This Is Epistemology. J. Adam Carter
Recall that doxastic justification for the infinitist requires two components: first, that the belief be propositionally justified, and, second, that the agent cite enough of the reasons from the series to satisfy contextual demands. If the notion of availability is weakened in the sense that it might have to be in order to get around Podlaskowski and Smith's objection, then it looks as though the infinite series of reasons “available” to you in such an attenuated sense has a marginalized role to play in explaining your doxastic justification. And, correspondingly, the reasons you cite to satisfy contextual demands play a comparatively larger role in accounting for your doxastic justification. But at this point, the position begins to look like a version of foundationalism rather than infinitism! Doxastic justification would in the main be a matter of citing a finite number of reasons (the last of which plays a special role in “clinching” the contextual provision demand), whereas the infinite series that is available to you includes reasons you'd more likely than not fail to cite correctly.
27 27 Incidentally, this is a point that Sosa (1980, p. 19) appeals to in objecting as well to coherentism.
28 28 The fact that it makes little sense to support the more certain with the less certain is why Wittgenstein objected to G.E. Moore's (1939) famous attempt to prove through argument that the external world exists – something Moore knows if he knows anything at all (including the reasons he could cite as evidence for it). For further discussion of Moore's proof, see Chapter 11 on skepticism.
29 29 Ernest Sosa (1980, p. 8) refers to this general position – that justification is a matter of relations between beliefs – as an Intellectualist Model of Justification.
30 30 This line of thinking could be further developed so as to indicate that your belief that the singular proposition “There is a tomato” is true, after the reveal, will accompany not only other demonstrative singular propositions (e.g. such as that the thing on the platter looks like a tomato) but also general propositions – for example, that something is on the table. Our response to the worry (expressed without reference to general propositions) applies mutatis mutandis to a version of the worry that included general propositions. For discussion about the difference between the two, see Fitch and Nelson (2016).
31 31 For helpful discussions of irrationality and delusion, see Bortolotti (2014) and Sacks (1985). The example of people who believe that there had been spaceships shaped like cars is taken from Wright (2013).
32 32 Note that some self‐described forms of coherentism maintain that coherence cannot justify beliefs from scratch but maintain nonetheless that coherence can justify beliefs that already have some initial degree of justification (even if miniscule) from something other than coherence. As Olsson (2014, Section 1) observes, however, such views might be better described as weak foundationalism as opposed to coherentism.
33 33 Note that the Regress Argument, understood as an argument for foundationalism, is distinct from the more general Regress Problem canvassed in Section 1.1.
34 34 See Pryor (2014, p. 206).
35 35 We assume our readers will be familiar with sudoku. If you are not, you can check out the rules here: https://sudoku.com/how‐to‐play/sudoku‐rules‐for‐ complete‐beginners.
36 36 For a discussion of defeat in terms of warrants rather than in terms of evidence, see Lyons and Graham (2020).
37 37 See Pollock (1986, pp. 29–30, 37–58) for the classic presentation of defeaters in epistemology.
38 38 According to some foundationalists, the relevant property here is simply the truth of the belief. On such views, foundational beliefs are self‐justifying. According to Turri and Klein (2014, pp. 6–7), this kind of position is usually associated with what they call “traditional” foundationalism, whereas those they term meta‐ justificatory foundationalists deny that the property doing the justifying work for foundational beliefs must be the truth of such beliefs.
39 39 At least, this assumption seems innocent enough provided we are taking responsible beliefs to be those beliefs that are not irresponsibly held. Some philosophers build further requirements into the notion of a responsible belief, beyond it not being held irresponsibly. Linda Zagzebski (1996) requires that a responsibly held belief is in some way praiseworthy – viz. attributable to some kind of intellectual virtue on the part of the subject. It is more contentious whether responsible beliefs must be not merely not‐irresponsible but also praiseworthy. Sosa (2017, pp. 147–149), for example, suggests that the belief one has that the room has just gotten dark, immediately as the light goes off, is not something that can be credited to one's agency, given that in such circumstances, one couldn't help but to form such a belief (e.g. if one tried to believe the room was not dark, one would fail). Putting this all together: if the requirement that beliefs be responsibly held is unpacked in a robust way so as to involve praiseworthiness on the part of the agent, Assumption 1 looks less plausible. If read as a minimal claim to the effect that justified beliefs cannot be irresponsibly held, the claim looks beyond reproach.
2 PERCEPTION
2.1 Introduction
2.1 Let's pick up on something from the previous chapter, the isolation objection to coherentism. You're walking along a path and you turn a corner. You had no expectations about what you'd see when you turned this corner. You certainly didn't expect to see a pig, but there it is, standing before you. Those who didn't tread this path might have had some reason to think that a pig would be here. They might have noticed some nearby buckets of pig food or heard tales of this pig. Now that you've turned the corner and see what you do, your situation is different to theirs.
2.2 As J.L. Austin (1962) succinctly puts it:
if the animal then emerges and stands there plainly in view, there is no longer any question of collecting evidence: its coming into view doesn't provide me with more evidence that it's a pig, I can now just see that it is, the question is settled.
(Austin 1962, p. 115)
Before you saw it, it would have been unreasonable to believe that a pig was present. After you saw it, however, the question is settled. It would be unreasonable now not to believe there is a pig standing before you. What changed between then and now that accounts for this significant change in your epistemic position? The obvious answer is that the pig came into view. A pig standing there unobserved (e.g. hiding behind a tree, or wearing an invisibility cloak) wouldn't improve your epistemic position. Seeing it makes all the difference. The change in your visual experience is the obvious explanation as to why it is now rational to believe something it wasn't rational to believe before.
2.3 Remember the difficulty that this poses for coherentism. The beliefs that you had before you turned the corner didn't support the pig‐hypothesis. But when you turn the corner and