Abstract
Several arguments attempt to show that if traditional, acquaintance-based epistemic internalism is true, we cannot have foundational justification for believing falsehoods. I examine some of those arguments and find them wanting. Nevertheless, an infallibilist position about foundational justification is highly plausible: prima facie, much more plausible than moderate foundationalism. I conclude with some remarks about the dialectical position we infallibilists find ourselves in with respect to arguing for our preferred view and some considerations regarding how infallibilists should develop their account of infallible foundational justification. In particular, I provide an account of how propositions that moderate foundationalists claim are foundationally justified derive their epistemic support from infallibly known propositions. This is possible when a foundational proposition is coarsely-grained enough to correspond to determinable properties exemplified in experience or determinate properties that a subject insufficiently attends to; one may have inferential justification derived from such a basis when a more finely-grained proposition includes in its content one of the ways that the foundational proposition could be true.
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Notes
Epistemologists overwhelmingly accept additional requirements on having a justified belief, so-called doxastic justification. For instance, if in addition to having adequate propositional justification for p and believing p one’s belief that p must be based on one’s justification, and if basing is a causal relation, then it is implausible that all factors that constitute one’s doxastic justification are factors with which one can be acquainted. Perhaps the best solution is simply to abandon a basing condition the satisfaction of which could not be an object of one’s acquaintance.
So, one can be an internalist in the awareness sense and an evidentialist if one identifies a subject’s evidence with what a subject is (or has been, or could become) aware of, as Feldman seems to do in places. And one could hold the view that seemings that a subject is aware of are the only things that contribute to a subject’s justification, and one would then have a critical role for seemings in one’s epistemology while making the epistemic relevance of seemings a result of subjects’ acquaintance with them. To my knowledge, no one holds the latter view.
“Traditional” internalists locate the inspiration for their view in early modern figures, including Descartes. Cf. Coppenger (2016).
This is the way Fumerton puts it in his works cited in this paper, but the same basic view appears in the work of other traditional internalists discussed throughout.
It is important to distinguish two different ways that foundational justification could be fallible. It could be that one only has foundational justification for true thoughts, but that one’s justification does not need to entail that the thought is true. Or, it could be that one may have foundational justification for false thoughts. Cf. Tucker (2016).
For critics who insist on infallible foundations, see the arguments discussed below. For an argument that infallible foundations are too meager to support our many justified beliefs, see Sosa (2003).
Little hangs on whether correspondence in particular is the truth-making relation the internalist identifies as the relation one must be acquainted with to have foundational justification. Fumerton states in some places that acquaintance with correspondence is necessary, and in other places that acquaintance with the truth-making relation is necessary (1995, 2006a, b, respectively). The main point that should be agreeable to all traditional internalists, however, is that foundational justification depends in part on awareness of the fact that a proposition one entertains fits with or matches some further fact with which one is acquainted.
The demand for a non-question-begging justification for putatively known foundational propositions resembles the basic challenge that Peter Klein has used to argue for infinitism (1998).
McGrew argues that justified empirical foundational propositions include de re reference to qualitative features of consciousness. In this way, forming the belief expressed by “I am experiencing this” guarantees that the belief is true, because that exact belief could not be formed if there were no ‘this’ that the belief includes as its content. In this way, McGrew’s account of foundational justification implies infallible foundationalism. But it is important to distinguish his account of infallible foundations and his argument against moderate foundationalism. I have just argued that the latter fails, and I left untouched his arguments for his positive view, which I find much more compelling.
This point also applies to the argument in (Poston 2010) discussed in the next section. Also see the next footnote.
To be fair to Ballantyne (and, in a moment, Poston) there are places where Fumerton seems to closely connect having assurance and acquaintance with factors that actually do constitute the truth of what one believes. However, what Fumerton says about fallible foundational justification strongly suggests that his notion of assurance is not as demanding as his critics insist. See especially his (2006a).
While Poston presents his main argument as a dilemma, the same basic argument appears on both horns, so I read that argument as his general argument.
Later in the paper, Poston repeats this argument against weakened conditions for foundational justification that Fumerton has proposed in a few places (1995, 2002, 2006a, 2009). Those conditions say one can have foundational justification for believing that p when one is acquainted with the thought that p, the fact q that is very similar to p, and a relation very similar to correspondence between the thought p and the fact q. As Poston points out, correspondence is trivially very similar to itself, and fact p is trivially very similar to the fact p. So, Poston’s argument that infallible foundations do not provide assurance also applies to fallible foundations. That is why I regard the argument that I discuss as the main argument of Poston (2010).
See footnote 1.
That is why Laurence BonJour (1985) used a strong awareness principle to undermine any version of foundationalism—both internalist and externalist—on the way to developing his coherence theory of justification.
Note that this line of argument applies to the problem of the speckled hen (Chisholm 1942). One may have fallible inferential justification for believing that there are exactly n speckles when one has infallible foundational justification for believing that there is some definite range of speckles that includes n.
Such relations may be probabilistic or explanatory, but I am skeptical that there are any fundamental explanatory relations that do not reduce to probabilistic relations, so one must be careful offering accounts of justification that depend heavily on explanatory concepts. See Appley and Stoutenburg (2016), Fumerton (1980) and Stoutenburg (2015a).
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Acknowledgements
I thank Nathan Ballantyne, Landon Elkind, Richard Fumerton, Ali Hasan, Sam Taylor, Chris Tucker, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on this paper at various stages.
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Stoutenburg, G. Traditional Internalism and Foundational Justification. Erkenn 85, 121–138 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0021-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0021-9