Engel’s Dilemma and the Epistemic Significance of Logical Disagreement

Hinge propositions—or simply “hinges”—are primitive certainties that we (must) presuppose to enable our entire belief systems. Recently there has been a lot of interest in hinge epistemology, which is a kind of epistemology that sets the notion of hinge at the center stage. This paper puts forward a dilemma levelled against hinge epistemologists. The dilemma is based on work by Pascal Engel (2016) and states that, given the assumption that hinge propositions are normative at all, they are either non-epistemic grammatical norms or epistemic norms. If the former is the case, hinges would appear to be irrelevant to epistemology as it is ordinarily conceived, while if the latter holds, the result would be an incomprehensible hinge epistemology altogether. After presenting Engel’s dilemma (§§1-2), it is utilized to tease out certain puzzling insights about the epistemic significance of logical disagreement (§§3-4).