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JUSTIFICATION AND KNOWLEDGE PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES SERIES IN PHILOSOPHY Editors: WILFRID SELLARS, University of Pittsburgh KEITH LEHRER, University of Arizona Board of Consulting Editors: JONATHAN BENNETT, University of British Columbia ALAN GIBBARD, University ofPittsburgh ROBERT STALNAKER, Cornell University ROBERT G. TURNBULL, Ohio State University VOLUME 17 JUSTIFICATION AND KNOWLEDGE New Studies in Epistemology Edited by GEORGE S. PAPPAS The Ohio State University D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY DORDRECHT: HOLLAND / BOSTON: U.S.A. LONDON: ENGLAND Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: Justification and knowledge. (Philosophical studies series in philosophy; v. 17) "Papers ... were originally presented at a conference held in April, 1978, at the Ohio State University." Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Kno\\'kdgc, Theory of-Congresses. 1. Pappas, George Sotiros, 1942- BD161.187 121 79-19447 ISBN-13: 978-90-277-1024-6 c-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-9493-5 DOl: 10.1007/978-94-009-9493-5 Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company, P.O. Box 17, Dordrecht, Holland Sold and distributed in the U.S.A., Canada, and Mexico by D. Reide~. Publishing Company, Inc. Lincoln Building, 160 Old Derby Street, Hingham, Mass. 02043, U.S.A. All Rights Reserved Copyright © 1979 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 15t edition 1979 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any informational storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner. This volume is dedicated to the memory of JAMES W. CORNMAN whose most untimely and pre­ mature death in May of 1978 was a great loss to his many friends and to Philosophy. TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE ix GEORGE S. PAPPAS / Introduction xi ALVIN I. GOLDMAN / What is Justified Belief? MARSHALL SWAIN / Justification and the Basis of Belief 25 GEORGE S. PAPPAS / Basing Relations 51 KEITH LEHRER / The Gettier Problem and the Analysis of Knowledge 65 ERNEST SOSA / Epistemic Presupposition 79 10 HN L. PO LLOCK / A Plethora of Epistemological Theories 93 RODERICK M. CHISHOLM / The Directly Evident 115 JAMES W. CORNMAN / On Justifying NonBasic Statements by Basic- Reports 129 MARK PASTIN / The Need for Epistemology: Problematic Realism Defended 151 WILFRID SELLARS / More on Givenness and Explanatory Coherence 169 NANCY KELSIK / Bibliography 183 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 213 NAME INDEX 215 SUBJECT INDEX 217 vii PREFACE With one exception, all of the papers in this volume were originally presented at a conference held in April, 1978, at The Ohio State University. The excep­ tion is the paper by Wilfrid Sellars, which is a revised version of a paper he originally published in the Journal ofPhilosophy, 1973. However, the present version of Sellars' paper is so thoroughly changed from its original, that it is now virtually a new paper. None of the other nine papers has been published previously. The bibliography, prepared by Nancy Kelsik, is very extensive and it is tempting to think that it is complete. But I believe that virtual com­ pleteness is more likely to prove correct. The conference was made possible by grants from the College of Human­ ities and the Graduate School, Ohio State University, as well as by a grant from the Philosophy Department. On behalf of the contributors, I want to thank these institutions for their support. I also want to thank Marshall Swain and Robert Turnbu~l for early help and encouragement; Bette Hellinger for assistance in setting up the confer­ ence; and Mary Raines and Virginia Foster for considerable aid in the pre­ paration of papers and many other conference matters. The friendly advice of the late James Cornman was also importantly helpful. April,1979 GEORGE S. PAPPAS ix INTRODUCTION The papers in this volume deal in different ways with the related issues of epistemic justification or warrant, and the analysis of factual knowledge. Some essays are concerned primarily with the first of these issues, others with the second, and some with both. In the opening paper Alvin Goldman takes as his central task that of pro­ viding a noncircular, informative and accurate naturalistic explanation of the notion of justified beliefs. His positive proposal is that whether a belief is just­ ified is a function of the reliability of the processes which cause the belief. His answer, thus, is in keeping with causal accounts of knowledge which he developed in earlier papers. What is of special interest in the present paper, however, is the extended and detailed spelling out of the relevant notion of reliabili ty. Goldman characterizes his theory as a Genetic or Historical theory, since according to it the justification of a belief is a function of the 'prior history' of the belief. He dubs his theory 'historical reliabilism.' Such historical theories are held to sharply contrast with 'Current Time-Slice' theories of justification since, on the latter theories, the justification of a belief is wholly dependent on facts pertaining to the knower at the time he or she has the be­ lief, or perhaps comes to have the belief. A number of classical and contemp­ orary epistemologists are classified according to whether they fall in one of these two major groups. Marshall Swain also holds that the notions of causality and epistemic justification are crucially connected. Moreover, like Goldman, Swain offers a reliability account of epistemically justified beliefs, one which he labels the 'probabilistic-reliability model.' The major part of Swain's paper concerns what it is for a belief to be based on reasons. Swain takes reasons to be states of a person, some of which (but only some) are usually belief-states. Other reason-states might be perceptual­ states or sensation-states. A person's belief is based on such reason-states, according to Swain's account, when there is some causal relation between the belief and the reason states, or some relation of what he calls 'pseudo-over­ determination'. He thus provides a causal account of the (or a) basing relation. Swain's reliability theory of justification is also sketched in his paper. One difference between his account and that of Goldman is that Swain utilizes the xi George S. Pappas (ed.), Justification and Knowledge, xi-xv. Copyright © 1979 by D. Reidel Publishing Company. xii INTRODUCTION notion of competition between beliefs while Goldman does not (at least not explicitly). This notion of competition is necessary to tum aside an objection, to Swain's theory, which derives from the lottery paradox. Knowledge is often said to, at times, be based on evidence or reasons. In my paper, several distinct basing relations are considered. A believed pro­ position, h, is said to be inferentially based on evidence e provided that h is deductively, inductively, or epistemically derivable from e. And it seems quite plausible to say that a person has knowledge on the basis of some evidence only if his belief is inferentially based on the evidence. It also seems that a person's knowledge is based on evidence only if his belief, and not the believed proposition, is based on the evidence or the hav­ ing of it. A number of different interpretations of belief-basing are thus considered, but for none of them is it found that knowing on the basis of evi­ dence requires belief-basing. This somewhat counterintuitive result is not the opposite of that defended by Swain, however, unless the notion of evidence is replaced by that of reasons. I also distinguish the notion of one's justification for belief being based on one's evidence. The central suggestion here is that different theories of justifi­ cation-basing can be scaled according to whether they require that the subject be a perspicacious agent or not, and if so, to what degree. That is, roughly, some theories of what it is to be justified on the basis of one's evidence require that the person either know or justifiably believe a great deal about his evidence and its relation to his putatively justified belief, while other theories require considerably less perspicacity, vis-a-vis one-'-s evidence, of the subject. Several accounts of justification-basing are examined, and an account which incorporates a weak perspicacity condition is proposed, The first three papers are concerned primarily with epistemic justification and basing relations. In the next two papers, by Keith Lehrer and Ernest Sosa, different analyses of factual knowedge are proposed and defended. Lehrer first advances a distinction between acception and believing it. Many analyses of knowledge, including some earlier endorsed by Lehrer, have stated that knowledge entails belief. Such accounts, Lehrer says, are mistaken; knowledge entails, instead, acceptance. Lehrer explicates reasonable acceptance of a proposition in terms of comp­ etition. Roughly, a proposition is reasonably acceptable by a person just in case the proposition fares well in competition with others. This idea of linking reasonable acceptance and competition (which is also found at the end of Swain's paper) is then put to use in distinguishing several distinct ways of dealing with types of sceptical ploys. Lehrer also defends a specific analysis of INTRODUCTION xiii factual knowledge by a discussion of Gettier and Gettier-like examples, and by contrasting his analysis with those recently proposed by Risto Hilpinen and Peter Klein. In his paper, Sosa introduces the notion of epistemic presupposition, which he then uses to help shed light on Gettier-type problems and, as well, on several recent proposals for dealing with Gettier problems (made by Harman, Goldman, and Sosa himself in an earlier paper). These matters are treated, first, informally. Then, in the fmal section of his paper, Sosa more precisely sets out and clarifies the concept of epistemic presupposition, and incorporates it in a wider theory of factual knowledge and justification.

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