Abstract
In a series of articles William Alston has done much to clarify the concept of epistemic justification and to delineate some limits and presuppositions of epistemology. It is important to examine his discussion here, for he objects to Sextus’s dilemma of the criterion. Considering his objection will help bring out some important features of Hegel’s response to this dilemma. Alston considers three basic kinds of belief justifiers: neurophysiological “mechanisms” that reliably cause beliefs; “direct” or “immediate” belief justifiers, such as conscious states or sensory experiences; and “mediate” or “indirect” belief justifiers, other justified beliefs that justify a particular belief.1 As a special case of mediate justification, the justification of a belief by means of demonstrative argument will be of central concern here. Alston presents a defense of “direct justification” that favors reliabilist accounts of knowledge.2 His defense involves arguing that the fundamental conception of justification in epistemology cannot be a “deontological” conception, according to which a belief is justified insofar as adopting it violates no intellectual obligations, and that the “K-K” thesis, the thesis that one must know that one knows that p in order to know that p, is to be rejected. This is the key to his rejection of Sextus’s dilemma and regress arguments and to Alston’s solution of problems of epistemic circularity.
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Notes to Chapter Five
“A belief is mediately (indirectly) justified provided it is justified by virtue of its relations to other justified beliefs of the subject that provide adequate support for it. In such cases the belief is justified by the mediation of those other beliefs. If it is justified in any other way it will be said to be immediately (directly) justified” (‘Internalism and Externalism in Epistemology’ [Philosophical Topics 14 No. 1 {1986}, pp. 179–221; hereafter abbreviated “IEE”], pp. 182–183). Cf. ‘Two Types of Foundationalism’ (op. cit.; hereafter abbreviated “TTF”), pp. 166, 168, 173, 173 note 10, 174, 167–177, 178.
‘Level Confusions in Epistemology’ (Midwest Studies in Philosophy V: Studies in Epistemology, P. French, T. Uehling, and H. Wettstein, eds. [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980], pp. 135–150; hereafter abbreviated “LCE”), p. 148; IEE passim; ‘An Internalist Externalism’ (Synthese [forthcoming]; all page references are to the manuscript; hereafter abbreviated “AIE”), passim.
IEE p. 181.
IEE pp. 191–192.
IEE p. 189.
IEE pp. 195–196.
IEE p. 194.
IEE pp. 196, 197, 201; ‘Concepts of Epistemic Justification’ (Monist 68 No. 1 [1985], pp. 57–89; hereafter abbreviated “CEJ”), pp. 64, 65; ‘The Deontological Conception of Justification’ (Philosophical Perspectives 2 [forthcoming]; hereafter abbreviated “DCJ”), passim. He suggests that what is chosen in relevant situations of choice is not a belief, but, e.g., an hypothesis, a working assumption, or a policy (CEJ p. 65; DCJ ms. pp. 13–16).
IEE pp. 201, 213.
IEE pp. 202–203. Alston first points out this kind of regress concerning principles of justification on the model of Lewis Carroll’s argument concerning logical principles of inference in ‘What the Tortise Said to Achilles’ (Mind 4 [1895], pp. 278–280) in ‘Self-Warrant, A Neglected Form of Privileged Access’ (American Philosophical Quarterly 13 No. 4 [1976], pp. 257–272), p. 272. Also see IEE pp. 202–203; EC p. 13–14; AIE pp. 10, 19.
CEJ pp. 67–68.
CEJ p. 68.
Alston states the following: “… a proposition, q, is adequate evidence for p provided they are related in such a way that if q is true then p is at least probably true. But I have that evidence only if I believe that q. Furthermore I don’t ‘have’ it in such a way as to thereby render my belief that p justified unless I know or am justified in believing that q” (CEJ p. 62). I have rephrased this condition because it is formulated here in terms of propositions being evidence or grounds, whereas he makes plain that the occurrence of psychological states or the recognition of logical truths may be the justificatory grounds of a belief (cf. CEJ p. 77). To substitute an occurrence of a psychological state for “q” in this statement would be to commit the kind of level confusion against which Alston so repeatedly warns.
CEJ p. 75.
CEJ pp. 75–76.
TTF pp. 173, 173 note 10, 174, 176–178; IEE p. 190; cf. CEJ p. 81.
Alston catalogs and attacks quite a number of such confusions in TTF, in ‘Has Foundationalism Been Refuted?’ (Philosophical Studies 29, pp. 287–305), in LCE, and in ‘What’s Wrong with Immediate Knowledge?’ (Synthese 55, pp. 73–95; hereafter abbreviated “IK”).
Provided I have no sufficient countervailing evidence.
See Frederick Suppe, The Structure of Scientific Theories (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1977), pp. 717–27, for an overview of the K-K thesis and some of the literature on it.
CEJ pp. 78–81.
CEJ p. 71.
IEE p. 217.
TTF p. 179.
TTF p. 169, LCE pp. 142–143.
TTF pp. 178.
IK pp. 85–86 (quoted below, p. 75); cf. TTF p. 182, CEJ p. 57.
This is to concur with Alston’s discussion of what is required to show that something is the case (TTF pp. 179–181, EC p. 15).
‘Epistemic Circularity’ (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47 No. 1 [1986], pp. 1–30; hereafter abbreviated “EC”), p. 2.
EC p. 4.
EC pp. 4–5.
EC p. 6.
EC p. 9.
EC pp. 9, 10.
EC p. 9.
Cf. EC p. 16.
EC pp. 12–13. It appears that at one point Alston misstates his view. He says “… in coming to believe the premises [of the inductive ‘track record’ argument] on the basis of sense experience I am ‘practically’ assuming [the principle of the reliability of perception]. But that by no means implies that I am justified in making this presupposition. Hence as far as the epistemic circularity of [the ‘track record’ argument] is concerned, my belief in [the principle of the reliability of sense perception] might remain unjustified until I bring it into inferential connection with the premises of this argument” (EC pp. 12–13). Alston is right that one’s belief in the principle of the reliability of sense perception may not be justified until after mounting the “track record” argument, but one’s belief in this principle is not identical to one’s practical presupposition of that principle’s holding true, and one’s practical presupposition must be justified in order to gather the premises of the argument. Either this, or one’s presumption needn’t be justified because practical presuppositions aren’t the sorts of things that receive or have justification anyway.
EC pp. 18–19.
EC p. 14; cf. IEE p. 213.
EC pp. 9, 15–16. Alston claims that Descartes in the Meditations practically accepts the reliability of sense perception and seeks only to validate this reliability theoretically (EC p. 16), and he refers to Van Cleve’s interpretation of Descartes as employing this strategy for coming to an explicit affirmation of the reliability of sense perception based on an implicit acceptance of that reliability (EC p. 13 note 16). As I have shown above (Chapter Two), both Alston and Van Cleve are wrong about Descartes’s strategy. Precisely what gets Descartes into hopeless trouble is refusing to grant his senses any reliability at all.
EC p. 27.
EC pp. 28–29.
IK p. 85; cf. TTF p. 182.
EC p. 29.
Above, Chapter One, pp. 7, 9–10.
DCEJ ms. pp. 13–14.
Cf. above, p. 67.
LCE pp. 147–148.
LCE p. 148.
EC p. 19. Alston’s way of contrasting “justification” and “reliability” in this passage indicates that he does not mean here “direct” justification but must mean some kind of “mediate” justification in terms of demonstrating the truth or warrant of a belief on the basis of other beliefs.
This may appear to reflect a shift in Alston’s view about basing relations. Certainly his recent essays have been more sensitive to this point, but even in LCE (1980) he lists among the conditions of mediate justification that “S’s belief that p was produced by, or is causally sustained by, S’s belief that q, in the right way” where one appropriate relation between these beliefs is inference (p. 143). A similar point is made even earlier in TTF (1976; p. 183).
See above, pp. 74–75.
EC p. 16.
EC p. 11.
LCE pp. 143–144; cited in this connection in EC (p. 11 note 13).
EC p. 9. The conclusion to this argument is identified as “II” on ibid., p. 4.
EC p. 18.
EC p. 13.
Contra Alston’s insinuation in EC (pp. 13–14).
Here I follow Robert Audi’s argument in ‘Belief, Reason, and Inference’ (Philosophical Topics 14 No. 1 [1986], pp. 27–65), p. 36. (I thank William Alston for this reference.) For all of his worries about generating regresses of levels of beliefs, at least once Alston grants that some such “connecting beliefs” as I defend here do play a role in those “basing” relations constituted by explicit inference (AIE p. 2).
CEJ p. 77.
CEJ p. 78.
Robert Audi points this out (op. cit.), p. 36.
An advance to the level of meta-logic would not improve the justificatory status of one’s beliefs based on argument anyway, for the justification of beliefs about meta-logic rest on these same conditions holding. I suspect that the infinite regress levels of epistemic principles that Alston urges against perspectival internalism may be specious, for very quickly in such a regress one would appeal not to epistemic principles so much as to logical principles of valid reasoning. Alston generates a regress of levels of epistemic principles by iterating embedding “that ...” clauses, claiming that each subsequent level of justification requires another epistemic principle because no principle at the previous level has the right content (IEE pp. 202–203). I suspect Alston’s regress is specious, for the logical principles of reasoning are the same whatever their level of application, and once logical principles are appealed to for justifying claims about valid inferences, compounding “that …” clauses won’t change the content of the principles in any significant way.
EC p. 12.
EC p. 15.
EC p. 9.
‘A “Doxastic Practice” Approach to Epistemology’ (in: M. Clay and K. Lehrer, eds., Knowledge and Skepticism [Boulder: Westview Press, forthcoming], hereafter abbreviated “DPAE”), ms. p. 4. All page references are to the manuscript.
DPAE ms. p. 5.
Later in this essay Alston says that the initial acceptance of this argument was “too hasty” (DPAE ms. p. 35).
EC p. 23.
EC p. 8.
EC p. 24.
EC pp. 25–26.
EC pp. 27, 28.
EC p. 27; cf. above, pp. 74–76.
DPAE ms. p. 40.
DPAE ms. pp. 9–14.
DPAE ms. p. 13.
DPAE ms. p. 22.
DPAE ms. pp. 22–27.
DPAE ms. p. 45.
DPAE ms. p. 30.
DPAE ms. p. 34.
DPAE ms. p. 33.
DPAE ms. p. 30.
DPAE ms. pp. 35–36.
DPAE ms. p. 38.
DPAE ms. pp. 24–25.
Cf. DPAE ms. p. 49.
See Chapter Four §VA, pp. 56–57.
EC pp. 26, 28.
See Chapter Two §§II–IV, pp. 23–33.
EC pp. 8, 9.
DPAE ms. p. 33.
CEJ p. 63.
CEJ pp. 75–76; EC pp. 12–13; IEE p. 184.
CEJ p. 76–77.
Alston agrees that such second-level knowledge is required for determining whether or not we know that we have some bit of empirical knowledge. He remarks: “If one thinks that reliability is what converts true belief into knowledge, then the question of how we can determine that perception is reliable will be a crucial part of how we can determine that we have perceptual knowledge” (EC p. 3).
This problem is central in Hegel’s discussion of the inadequacy of traditional approaches to proof and the need for another approach to philosophy (namely, his own) in the introductory material of the smaller Logic. This problem also stands behind Hegel’s rejection of the mathematical or axiomatic model for philosophy. (See his criticism of Spinoza in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy [VGP III {Werke 20} pp. 167, 172–173, 187–189; cf. pp. 209, 223/cf. LHP III pp. 263–264, 282–285; cf. pp. 299]. [Note: These German and English editions frequently diverge in this section of Hegel’s Lectures.])
Hegel notes this problem expressly in his discussion of Sextus in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy (VGP II [Werke 19] pp. 386–387, 390–391/LHP II pp. 357–358, 360). The point is quite explicit in the ‘Skepticismus’ essay (op. cit., pp. 218, 219).
Compare Alston’s account of the use of the “track record” argument “to rationally bring a person from the state of only practically accepting [the reliability of perception] to the state of explicitly accepting it” (EC p. 16).
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Westphal, K.R. (1989). William Alston on Justification and Epistemic Circularity. In: Hegel’s Epistemological Realism. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 43. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2342-3_6
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