Online research in philosophy

Foundationalists and coherentists disagree over the structure of the part of the mental state corpus that is relevant for epistemic achievement (Bonjour, 1999; Dancy, 1989; Haack, 1993; Sosa, 1980; Pollock and Cruz, 1999). Given the goals of a theory of epistemic justification and the trajectory of the debate over the last three decades, it is not difficult to see how structural questions possess a kind of immediacy. In order to undertake an epistemic evaluation of a belief, one intuitive and appealing strategy is to investigate the reasons for that belief to determine whether it is epistemically positive, where the reasons are typically other beliefs. This demands that we must in turn determine whether the reasons for the belief are themselves justified. A regress looms (and thus a regress argument is in the making), and foundationalism and coherentism propose proprietary views on the structural relations between beliefs with an eye toward resolving it.

One thing all forms of foundationalism have in common is that they hold that a belief can be justified noninferentially--i.e., that its justification need not depend on its being inferred from some other justified (or unjustified) belief. In some recent publications, Peter Klein argues that in virtue of having this feature, all forms of foundationalism are infected with an unacceptable arbitrariness that makes it irrational to be a practicing foundationalist. In this paper, I will explain why his objections to foundationalism fail.

In Foundationalism, Coherentism, and the Levels Gambit, David Shatz argued that foundationalists must countenance a circular mediate justification of perceptual beliefs which the foundationalist holds are already immediately justified. Because the circularity of coherentist accounts of the justification of beliefs is a major basis of foundationalist criticism of coherentism, Shatz's claim is a serious challenge to foundationalism. In this paper, using a moderate foundationalism with a reliabilist conception of justification, I give an account of immediately and mediately justified beliefs which shows that such a foundationalism need not accept such a circular justification (and in crucial cases cannot do so) and that Shatz's claim is therefore incorrect.

The regress problem and foundationalism -- Externalist accounts of justification -- In search of coherentism -- Back to foundationalism -- The conceptualization of sensory experience and the problem of the external world -- Knowledge and justification -- Does knowledge have foundation -- Skepticism and the internal/external divide -- A virtue epistemology -- Reply to Sosa -- Reply to Bonjour.

According to memory foundationalism, seeming to remember that P is prima facie justification for believing that P. There is a common objection to this theory: If I previously believed that P carelessly (i.e. without justification) and later seem to remember that P, then (according to memory foundationalism) I have somehow acquired justification for a previously unjustified belief. In this paper, I explore this objection. I begin by distinguishing between two versions of it: One where I seem to remember that P while also seeming to remember being careless in my original believing that P and the other where I seem to remember that P while not seeming to remember my past carelessness. I argue that the former case is the real challenge for memory foundationalism. After establishing the case of unforgotten carelessness as objection to memory foundationalism, I recast memory foundationalism in way that allows it to escape this objection.

attacks new defenders of foundationalism. Some simply took on the critics, 2 but others attempted to argue that even if the critics were right, only one form of foundationalism was suspect, not foundationalism itself. For, according to these defenders, foundationalism is not to be identified with the view of Classical Foundationalism (CE) that all of our knowledge rests on incorrigible beliefs. Rather foundationalism is the view that all of our knowledge rests on beliefs that are self-warranting in some sense. Thus, even if CF is false, it does not follow that foundationalism is false.

In The Structure of Empirical Knowledge , Laurence BonJour argues that coherence among a set of empirical beliefs can provide justification for those beliefs, in the sense of rendering them likely to be true. He also repudiates all forms of foundationalism for empirical beliefs, including what he calls "weak foundationalism" (the weakest form of foundationalism he can find). In the following, I will argue that coherence cannot provide any justification for our beliefs in the manner BonJour suggests unless some form of foundational justification is assumed. In other words, the argument that BonJour gives in favor of the thesis that coherence provides a kind of justification succeeds if and only if some beliefs have (at least weak) foundational justification.

Foundationalism came under attack in two areas in the first half of this century. First, some doubted whether the foundations were adequate to support the entire structure of knowledge, and second, the doctrine of the Agiven@ came under serious attack. = However, many epistemologists were not convinced that foundationalism was to be abandoned even if the criticisms were granted. According to these epistemologist, far from having shown that foundationalism itself was at fault, the critics of foundationalism had only been attacking one particular version of foundationalism--that version that included infallibility, incorrigibility,, or some appeal to a Agiven@ at the base of the structure of justification. The claim of these defenders was that there are other possible types of foundationalism than this version of foundationalism, which has come to be called Classical Foundationalism. And thus opened up a new area of philosophical lexicography: the attempt to say what foundationalism itself is, so that Classical Foundationalism turned out to be one instance of foundationalism but not the only possible one.

Introduction -- Foundationalism versus coherentism : a dichotomy disclaimed -- Foundationalism undermined -- Coherentism discomposed -- Foundherentism articulated -- The evidence of the senses : refutations and conjectures -- Naturalism disambiguated -- The evidence against reliabilism -- Revolutionary scientism subverted -- Vulgar pragmatism : an unedifying prospect -- Foundherentism ratified -- Selected essays -- "Know" is just a four-letter word -- Knowledge and propaganda : reflections of an old feminist -- "The ethics of belief" reconsidered -- Epistemology legalized : or, truth, justice, and the American way.