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- Alvin Plantinga (2001). Swinburne and Plantinga on Internal Rationality. Religious Studies 37 (3):357-358.I took it that the definitions Swinburne quotes imply that all of a person's basic beliefs are (privately) rational; Swinburne demurs. It still seems to me that these definitions have this consequence. Let me briefly explain why. According to Swinburne, a person's evidence consists of his basic beliefs, weighted by his confidence in them. So presumably we are to think of S's evidence as the set of the beliefs he takes in the basic way, together with a sort of index indicating, for each of those beliefs, his degree of confidence in that belief. Now it is clear, first, that different basic beliefs can be held with different degrees of confidence. I believe 2+1 = 3 more firmly than there are presently some large trees in my backyard, and I believe that second proposition more firmly than I played bridge last night. Nevertheless, I believe all three propositions; I don't just believe them probably. So, the set of my basic beliefs contains propositions, all of which I believe. Further, a belief of mine is ‘rendered (evidentially) probable by [my] evidence’, I take it, just if it is probable with respect to the set of my basic beliefs. But of course probability of 1 with respect to that set; the degree of confidence with which I hold those beliefs does not seem to be relevant. Hence my conclusion that on these definitions all of my basic beliefs are rational. Swinburne points out that some of my basic beliefs may be improbable with respect to the rest of my basic beliefs; these beliefs, then, might be thought irrational, at least if they are not held as firmly as those with respect to which they are improbable. But this seems to me an uninteresting sense of ‘irrational’. Many of my basic beliefs are improbable with respect to my other basic beliefs; they are none the worse for that. I now remember, as it seems to me, that in the second bridge hand last night I was dealt three aces, three jacks, and three deuces. This is unlikely on the rest of my basic beliefs. It is, nonetheless, not irrational in any useful sense; memory is an important and independent source of rational belief, a source such that its deliverances do not necessarily depend, for warrant or rationality, on their probability with respect to other basic beliefs. I believe the same goes for some of my Christian beliefs. They may be improbable with respect to other beliefs, basic or otherwise, that I hold; but that need be nothing whatever against them. Footnotes1 Note: This brief discussion arises out of Richard Swinburne's critical notice of Alvin Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief (New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2000) and Plantinga's reply in Religious Studies, 37 (2001), 203–214, 215–222.Reading list | Discuss | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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In this paper we set out a view on which internalist proper basicality is secured by sensory experience.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Truth and the aim of belief -- Belief, interpretation, and Moore's paradox -- Belief, sensitivity, and safety -- Basic beliefs and the problem of non-doxastic justification -- Experience as reason for beliefs -- The problem of the basing relation -- Basic beliefs, easy knowledge, and the problem of warrant transfer -- Belief, justification, and fallibility -- Knowledge of our beliefs and privileged access.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... 'Perception and Basic Beliefs' addresses two central questions in epistemology: which beliefs are epistemologically basic (i.e., noninferentially justified) and where does perception end and inferential cognition begin.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... A particular belief of a person is basic just in case it is epistemically justified and it owes its justification to something other than her other justified beliefs or their interrelations; a person’s belief is nonbasic just in case it is epistemically justified but not basic. Foundationalists agree that if one has a nonbasic belief, then—at rock bottom—it owes its justification to at least one basic belief. There are justified beliefs (if any) because and only because there are basic beliefs. Such is the genus Foundationalism.1 In this essay I assess Peter Klein’s recent case against Foundationalism, which is centered on the charge that basic beliefs are arbitrary.
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| | Other links: faculty.wwu.edu | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Intuitively, it seems that some belief-forming practices have the following three properties:
1. They are rational practices, and the beliefs that we form by means of these practices are themselves rational or justified beliefs.
2. Even if in most cases these practices reliably lead to correct beliefs (i.e., beliefs in true propositions), they are not infallible: it is possible for beliefs that are formed by means of these practices to be incorrect (i.e., to be beliefs in false propositions).
3. The rationality of these practices is basic or primitive. That is, the rationality of these practices is not due simply to the availability, by means of some process of reasoning that relies purely on other practices, of a rational or justified belief in the reliability of these practices.
How can there be such practices? This paper offers an answer to that question.
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| | Other links: users.ox.ac.uk usc.edu | Scholar | At my library | More options ... In Warranted Christian Belief, Alvin Plantinga makes use of his earlier two books, Warrant: the Current Debate and Warrant and Proper Function, to show how it is possible for someone to have a warranted belief that God exists and that all of the great things of the Christian Gospel are true even if the believer is unable to give any argument to support these beliefs. Three objections are lodged against Plantinga’s position. First, the alleged sensus divinitatis and the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit are crucially disanalogous to the cognitive faculties, such as memory and perception, in the standard package, thereby destroying his argument based on an analogy between the former and the latter. Second, in order to defeat defeaters for these beliefs one must give arguments, thus merely relocating the point at which the believer must produce argumentative support for her belief. Third, there are moral defeaters for exclusivist basic theistic and Christian beliefs based on the undesirable consequences of such beliefs.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Alvin Plantinga argues that secular evidential ism must be false because the criteria of properly basic beliefs are too restrictive or incoherent. I argue that Plantinga’s arguments are unsound, and this is easily seen against what Wittgenstein implies about evidentialism.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Plantinga famously argues against evidentialism that belief in God can be properly basic. But the epistemology of cognitive faculties such as perception and memory which produce psychologically non-inferential beliefs shows that various inferentially justified theoretical beliefs are epistemically prior to our memory and perceptual beliefs, preventing the latter from being epistemically basic. Plantinga's analogy between the sensus divinitatis and these cognitive faculties suggests that the deliverances of the sensus divinitatis cannot be properly basic either. Objections by and on behalf of Plantinga to this argument are considered.
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| | Other links: dx.doi.org doi.wiley.com | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Plantinga defines S's belief as ‘privately rational if and only if it is probable on S's evidence’, and ‘publicly rational if and only if it is probable with respect to public evidence’, and he claims that ‘it is an immediate consequence of these definitions that all my basic beliefs are privately rational’. I made it explicitly clear in my review that on my account of a person's evidence (quoted and used by Plantinga) as ‘the content of his basic beliefs (weighted by his degree of confidence in them)’, that is not the case. I emphasize ‘weighted by his degree of confidence in them’. I wrote explicitly: ‘for more or less any belief, however convinced you are of it initially, other evidence of which you are equally convinced could rend it overall improbable’. Put technically, in probabilistic terms, basic beliefs come to us with different degrees of prior probability varying with our degree of confidence in them, but a belief with a high prior probability can in the light of other beliefs of our current set have a lower posterior probability. If you continue to hold on to a basic belief when its probability on the total evidence is below half, that belief is not privately rational. Footnotes1 Note: This brief discussion arises out of Richard Swinburne's critical notice of Alvin Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief (New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2000) and Plantinga's reply in Religious Studies, 37 (2001), 203–214, 215–222.
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| | Other links: jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... are properly basic for at least some believers in God; there are widely realized sets of conditions, I suggested, in which such propositions are indeed properly basic. And when I said that these beliefs are properly basic, I had in mind what Quinn calls the narrow conception of the basing relation.[1] I was taking it that a person S accepts a belief A on the basis of a belief B only if (roughly) S believes both A and B and could correctly claim (on reflection) that B is part of his evidence for A. S's belief that there is an error in some argument against p will not typically be a belief on the basis of which he accepts p and will not be a part of his evidence for p.
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| | Scholar | More options ... Discussion of Alvin Plantinga, Swinburne and Plantinga on internal rationality
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