So, the mountain disanalogy: sometimes there are things we have opinions about, and yet there is no clean separation between us and the thing. We don’t perceive it in a way that we can agree is trusted or privileged. We receive vague, sparse data about it, and the subject is plagued by disagreement, self-doubt, and claims that other people are doing it all wrong.
This isn’t to say that we should give up entirely, but it means that we might have to shift our expectations of what sort of explanation or justification we are “entitled” to.
So this depends on two things—first, how likely (in advance of assessing the ‘evidence’) something like normative realism is, and then how good that evidence is (how coherent it is). If we have really good reasons in advance to think there’s ‘no separation between us and the thing’ then no matter how coherent the ‘thing’ is we have to conclude that while we might all be able to agree on what it is, it isn’t mind independent.
So, is it coherent, and is it mind-independent? How coherent it needs to be for us to be confident we can know it, depends on how confident we are that its mind-independent, and vice versa.
The argument for coherence comes in the form of convergence (not among people, to be clear, but among normative frameworks), but as you say that doesn’t establish its mind independent (it might give you some strong hint, though, if its really strongly consistent and coherent), and the argument that normativity is mind-independent comes from the normativity argument. These three posts deal with the difference between those two arguments and how strong they are, and how they interact:
So this depends on two things—first, how likely (in advance of assessing the ‘evidence’) something like normative realism is, and then how good that evidence is (how coherent it is). If we have really good reasons in advance to think there’s ‘no separation between us and the thing’ then no matter how coherent the ‘thing’ is we have to conclude that while we might all be able to agree on what it is, it isn’t mind independent.
So, is it coherent, and is it mind-independent? How coherent it needs to be for us to be confident we can know it, depends on how confident we are that its mind-independent, and vice versa.
The argument for coherence comes in the form of convergence (not among people, to be clear, but among normative frameworks), but as you say that doesn’t establish its mind independent (it might give you some strong hint, though, if its really strongly consistent and coherent), and the argument that normativity is mind-independent comes from the normativity argument. These three posts deal with the difference between those two arguments and how strong they are, and how they interact:
Normative Anti-realism is self-defeating
Normativity and recursive justification
Prescriptive Anti-realism