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Circular Justifications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Harold I. Brown
Harold I. Brown*
Affiliation:
Northern Illinois University
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Extract

It is common practice to reject a justification out-of-hand if the argument that yields the justification is circular. Here are two recent examples. Siegel, criticizing Giere's (1988) proposal for a naturalistic philosophy of science, lists a number of questions about the justification relation between evidence and theory. Siegel then maintains that any attempt to provide a scientific account of this relation must fail:

any answer to the question of the relationship between evidence and a justified theory, if arrived at scientifically, would depend upon exactly the same relationship between it and the evidence for it as it recommends for the relationship between any justified theory and the evidence for it. Because these general questions about the epistemology of science cannot be answered naturalistically without begging the question, they cannot be so pursued. (1989, 369.)

Type
Part X. Games, Explanations, Authority, and Justification
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1994 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1994 , 1994 , pp. 406 - 414
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

I want to thank C. A. Hooker, Tomis Kapitan and Harvey Siegel for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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