Philosophy of Knowledge
L. Radzik
5 November 2012
An
Examination of Foundationalism
Epistemology is a
branch of philosophy that studies the nature of knowledge. Much of this inquiry
considers propositional knowledge: a subset of epistemology dealing with factual
knowledge and the notions of justified, true, beliefs (JTB), which lead us to
make certain conclusions about the attributes of our world. Most of this debate
argues the necessary and sufficient conditions needed to claim that we have
knowledge about the phenomena of the external world. In this essay, I will
compare what I see to be a major shortcoming of Foundationalism’s standard for
the justification of knowledge, and argue why Coherentism offers a better
standard for our inquiry. Before I can compare them and offer a defense for Coherentism,
I must go into greater detail about the epistemic problem of achieving a
justified belief.
In
epistemology, when someone makes a statement such as “I know that P,” that person is often confronted by
doubters who implore him or her to explain exactly how and why he or she has
come to believe that their statement is a justified belief. Their demand to
know “why” a propositional statement has come to be believed is ultimately an
inquiry into discovering what qualifying standards
were used to guide that person’s judgment on the truth of “P.” I want to note a this point that
“truth” in these contexts merely means that our proposition agrees with the
events we observe in the external world, and that deciphering “truth
values” is a separate issue from defining “justification.”
This
is a major philosophical problem because philosophers have never been able to
agree on what criterion should constitute a set of universally valid standards for
determining knowledge. Epistemologist Roderick Chisholm uses the phrase “the
problem of the ‘diallelus,’” to describe the challenge philosophers face in choosing
the ‘unequivocally proper’ criterion of delineating what is objectively true or
false about our world (Chisholm 61). As we will see, this is the issue that
Foundationalism and Coherentism try to resolve.
In
the quest to resolve this fundamental question, philosophers encounter a secondary—but
no less important—problem of determining which set of standards “accentuates just
those dispositions which are particularly truth conducive” (Henderson 628). That
is to say, epistemologists not only want to find justification standards that
can be used universally, they also want to find standards that help them to
formulate true beliefs (i.e. beliefs
whose truth values match the events of the external world). This requires that
philosophical standards not merely be intuitively
appealing, but also have a high level of functionality in practice.
Both
Foundationalism and Coherentism offer us similar standards, but if we take a
closer look at each one, we will be able to see how they fundamentally differ
in their respective functionality. Let us first examine the mechanics of
Foundationalism.
Foundationalism’s
standard says that beliefs are justified “if and only if it is either a basic
belief justified by the subject’s experience, or is else a derived belief
justified, directly or indirectly, by the support
of basic beliefs” (Haack 226). This differentiation between basic and derived
beliefs is intended to help us create a linear path of evidential reinforcement
for our reasons in asserting that a belief is justified.
The
“Strong” Foundationalism I want to discuss here claim that our set of basic
beliefs ought to derive purely from our sensory experiences of the external
world (Haack 227). They require that all of
our derived beliefs have a traceable basis
in our personal experiences through our conscious interaction with the outside
world. With such criteria, Foundationalism
offers us cause for acknowledging and trusting the reliability of our sensory
experiences in communicating truths about external phenomena.
The
amount of trust we are supposed to attribute to our senses is conditional,
however. Foundationalism asks us to allot our trust to our sensory experiences
in amounts that are “reasonable” to the strength or repetition of our
respective experiences (Pollock 29-30). For example, if we have an
experience—proposition “P,” that occurs
only once in our life, then we might be permitted in saying our belief about “P” is justified, but we may not be said
to have much confidence in our justification. Conversely, if we have many experiences
that are identical to “P” in
character and outcome, then we possess not only basic empirical justification,
but we may also have more confidence in
believing “P” than we may otherwise
allot if we experienced “P” a lesser number
of times.
The
reasoning behind this trust of our sensory experiences comes from the writings
of Rene Descartes. Descartes developed his Foundationalist theory because he was
greatly concerned with minimizing people’s habit of making dubitable and superficially
arbitrary (and thus unjustified) claims of knowledge. He worried that the common misuse of one’s perceptual
abilities and reason was causing people to develop entire knowledge schemas
grounded in false beliefs about the world.
To
avoid these arbitrary claims, and be able to develop what he thought to be a
justified, accurate schema of the world, Descartes asked that we mentally
“erase” everything we previously knew and “rebuild” our knowledge reservoir. He
asked us to reduce the size of our knowledge base to only those elements that
he suggested were
“indubitable,” and to develop the rest
of our knowledge from those basic elements (Descartes 75).
He
claimed that if we employed a perfect use of our reason, we would come to
realize that the only propositions that we know for certain are that, by virtue
of my capacity for introspective reflection, “I exist” (Descartes 78-80). This is commonly known as Descartes’
“cogito” principle (Newman). Descartes goes on further to say that because he
has the cognitive ability to entertain the notion of “perfection,” and the awareness that he himself is inevitably an
imperfect being, then it is reasonable for us to believe that a benevolent God
exists, whom has bestowed to us trustworthy sensory receptors with which we can
experience the external world. The reason he rejects the notion that a deceptive God exists is because he thinks that a
deceptive God would not bestow us with the notion of perfection, as this
concept inspires us to question the truth about our reality; and such questions
might grant us cause to resist the deception being caused by our malevolent
God.
This
is the general background for Foundationalism’s “basic belief vs. derived
belief” standard. I want to note at this point that I am not evaluating the validity
of Foundationalism’s argument for trusting
our sensory receptors, but am instead inquiring about its functional virtue in establishing truth-conducive “basic beliefs,” which
springboards all of our other beliefs (Henderson 631). Hence, it is from these
foundations, Descartes argued, that we could develop—by using perfect
reasoning—a linear chain of beliefs, and with further progress, an entire
linear belief set of indubitable, justified beliefs.
This
quest for making a linear-chained belief set can help us understand why
Descartes placed so much importance on excluding potentially dubitable beliefs:
he says that tracing our causal chain of reasoning is necessary to maintain the
integrity of our belief’s truth values. That is to say, by starting out with an
indubitably true basic belief, we will be able to trace the transfer of that
truth to every subsequent belief derived from that same basic belief. Descartes
fears that if we cannot keep up with the “justificatory pedigrees” behind our
beliefs, then our defense against epistemic challengers disintegrates, since we
will have doubts about our tracking of truth continuities (Henderson 630).
Although
Foundationalism offers adequate standards for deducing knowledge, I believe
that Coherence theory offers a more convincing argument. Rather than holding the
strict requirement that our basic beliefs be entirely justified by our
experience (and that all other derived experiences be identically justified therein),
Holistic Coherence theory offers us a standard that is more veracious in
describing how our cognitive processes actually function (Henderson).
Like
Foundationalism, Coherentism accepts that we should trust our sensory
experiences to produce justified knowledge. It differs, however, in its assertion
that non-empirical sources also qualify as knowledge-sources. Such
non-empirical sources include oral or written testimony from other individuals,
as well as “matters of fact” that our society accepts (the latter includes all
information obtained from the “hard sciences,” whose rejection would require us
to ignore a pestiferous amount of data about the world) (Hume 54).
Hence,
Coherentism demands that we not only take into account the information we
acquire by first-hand experience, but that we also include the totality of
information we have obtained from those non-empirical sources when we begin the
process of justifying our belief(s). From here, we are required to evaluate how
well our belief in question, “P,” coheres with our preexisting knowledge
schema. That is, we are to go through a mental process that is much like
comparing and contrasting the belief “P” with all of our compiled knowledge in order to ascertain whether or not our
belief in “P” is reinforced by our
arsenal of mental evidence. If, after such an assessment, we find that the
evidence reinforcing our belief in “P” reasonably
outweighs any evidence that may cause us to doubt “P,” then we ought to qualify “P”
as a justified belief. This standard of
reasoning leads us to Holistic Coherentism’s fundamental principle that “beliefs
can be justified only by mutual support among themselves” (Haack 226). As we
can infer, this approach would cause us to develop a knowledge reservoir that
strings our beliefs together by both direct and indirect relations, creating a
shockingly non-linear justification schema.
This
makes Coherentism, and, more specifically, Holistic Coherentism, look more like
a “spider web” system of beliefs: where each belief’s justification depends
both on how closely it coheres with those analogous beliefs surrounding it, as
well as its particular number of reinforcing “strings” holding it up within the
web (Quine 3-4). This is in stark contrast to the chain-link system proposed by
Foundationalism. The strength of this spider web analogy can be more fully
appreciated after we look at Foundationalism’s weakness.
My
dissatisfaction with the Foundationalist standard is that it demands more
justification for our beliefs than people have the capacity to offer: it asks
us to maintain justificatory relations for our beliefs that reach so far back
into their development that we must link them to our basic, foundational
beliefs (i.e. reach an answer requiring us to incorporate Descartes’ cogito principle) (Descartes 78-79). With
such strenuous requirements, Foundationalism seems mechanically inoperative; it
is so ambitious in ascertaining human capabilities that it fails in offering us
a satisfactory solution to the problem of epistemic standards. It appears that
in Foundationalism, any attempt to divulge the minute causation linkages for
those “belief sets of the size that we commonly need in our everyday rounds,” we
would inevitably violate the prudential research principle of pursuing “actual
epistemic competence” in our theories (Henderson 629).
Although we normatively should have the ability to explain our reasoning process (i.e.
produce evidence supporting our reasons for believing event “P”), this is not always possible, given
our innate psychological limitations. Each day, we are exposed to more external
phenomena (i.e. potential causes for new beliefs) than we would ever have the time to become consciously aware
of, much less retrace the justificatory pedigrees of each phenomenon, and do the same for all the information
we have accumulated from every single day preceding the present one.
In
order to overcome the potential cognitive quagmire that would occur if we had
to consciously track the precise causation linkages for each (as-of-yet)
unjustified belief we hold, our psyches have developed pneumonic devices to
bypass this process. Instead of delineating a single justificatory (empirical)
cause to each of our beliefs, our minds attribute a plethora of potential
inferential and non-inferential causal justifications for that belief. This
helps us not only to make a holistic assessment as to whether or not our belief
in event “P” should be granted
credulity—dependent on how strongly it coheres to our established beliefs—but
also lets us remain tolerant towards those beliefs with as-of-yet un-circumscribed
evidentiary justification. Thus, by creating belief system based on a
“spider
web,” we can protect ourselves from incorrectly attributing a singular cause to
an event, while remaining open to adopting new beliefs, or even to altering our
pre-established beliefs.
This
sort of causal cushioning offered by Coherentism is important to our epistemic
inquiry because it allows us more or less “learn” from our empirical and
non-empirical experiences. That is to say, that because Holistic Coherentism
judges the validity of a belief on how strongly
it coheres with our pre-established belief set, we may, in practice, find
ourselves finding sufficient, albeit weak, justification for believing in event
“P.” And we may hold this weak belief
in “P” so long as no “particular
occasion leads you to suspect what the senses report” (Chisholm 70).
Conversely,
while we may at first hold “P” to be
a weakly justified belief, we may discover some new evidence that reinforces
our belief in “P,” so that we may
augment our justificatory reasoning to include this new evidence. This practice
of tweaking our pre-established beliefs, so as to better understand the
character of each of our new experiences, carries with it huge descriptive
power in our effort to document the processes by which we obtain justified, true
beliefs—and eventually, knowledge.
The
fact that Holistic Coherentism grants us the opportunity to make changes to our
belief systems, without dismantling that system entirely, gives it a
theoretical edge over “Strong” Foundationalism. This advantage can be best
understood through an analogy introduced by W. V. O. Quine, regarding the
problem of shipbuilding: “if we are to rebuild it, we must rebuild plank by plank
while staying afloat in it…our boat stays afloat because at each alteration we
keep the bulk of it intact as a going concern" (Quine 3-4).
I
feel that Quine’s analogy exemplifies the inescapable problem at hand in that
it shows us the challenge of having to simultaneously formulate our individual
beliefs from all of the information available to us and to reconstruct our belief
sets from these new inputs, so that we retain an orderly sense of the world
around us. Because of this flexibility, I feel that Holistic Coherentism
provides us with an argument with more functional virtue than “Strong”
Foundationalism can offer.
Much
of this discussion referred to the psychological processes of belief formation.
However, I feel that because we exist under conditions where “nature has kept
us at a great distance from all her secrets and has afforded us only the
knowledge of a few superficial qualities of objects,” that
it is necessary for us to pay attention to how our limited mental faculties
work to make sense of the complex phenomena of the external world (Hume 53).
I
would like to remind my audience that I do not attempt to offer an infallible
argument for Holistic Coherentism, but merely one that demonstrates its virtue
over Foundationalism. I realize that the Coherentist standards of justification
may wrongly lead us to adopt false propositions as true beliefs. However, I
maintain that our future experiences of as-of-yet unknown empirical and
non-empirical information will be able to break the evidentiary strings
upholding our weakly supported beliefs, and instead tighten the bonds among our
beliefs that are supported by reinforcing evidence. This cognitive flexibility
of Coherentism’s epistemic justification standards are, I hold, the critical
virtue that Foundationalism lacks.
Bibliography
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Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota,
1982. 61-75.
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MA:
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Competence and Contextualist Epistemology: Why
Contextualism
is Not Just the Poor Person’s Coherentism.” The
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Philosophy, Inc.
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3-8.
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