Newman Studies Journal

Volume 4, Issue 1, Spring 2007

Marty Miller Maddox
Pages 69-86

Newman
Certain Knowledge and “The Problem of the Criterion”

This essay examines Newman’s approach to the age-old skeptical “problem of the criterion” in his An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. By examining Newman’s accent on the illative sense as right judgment in rationation, especially in the justification of first principles of knowledge, this essay depicts Newman as offering a proceduralist approach to answering “the problem of the criterion.”