Arbitrary foundations?

Philosophical Forum

Volumn 34, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 141-152

  Huemer, Michael ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60949364589     PISSN: 0031806X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9191.00131     Document Type: Article

References (25)

1. In fact, this does not follow from foundational ism as defined, for two reasons. First, because a foundationalist might hold only that some beliefs have a relatively low degree of noninferential justification, insufficient by itself for justified belief. This would be plausible in conjunction with the view that coherence among these beliefs ratchets up their justification. See Laurence BonJour's definition of "weak foundationalism," The Structure of Empirical Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) 28. Second, the claim that A does not depend on B does not imply that it is possible for A to exist in the absence of B. For if B were an inevitable consequence of A, or if B were necessary on its own, without reference to A, then it would be true that one could not have A without B but false that A depends on B. One could hold that there are some noninferen-tially justified propositions that we inevitably also have reasons for. However, I shall pass over this point for now, because I do not consider it the most interesting problem for Arbitrariness Objection to foundationalism
2. None of these things follows from foundationalism. See William Alston, "Has Foundationalism Been Refuted?" Epistemic Justification (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989) 39-56, for responses to several objections of this kind
3. Peter Klein, "Human Knowledge and the Infinite Regress of Reasons," Philosophical Perspectives 13 (1999): 297. The AO is more commonly encountered in conversation than in print
4. See the quotation from Klein, "Human Knowledge," above (footnote 3)
5. I have in mind the sort of interpretations offered by Richard von Mises, Probability, Statistics, and Truth (London: Allen, 1957)
6. and Karl Popper, "The Propensity Interpretation of Probability," British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 10 (1959): 25-42, "Physical probability" here is slightly misleading, since frequentist and propensity interpretations may apply equally well to probabilities of nonphysical events, if such there be, as to probabilities of physical events. The term is intended merely as a contrast to "subjective probability," "epistemic probability," and "logical probability."
7. See Colin Howson and Peter Urbach, Scientific Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1989), ch. 3, for a subjective interpretation of probability. This interpretation is closely related to the epistemic interpretation, since it is standardly stipulated that probabilities are rational degrees of belief
8. See John Maynard Keynes, A Treatise on Probability (London: Macmillan, 1921)
9. Rudolph Carnap, Logical Foundations of Probability (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950). The distinction between epistemic and logical interpretations is just this: the former identifies a proposition's probability with its level of justification, while the latter postulates a logical property that grounds (and is equal to) a proposition's level of justification. This distinction is not important for our purposes
10. Thus, for example, Alvin Goldman's reliabilism leads him to embrace a form of foundationalism; see his "What Is Justified Belief?" Liasons: Philosophy Meets the Cognitive and Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992) 117-18
11. Keynes 5, 15-16. This cannot be taken literally, since neither entailment nor necessity comes in degrees. Instead, the theory is that there is a logical property that does come in degrees, such that necessity is one of the extreme values of that property (impossibility being the opposite extreme); or that there is a logical relation that comes in degrees, such that entailment is one of the extreme values of that relation (incompatibility being the opposite extreme)
12. Keynes 11-12
13. This interpretation is suggested by the argument in BonJour, Empirical Knowledge 31-32
14. Daniel Howard-Snyder has pressed this objection against BonJour ("BonJour's 'Basic Antifoun-dationalist Argument' and the Doctrine of the Given," Southern Journal of Philosophy 36 [1998]: 163-77, esp. 165)
15. See William Alston on level confusions, "Level Confusions in Epistemology," Epistemic Justification (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press) 153-71. A level confusion is a confusion between, for example, the conditions for knowing that P and the conditions for knowing that one knows that P, or between the conditions for being justified in believing that P and the conditions for being justified in believing that one is justified in believing that P, and so forth
16. Cf. Michael Huemer's objection to Fumerton's Principle of Inferential Justification, "Fumerton's Principle of Inferential Justification," Journal of Philosophical Research 27 (2002): 329-40
17. Unlike "the foundationalist" and "the antifoundationalist, " "the infinitist" turns out to be a definite description, referring to Peter Klein. Klein ("Human Knowledge" 309-10) rejects a condition on justified belief very similar to (b) on the grounds that it "confuses having a justified belief that p with having justified beliefs about p's justificatory status." He also seems to grant the existence of a limit to the complexity of beliefs that a person can grasp
18. See, for example, Ernest Sosa on "formal foundationalism," Knowledge in Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 179-80
19. For attempts to specify some epistemically relevant features of beliefs, see Roderick M. Chisholm, The Foundations of Knowing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982) 12, 21-2
20. Robert Audi, The Structure of Justification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 308
21. Michael Huemer, Skepticism and the Veil of Perception (Lanham, MD: Rowman, 2001) 99
22. Peter Klein, "Foundationalism and the Infinite Regress of Reasons," Philosophy and Phenomeno-logicat Research 58 (1998): 919-25, esp. 924
23. See also BonJour 31
24. and Klein, "Human Knowledge," 303-04, for similar arguments. Note that Klein ("Human Knowledge," 309, 319 n. 15) seems to accept an interpretation of probability in terms of justification for belief, making "highly likely to be true" in the above passage plausibly interpreted as "justified."
25. I here refer to what Richard Fumerton, Metaepistetnology and Skepticism (Lanham, MD: Rowman, 1995) 63, calls "weak access internalism." "Strong access internalism," on the other hand, requires that S actually know or otherwise be aware of the conditions that make S's belief justified. The strong access internalist cannot make use of the reply I give here. However, strong access internalism should be rejected on independent grounds, since it generates an infinite regress of beliefs of ever-increasing complexity (Fumerton 64, 82)