Friday, December 28, 2012

An Essay on Epistemological Foundationalism


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
Chisholm, Roderick. The Foundations of Knowing. Minneapolis: University of
            Minnesota, 1982. 61-75.
Haack, Susan. Epistemology: An Anthology. Ed. Ernest Sosa and Jaegwon Kim. Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2000.
Henderson, David K. “Epistemic Competence and Contextualist Epistemology: Why
            Contextualism is Not Just the Poor Person’s Coherentism.” The Journal of
Philosophy, Inc. Vol. 91, No. 12. Dec. 1994. 627-649.
Hume, David. David Hume on Human Nature and the Understanding. Eds. C. Brinton
and P. Edwards. New York: Collier, 1962. 47-65, 115-136.
LaFleur, L.J. Descartes: Philosophical Essays. New York: Macmillan, 1988. 75-80.
Newman, Lex. "Descartes' Epistemology." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Palo Alto: 1997.
Pollock , John L. and Joseph Cruz. Contemporary Theories of Knowledge. 2nd Ed.
New York: 1999.
Quine, W. V. O and J. S. Ullian. The Web of Belief. New York: Random House. 1970.
3-8.


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