Basic Beliefs and the Problem of Non-doxastic Justification

Abstract

Beliefs, as noted earlier, are also distinguished by the fact that they are sensitive to evidence. Evidence, however, can be either doxastic or experiential. It is the bearing of the latter type of evidence on belief that we will be concerned with in this chapter. The question of the epistemic liaison between sensory experience (perception) and belief has long been a controversial one dividing the foundationalist and coherentist theories of the structure of our justified beliefs. The debate has been further fueled by the recent controversy over the character of experience; whether its content is of a conceptual or non-conceptual nature. In this chapter, after highlighting the urgency of the issue, I try to provide a rather comprehensive survey of the current attempts to resolve the problem of non-doxastic justification by reconstructing them as attempts to find a normative paradigm that would simulate the experience-belief transition. While finding them all wanting, I conclude by providing a diagnosis of why they fail and examine the prospects of finding a satisfactory solution to the problem.