Putting Particularism in its Place Joshua Gert “Putting Particularism in its Place,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 89 (2008), pp 312- 324. Please cite published version. As particularists are fond of pointing out, in the epistemic domain their view is fairly uncontroversial. The very same fact that can, in one context, count as a reason in favor of believing something can, in another context, count against believing it. 1 Of course there are ways of trying to argue against this sort of view. For example, one can always try to argue that the fact singled out ought not to be considered as a basic epistemic reason. For example, the fact that the president of the United States says something can, in some contexts, count as a reason for believing it, in other contexts, as a reason for doubting it, and in still other contexts as no reason one way or the other. But this need not show anything, by itself, about the plausibility of epistemic particularism. It may merely mean that what we ought never to count as a basic reason ‘that the president said it’; more plausible candidates might be ‘that a dishonest person said it’ or ‘that an ignorant person said it’. Still, for any such proposal, it is easy to construct an overall context in which the purported basic reason seems to have a different valence. This paper will simply concede the epistemic domain to the particularist, and not merely for the purposes of argument. Rather, the point of the paper is to undermine the support that epistemic particularism might seem to give to particularism in the domain of practical rationality. That is, the paper is not primarily an argument against particularism about practical reasons; it is an argument against the validity of an inference that might lead someone to embrace it. Very roughly put, the point is the following. In the epistemic domain there are two related notions: the truth of a proposition, and the rationality of believing that proposition. When we talk about epistemic reasons, we are talking most directly about epistemic rationality, not truth. In the domain of practical rationality, there are also two notions, sometimes called objective and