ABSTRACT
Remember repeatedly falling in love for the first time? Well, if the relevant research literature is to be believed, then the story about your-about our-loss of epistemic innocence is rather like that. That is, seemingly without reference to the particular age group being studied, effectively everyone who has ever gone out in search of possible differences in the ways that older, as opposed to younger, persons think about matters of belief entitlement has miraculously ended up reporting what amounts to the same thing. The recurrent story goes like this: The youngest of available subjects (whatever their actual age might happen to be), enter stage-left as naïve realists-objectivists at heart, only to shortly find themselves inextricably drawn toward some waiting pit of nihilism. As the plot thickens and skeptical doubts progressively overtake them, these previously committed foundationalists lose their ability to act on the basis of reason, and so, for a time, remain stupefied and lost in a directionless moratorium where blind intuitionism, or simply doing the done thing, is all that is left of choice. Finally, just before exiting stage-right, the best and brightest among this temporarily dispirited group is shown to come to a new “postskeptical” insight, as some beliefs are recognized as better grounded than are others, and the cautious possibility of rational choice is triumphantly restored. That is the Procrustean bed, and the good news is that one size is argued to conveniently fit all.
