s argumentative theory of reasoning can shed light on “why we commonly think of perceptually and testimonially supported judgments as justified despite feeling worried, on reflection, that only what is internally available can justify”. While I agree that there is indeed a natural path (or paths) from the argumentative theory to this asymmetry, and instability, in our epistemic judgments, I am not sure that it is quite the one that Nagel identifies. Having registered some reservations about Nagel’s account, I make an alternative suggestion as to how the argumentative theory might help to explain the naturalness of the relevant judgments.