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Axiological Foundationalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Robert Audi
Robert Audi*
Affiliation:
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
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Extract

Epistemological foundationalism has typically been thought to hold that in order to account for human knowledge we must countenance the direct Justification of some specific kind of beliefs, such as one's beliefs to the effect that one is having a certain sensation. How else, it may be thought, can one analyse Justification without confronting an infinite regress or a vicious circle? I believe that this conception of foundationalism has been so influential that most foundationalists and nearly all their critics have failed to appreciate that foundationalism may be plausibly construed as a thesis mainly about the structure of a body of Justified beliefs. Central to the thesis, so interpreted, is that one's Justified beliefs divide into foundations and superstructure; but no particular content on the part of either set of beliefs need be required. This latitude regarding content is altogether appropriate; for if we use, as a guide to understanding foundationalism, the famous regress argument, from which the thesis derives much of its plausibility, then the only foundations required by the thesis are beliefs whose Justification does not depend on that of other beliefs. Precisely what beliefs these are is a controversial matter on which foundationalists may differ.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , March 1982 , pp. 163 - 183
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1982

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References

1 A notable exception is Mark Pastin, who has connected foundationalism with value theory. See ‘The Reconstruction of Value; Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 5 (1975). Some of the literature on intrinsic value also bears on the topic of this paper, though less specifically. See, e.g., Moore, G.E. Ethics (Oxford; Oxford University Press 1912);Google Scholar Wright, G.H. von The Varieties of Goodness (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1963);Google Scholar and Beardsley, Monroe C. ‘Intrinsic Value; Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 26 (1965).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Some of these points are made in my paper ‘Psychological Foundationalism,' The Monist, 61 (1978); but the points are not developed at length there, since the paper's main concern is the implications of epistemological foundationalism and coherentism for cognitive psychology.

3 See Chisholm, Roderick M. Theory of Knowledge, 2nd. edn. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall 1966), 18-24.Google Scholar He does not use ‘directly Justified’ here, but seems to have a species of directly Justified beliefs in mind. As the examples I have given suggest, direct Justification need not be self-justification.

4 One might object that such a belief is a valuation. lnternalists would be especially likely to think this, since they could easily take such beliefs to have motivating force, as values do and beliefs - according to externalists - do not. I have argued against internalism in ‘Weakness of Will and Practical Judgment,’ Noûs 13 (1979); but even if internalism is true, foundationalists may simply appeal to a different kind of non-valuational Justifier than I am suggesting. Indeed, even if all values are analyzable into beliefs of some sort- which seems highly unlikely if my case against internalism is sound - the foundationalist could at least equally well make his case. He would in fact be making it on ground more familiar to him. I shall return to this issue in Section VIII.

5 This entails, but is not equivalent to the proposition that S values ϕ in such a way that, other things equal, he would value it, at the time in question, even if there should be no Ψ such that he values Ψ and believes something to the effect that ϕ does (or that it might) contribute to Ψ. One reason this sentence is so guarded is that even where S values ϕ purely intrinsically, his ceasing to believe that it is a means to Ψ might Just happen to cause him to cease valuing it at all. We might also want to speak, in the formulations in the text, of valuing or wanting Ψ. Another problem is whether, instead of requiring only that Ψ be a different state of affairs from ϕ, we should require that it be separable, i.e., capable of existing apart from ϕ. Consider, e.g., the pleasure of an activity. This is presumably distinct but not separable from it. If Sue values playing the piano because she values the pleasure of it, does she value the former intrinsically? It may be reasonable to say so, unless (perhaps) she believes this pleasure is separable from the playing. These are difficult problems, but for our purposes the formulation in the text will do.

6 See, e.g., Alston, William P. ‘Has Foundationalism been Refuted?', Philosophical Studies, 29 (1976),CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘Two Types of Foundationalism,’ Journal of Philosophy, 73 (1976); Pastin, Mark ‘C.I. Lewis's Radical Foundationalism,’ Nous, 9 (1975);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Cornman, James W. ‘Foundational versus Nonfoundational Theories of Empirical Justification,’ American Philosophical Quarterly, 14 (1977).Google Scholar Cornman argues that both Quine and Sellars are, despite appearances, probably modest foundationalists; see especially 296·7.

7 See, e.g., Sosa, Ernest ‘The Foundations of Foundationalism,’ Noûs 14 (1980);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Bonjour, Laurence ‘The Coherence Theory of Empirical Knowledge,' Philosophical Studies, 30 (1976).CrossRefGoogle Scholar The latter devotes considerable attention to problems facing foundationalism as well.

8 The problem is shown to occur in the domain of motivation, in my paper ‘The Structure of Motivation,’ Pacific Philosophical quarterly, 16 (1980).

9 Armstrong, D.M. has recognized the difficulty of the question for beliefs and plausibly answered it. See his Belief, Truth and Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1973),CrossRefGoogle Scholar Chs. 13 and 14. Some further aspects of the question are discussed in my ‘Psychological Foundationalism,’ cited in n. 2.

10 There are prima facie plausible objections to taking these relations to be transitive and irreflexive. I believe they can be answered, but it would require too much space to take them up here.

11 See Lehrer, Keith Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1974) 122-6.Google Scholar Lehrer argues plausibly against the sustaining requirement for beliefs. I cannot discuss his arguments here, but what I shall say in defending the sustaining requirement for values seems equally applicable to beliefs.

12 For instance, Laurence Bonjour holds that ‘it is not necessary that the belief orginate via inference, however tacit or even unconscious; but it must be the case that a tacit grasp of the availability of the inference is the basis for the continuing acceptance of the belief and for the conviction that it is warranted.’ Note, however, that Bonjour seems to be endorsing a sustaining requirement. See Bonjour, 296.

13 This appears to hold for Bertrand Russell, who says, of our ‘common knowledge,’ that ‘some of it is derivative, while some is primitive; that is to say, there is some that we only believe because of something else from which it has been inferred … while other parts are believed on their own accounts’ (emphasis added). See Our Knowledge of the External World, 2nd edn. (New York; 1929), 58. Rationalist foundationalists may of course maintain the same structural thesis, and I believe Descartes held a similar one.

14 D.M. Armstrong also suggests that we need a sustaining requirement to distinguish reasons from rationalizations; but he requires that in rationalizing (with respect to belief) S must desire that p be true, and this desire must be the sustaining cause of S's taking q to support p, where, even though S's belief that q, does not even partly sustain his belief that p, q is the reason S would offer to Justify his belief that p. I do not impose an analogous requirement on ‘valuational rationalization,’ but I believe requirements to this effect, even if not necessary for rationalization, do hold for the paradigm (and Freudian) cases. See Belief, Truth and Knowledge, esp. pp. 95-6.

15 Lehrer, e.g., takes a coherentist theory of (epistemic) Justification to be in part an account of what it is for a particular belief to be Justified. See, e.g., Lehrer, 154. He would presumably hold a parallel view regarding valuation.

16 These points go a significant distance toward avoiding important objections to foundationalist theories, such as those raised by Lehrer (op. cit.) and those which may be drawn from some of Wittgenstein's work. For detailed discussion of some of the latter, see Shiner, Roger A. ‘Wittgenstein and the Foundations of Knowledge,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 78 (1977-8).Google Scholar

17 See, e.g., Nicomachean Ethics 1097a30-1097b1-20.

18 For helpful criticism of earlier versions of this paper I am especially grateful to William Alston, Carl Ginet, and Warren S. Quinn, who was the commentator on the version read at the 1978 Western Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association. I have also profited from comments by a number of friends and colleagues, particularly Albert Casullo, Hardy E. Jones, Raimo Tuomela, and James Van Cleve.