Abstract
In this paper a new conception of foundation-oriented epistemology is developed. The major challenge for foundation-oriented justifications consists in the problem of stopping the justificational regress without taking recourse to dogmatic assumptions or circular reasoning. Two alternative accounts that attempt to circumvent this problem, coherentism and externalism, are critically discussed and rejected as unsatisfactory. It is argued that optimality arguments are a new type of foundation-oriented justification that can stop the justificational regress. This is demonstrated on the basis of a novel result in the area of induction: the optimality of meta-induction. In the final section the method of optimality justification is generalized to deductive and abductive inferences.
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Notes
If the conclusion of a deductive inference contains a predicate that doesn’t occur in the premises, then this predicate is completely irrelevant, in the sense of being replaceable by any other predicate salva validitate of the inference. This follows from the theorem of uniform substitution for predicates (cf. Schurz 1991). Examples (the underlined predicates are replaceable salva validitate): \(\hbox {Fa }\vert \hbox {== } \hbox { Fa}\vee \underline{\hbox {G}}a, \,\forall \hbox {x}(\hbox {Fx}\rightarrow \hbox {Gx}) ~\vert \hbox {== } \,\forall \hbox {x}(\hbox {Fx}\wedge \underline{\hbox {H}}\hbox {x} \rightarrow \hbox {Gx})\) (etc.).
Inductive and abductive inferences are often subsumed under the umbrella notion of inductive inferences in the wide sense (cf. Pollock 1986, p. 42).
This definition of “internalism” is also called accessibility-internalism, as opposed to state-internalism (Fumerton 1995, pp. 60–66).
A different translation is proposed by Rutz (1972): He translates sentences of the three-valued logic into n-tuples of sentences of the two-valued logic.
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This work was supported by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), SPP 1516.
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Schurz, G. Optimality justifications: new foundations for foundation-oriented epistemology. Synthese 195, 3877–3897 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1363-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1363-6