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Notes
Except as noted, all page references are to Boghossian (2006).
See de Santillana (1955), p. 28.
See Rorty (1981), pp. 328–329.
Ibid., p. 331.
Boghossian assumes, at least for purposes of this book, that knowledge requires justification (15).
Boghossian might also have pointed out that Revelation is also supposed to justify beliefs about things on earth.
Of course, even if we have here a case of real conflict between genuinely incompatible epistemic frameworks, we could still resist Equal Validity and plump for skepticism instead, claiming that there is an objective fact about which framework is correct—one that we are not in a position to know. Boghossian tries briefly to persuade us that such skepticism is palatable if it is due to some contingent condition, like our recognition of a sufficiently impressive and coherent epistemic framework that competes with our own: “While it is very plausible to claim that, if there are absolutely correct epistemic principles, they ought to be accessible in principle, it is much less plausible to claim that if there are such principles, we must know what they are here and now, in the actual world,” (102). One might worry, however, that skepticism about fundamental epistemic principles would quickly ramify into universal skepticism. Even if being justified in believing that p does not require knowing the principles that make this belief justified, genuine doubts about what counts as a justification might lead one to suspend first-order belief. I lack the space to pursue this issue further here.
Though the assumption that fundamental epistemic principles must be known is later questioned—see note 7, above—their in-principle a priori knowability is not.
See Good (1967).
References
Boghossian, P. (2006). Fear of knowledge: Against relativism and constructivism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
de Santillana, G. (1955). The crime of Galileo. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Good, I. J. (1967). The white shoe is a red herring. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 17, 322.
Rorty, R. (1981). Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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MacFarlane, J. Boghossian, Bellarmine, and Bayes. Philos Stud 141, 391–398 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9281-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9281-6