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Ucin1028837654.Pdf (108.79 UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI _____________ , 20 _____ I,______________________________________________, hereby submit this as part of the requirements for the degree of: ________________________________________________ in: ________________________________________________ It is entitled: ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ Approved by: ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ BONJOUR’S RECONSIDERATION OF FOUNDATIONALISM A thesis submitted to the Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in the Philosophy Department of the College of Arts and Sciences 2002 by Fred J. Harrington B.A., The Ohio State University, 1995 Committee: Robert C. Richardson, Ph.D. (Chair) Robert A. Skipper, Ph.D. Thomas W. Polger, Ph.D. BonJour’s Reconsideration of Foundationalism Fred Harrington ABSRTACT: In BonJour’s recent essay, “The Dialectic of Foundationalism and Coherentism,” he argues for a reconsideration of foundationalism. BonJour makes three assumptions: (i) that the realist conception of truth as correspondence with the appropriate region of mind-independent reality is correct; (ii) that foundationalism is offering an account of “the fundamental structure of the epistemic justification of contingent or empirical beliefs, where what is distinctive about epistemic justification is that it involves an acceptably strong reason for thinking that the belief in question is true or likely to be true;” and (iii) that an internalist conception of epistemic justification is correct. BonJour then argues that an internalist foundationalism offers the correct conception of epistemic justification. I argue that, given the assumption of the correspondence theory of truth, an internalist foundationalism fails to provide an acceptably strong reason for supposing any belief to be true with regard to a mind-independent reality. After explicating BonJour’s notions of foundationalism, internalist justification, and truth as correspondence, the nature of foundational beliefs is explored through a dilemma posed as a challenge for metajustification. I attempt to demonstrate that foundationalism does not provide an adequate basis for epistemic inference to the external physical world, and use this to show that BonJour’s three assumptions are together incompatible. This is the goal of the first part of the thesis. In the second part of the thesis, both to emphasize that it is only this specific triumvirate that is incompatible and to suggest viable directions to proceed that are free from this criticism, I show that any two of these three notions plus the contrary of the third are compatible. Finally, I suggest that the combination of internalism, a correspondence theory of truth, and coherentism, thereby rejecting the assumption of foundationalism, shows the most promise for a complete and internally compatible theory of epistemic justification. Table of Contents Introduction 2 I. The Incompatibility of Foundationalism, Internalism, and the Correspondence Theory of Truth 5 1. Epistemic regress 5 2. Foundationalism 8 3. Internalism 10 4. A dilemma 12 5. BonJour’s proposed solution 14 6. Correspondence theory of truth 18 7. The external world 19 8. Incompatibility 26 II. Possible Internally Compatible Solutions 33 1. Reject internalism 34 2. Reject the correspondence notion of truth 39 3. Reject foundationalism 42 4. Conclusion 49 References 51 1 BonJour’s Reconsideration of Foundationalism A theory of knowledge is intended to provide an account of what knowledge is and of what it is for a belief to be justified. Not all beliefs need to be justified, but it is usually required of beliefs regarded as knowledge. An epistemological account is used to show “not only the extent and nature of our cognitive grasp on the world but also our right to that grasp: to show how far we are rational in taking the world to be the way it seems to us” (Dancy, 1988: 1). This thesis will address the structure of epistemic justification for empirical beliefs and what can and cannot be justified in a given structural schema. Some sort of structure of knowledge is needed to prevent an infinite regress in the justification of beliefs, for such a regress may leave our beliefs without any ultimate justificatory basis. That is, an adequate theory of knowledge cannot require that a belief is justified by another belief which requires justification and the justification itself is in need of justifying, ad infinitum. For at least the last four centuries, the dominant epistemological conception was that of our knowledge ultimately resting on a foundation of basic beliefs whose justification is usually grounded in our ‘given’ sensory experiences. This is the foundationalist view of the structure of knowledge. Justification of any beliefs must either appeal to basic or foundational beliefs or they must directly appeal to given experiences. Furthermore, such foundationalism has traditionally been an internalist theory of epistemic justification, wherein the justification of a belief must be accessible to 2 the believer.1 However, in the past four decades the foundationalist epistemology has increasingly come under attack as untenable; the appeal to the basic beliefs may fail to halt the epistemic regress, and the idea of a ‘given’ may itself not be coherent (Sellars, 1963; BonJour, 1978, 1985). Foundationalism has largely been replaced by coherentism, the theory that the structure of knowledge is such that beliefs considered knowledge are justified by their relation to other beliefs, forming a coherent system. Coherentists reject the notion that justification of knowledge has a structure like a building, where all beliefs derive their justification from certain foundational beliefs. Instead they favor a system structured like a raft, with the justified beliefs supporting one another (Sosa, 1980). Despite coherentism becoming the dominant internalist view in the later part of the twentieth century, there have been recent attempts to reestablish traditional internalist foundationalism as a viable theory of the structure of knowledge (BonJour, 1999a, 1999b, 2001; Fales, 1996; Fumerton, 1995, 2001). The central focus of this thesis will be the critical examination of the current foundationalist program of Laurence BonJour, a prominent epistemologist who was previously a vocal opponent of foundationalism. In BonJour’s recent essay, “The Dialectic of Foundationalism and Coherentism,” he argues for a reconsideration of foundationalism. BonJour makes three assumptions: 1 The predominance of internalism in traditional epistemology has been noted by both internalists and externalists. Laurence BonJour, an internalist, writes: When viewed from the general standpoint of the western epistemological tradition, externalism represents a very radical departure. It seems safe to say that until very recent times, no serious philosopher of knowledge would have dreamed of suggesting that a person’s beliefs might be epistemically justified simply in virtue of facts or relations that were external to his subjective conception. (BonJour, 1980: 56) In the externalist camp, Alvin Goldman writes: “Traditional epistemology has not adopted this externalist perspective. It has been predominantly internalist, or egocentric” (Goldman, 1980: 32). 3 (i) that the realist conception of truth as correspondence with the appropriate region of mind-independent reality is correct; (ii) that foundationalism is offering an account of “the fundamental structure of the epistemic justification of contingent or empirical beliefs, where what is distinctive about epistemic justification is that it involves an acceptably strong reason for thinking that the belief in question is true or likely to be true;” and (iii) that an internalist conception of epistemic justification is correct (BonJour, 1999a, 117-118). BonJour then argues that an internalist foundationalism offers the correct conception of epistemic justification. I will argue that, given the assumption of the correspondence theory of truth, an internalist foundationalism fails to provide an acceptably strong reason for supposing any belief to be true with regard to a mind-independent reality. My strategy for substantiating this thesis will be to first explicate BonJour’s notions of foundationalism, internalist justification, and truth as correspondence. The nature of foundational beliefs will be explored through a dilemma posed as a challenge for metajustification. After addressing whether foundationalism can provide an adequate basis for epistemic inference to the external physical world, I argue that BonJour’s three assumptions are together incompatible. This is the goal of the first part of the thesis. In the second part of the thesis, both to emphasize that it is only this specific triumvirate that is incompatible and to suggest viable directions to proceed that are free from this criticism, I will show that any 4 two of these three notions plus the contrary of the third are compatible. Finally, I suggest the combination that I believe shows the most promise. Although it is the current philosophy of BonJour that is under direct consideration, his foundationalism may be viewed as an exemplar. The argument attempting to establish the incompatibility
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    Bibliography Achinstein, P. (2001). The Book of Evidence, Oxford University Press. Alston, W. (1980). Level-confusions in epistemology, Midwest Studies in Philoso- phy 5(1): 135–150. Alston, W. (1983). What’s wrong with immediate knowledge? Synthese 55 (73–95). Alston, W. (1986). Epistemic circularity, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47: 1–30. Alston, W. (1993). The Reliability of Sense Perception, Cornell University Press. Baker, A. (2011). Simplicity, in E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, summer 2011 edn. Beebe, J. (2008). Bonjour’s arguments against skepticism about the a priori, Philosophical Studies 137: 243–267. Beebe, J. (2011). A priori skepticism, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 83(3): 583–602. Bergmann, M. (2004a). Epistemic circularity: malignant and benign, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 69(3): 709–727. Bergmann, M. (2004b). What’s not wrong with foundationalism, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68: 161–165. Bergmann, M. (2006a). Bonjour’s dilemma, Philosophical Studies 131: 679–693. Bergmann, M. (2006b). Justification without Awareness, Oxford University Press. Boghossian, P. (2001). Inference and insight, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63(3): 633–640. BonJour, L. (1978). Can empirical knowledge have a foundation? American Philosophical Quarterly 15(1): 1–13. BonJour, L. (1985). The Structure of Empirical Knowledge, Harvard University Press. BonJour, L. (1997). Haack on experience and justification, Synthese 112: 13–23. BonJour, L. (1998). InDefenseofPureReason, Cambridge University Press. BonJour, L. (1999). Foundationalism and the external world, Philosophical Perspectives 13: 229–249. BonJour, L. (2000). Critical study of Evan Fales, A Defense of the Given, Nous 43(3): 468–480. BonJour, L. (2001a). Precis of in defense of pure reason, Philosophy and Phe- nomenological Research 63(3): 625–631.
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