Conclusion
1.91 The epistemic regress problem arises when we try to identify the features that distinguish justified from unjustified beliefs. The Principle of Sufficient Difference tells us that there must be some further difference between these beliefs that accounts for the fact that the justified ones are justified and the others aren't. The natural place to look to understand this difference is to the kind of rational support these beliefs enjoy. Clear cases of justified belief are cases in which further beliefs provide strong support for those beliefs. Clear cases of unjustified belief are cases in which further beliefs lack such support. As we've seen, there is disagreement about the structure of this support. The coherentists and infinitists don't think that there are (or could be) foundational beliefs that terminate the regress, justified beliefs that can justify further beliefs without themselves being justified by any further beliefs. The foundationalists, for their part, don't think that any putative structure of justification could really justify the beliefs embedded in that structure unless there are foundational beliefs that can transmit that support to further elements in the structure via inference.
1.92 While the infinitists, coherentists, and foundationalists all have to deal with serious objections, the standard objections to foundationalism seem most clearly surmountable. In the chapters to come, we'll look at some of the different ways that the foundationalist view might be fleshed out. Most contemporary foundationalists believe that our perceptual beliefs are among the foundational beliefs, so we'll look at some debates about the nature of perceptual experience in the next chapter and discuss the significance of these debates for the foundationalist project in the chapter after that.
Free Internet Resources
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu. See entries for Foundationalism (Ted Poston), Infinitism in Epistemology (Peter Klein and John Turri), Coherentism in Epistemology (Peter Murphy), Ancient Greek Skepticism (Harald Thorsrud).
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu. See entries for Foundationalist Theories of Epistemic Justification (Ali Hasan and Richard Fumerton), Coherentist Theories of Epistemic Justification (Erik Olsson).
Notes
1 1 Some philosophers distinguish between those beliefs that merely guide behavior, but which we would not be inclined to positively endorse on reflection (e.g. our suppressed beliefs, including those which might be painful to consider), from those we would be inclined to affirm as true. Ernest Sosa (e.g. 2017) terms the former “functional” beliefs and the latter “judgmental” beliefs. For the present purposes, we'll be referring to beliefs in a general sense. However, the distinction between functional and judgmental beliefs will be revisited in Chapter 11.
2 2 The reader can assume that by “justified” we will always mean (throughout the discussion in this book) “epistemically justified” – viz. justified from the point of view where what matters is things like truth and knowledge – unless explicitly stated otherwise.
3 3 The careful reader might have caught something here that seems problematic; what if some of the beliefs you have include words like “right” and “wrong”, “good” and “bad”, “justified” and “unjustified”? Given that the helmet – by stipulation – scans all of your beliefs, won't it scan these beliefs, too? And if so, then isn't it incorrect to suppose that the helmet does not detect normativity? Here it is important to distinguish between (i) the scientists' describing, without passing judgment, that you have some belief that includes a normative term (e.g. your belief that murder is wrong), and (ii) the scientists' being able to tell whether your beliefs actually have some kind of normative status (e.g. whether they are justified, unjustified). On the situation we're inviting you to imagine here, suppose what the helmet cannot do is, specifically, (ii).
4 4 Flipping a coin is certainly a method you could apply! But it is an unreliable method, one that would lead you astray as easily as not.
5 5 The philosophical strategy, more generally, of constraining our epistemological theorizing with reference to our judgments about obvious cases is developed in a notable way in epistemology by Roderick Chisholm (1973).
6 6 But wait! Could there be a simple shortcut? What about the following “obvious” rule: “Put all and only justified beliefs in Your Book of Justified Beliefs.” Following the “obvious rule” would result in your achieving your goal – for if you followed this rule, you'd get the easy cases (B1 and B2) right, along with all the rest. The obvious problem with the obvious rule, though, is that this rule doesn't actually help you do what you're trying to do. It doesn't help you work out which beliefs in Your Book of Beliefs are justified and which are not. You think you already know the easy cases. You're not sure about the rest. And you're not sure why the easy cases are right.
7 7 For a discussion of the principle (under a less snazzy name), see Goldman (1999b, p. 2).
8 8 The gist of the idea would be to, first, find some feature, F, that B1 has but B2 doesn't have, which could plausibly account for why B1, but not B2, is justified. Next, extrapolate from this difference between B1 and B2 to generate a rule, framed with reference to F, that looks something like this: “Include all and only beliefs with feature F in Your Book of Justified Beliefs.”
9 9 What does “adequate” mean? A piece of evidence might provide some support for a belief without providing adequate support for a belief. We might say that a piece of evidence, E, supports your belief in p if adding E to your set of evidence increases p's probability. If the increase is very small, the evidence might support p without providing adequate support. The observation that someone is about to swim laps is some evidence that they'll drown and the observation that someone has been handed a lottery ticket is some evidence that they'll soon be rich. These observations increase the probability of the relevant beliefs ever so slightly. They don't provide an adequate basis for belief, however. We will discuss this further in the chapter on inference.
10 10 Typically, skeptics about epistemic justification (particularly those persuaded by the kind of regress argument we are discussing in this chapter) have embraced not only the contingent, descriptive thesis that no beliefs are justified, but, even more, the necessary, modal thesis that epistemic justification is impossible. For the present purposes, we'll sidestep this distinction – for the contingent descriptive thesis that no beliefs are justified suffices for at least one interesting kind of skepticism – and return to it in Chapter 11.
11 11 Interestingly, many of the philosophers associated with the doctrine of skepticism about epistemic justification would be disinclined to say that they know or even justifiably believe the doctrine to be true. Pyrrhonian skeptics typically were
