Table Of ContentJUSTIFICATION AND KNOWLEDGE
PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES SERIES
IN PHILOSOPHY
Editors:
WILFRID SELLARS, University of Pittsburgh
KEITH LEHRER, University of Arizona
Board of Consulting Editors:
JONATHAN BENNETT, University of British Columbia
ALAN GIBBARD, University ofP ittsburgh
ROBERT STALNAKER, Cornell University
ROBERT G. TURNBULL, Ohio State University
VOLUME 17
JUSTIFICATION AND
KNOWLEDGE
New Studies in Epistemology
Edited by
GEORGE S. PAPPAS
The Ohio State University
D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY
DORDRECHT: HOLLAND / BOSTON: U.S.A.
LONDON: ENGLAND
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Main entry under title:
Justification and knowledge.
(Philosophical studies series in philosophy; v. 17)
"Papers ... were originally presented at a conference held in
April, 1978, at the Ohio State University."
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Kno\\'kdgc, Theory of-Congresses. 1. Pappas, George
Sotiros, 1942-
BD161.187 121 79-19447
ISBN-13: 978-90-277-1024-6 c-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-9493-5
DOl: 10.1007/978-94-009-9493-5
Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company,
P.O. Box 17, Dordrecht, Holland
Sold and distributed in the U.S.A., Canada, and Mexico
by D. Reide~. Publishing Company, Inc.
Lincoln Building, 160 Old Derby Street, Hingham,
Mass. 02043, U.S.A.
All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 1979 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 15 t edition 1979
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any informational storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
This volume is dedicated to
the memory of
JAMES W. CORNMAN
whose most untimely and pre
mature death in May of 1978
was a great loss to his many
friends and to Philosophy.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE ix
GEORGE S. PAPPAS / Introduction xi
ALVIN I. GOLDMAN / What is Justified Belief?
MARSHALL SWAIN / Justification and the Basis of Belief 25
GEORGE S. PAPPAS / Basing Relations 51
KEITH LEHRER / The Gettier Problem and the Analysis of Knowledge 65
ERNEST SOSA / Epistemic Presupposition 79
10 HN L. PO LLOCK / A Plethora of Epistemological Theories 93
RODERICK M. CHISHOLM / The Directly Evident 115
JAMES W. CORNMAN / On Justifying NonBasic Statements by Basic-
Reports 129
MARK PASTIN / The Need for Epistemology: Problematic Realism
Defended 151
WILFRID SELLARS / More on Givenness and Explanatory Coherence 169
NANCY KELSIK / Bibliography 183
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 213
NAME INDEX 215
SUBJECT INDEX 217
vii
PREFACE
With one exception, all of the papers in this volume were originally presented
at a conference held in April, 1978, at The Ohio State University. The excep
tion is the paper by Wilfrid Sellars, which is a revised version of a paper he
originally published in the Journal ofP hilosophy, 1973. However, the present
version of Sellars' paper is so thoroughly changed from its original, that it is
now virtually a new paper. None of the other nine papers has been published
previously. The bibliography, prepared by Nancy Kelsik, is very extensive
and it is tempting to think that it is complete. But I believe that virtual com
pleteness is more likely to prove correct.
The conference was made possible by grants from the College of Human
ities and the Graduate School, Ohio State University, as well as by a grant
from the Philosophy Department. On behalf of the contributors, I want to
thank these institutions for their support.
I also want to thank Marshall Swain and Robert Turnbu~l for early help
and encouragement; Bette Hellinger for assistance in setting up the confer
ence; and Mary Raines and Virginia Foster for considerable aid in the pre
paration of papers and many other conference matters. The friendly advice
of the late James Cornman was also importantly helpful.
April,1979 GEORGE S. PAPPAS
ix
INTRODUCTION
The papers in this volume deal in different ways with the related issues of
epistemic justification or warrant, and the analysis of factual knowledge.
Some essays are concerned primarily with the first of these issues, others with
the second, and some with both.
In the opening paper Alvin Goldman takes as his central task that of pro
viding a noncircular, informative and accurate naturalistic explanation of the
notion of justified beliefs. His positive proposal is that whether a belief is just
ified is a function of the reliability of the processes which cause the belief.
His answer, thus, is in keeping with causal accounts of knowledge which he
developed in earlier papers. What is of special interest in the present paper,
however, is the extended and detailed spelling out of the relevant notion of
reliabili ty.
Goldman characterizes his theory as a Genetic or Historical theory, since
according to it the justification of a belief is a function of the 'prior history'
of the belief. He dubs his theory 'historical reliabilism.' Such historical
theories are held to sharply contrast with 'Current Time-Slice' theories of
justification since, on the latter theories, the justification of a belief is wholly
dependent on facts pertaining to the knower at the time he or she has the be
lief, or perhaps comes to have the belief. A number of classical and contemp
orary epistemologists are classified according to whether they fall in one of
these two major groups.
Marshall Swain also holds that the notions of causality and epistemic
justification are crucially connected. Moreover, like Goldman, Swain offers
a reliability account of epistemically justified beliefs, one which he labels the
'probabilistic-reliability model.'
The major part of Swain's paper concerns what it is for a belief to be based
on reasons. Swain takes reasons to be states of a person, some of which (but
only some) are usually belief-states. Other reason-states might be perceptual
states or sensation-states. A person's belief is based on such reason-states,
according to Swain's account, when there is some causal relation between the
belief and the reason states, or some relation of what he calls 'pseudo-over
determination'. He thus provides a causal account of the (or a) basing relation.
Swain's reliability theory of justification is also sketched in his paper. One
difference between his account and that of Goldman is that Swain utilizes the
xi
George S. Pappas (ed.), Justification and Knowledge, xi-xv.
Copyright © 1979 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.
xii INTRODUCTION
notion of competition between beliefs while Goldman does not (at least not
explicitly). This notion of competition is necessary to tum aside an objection,
to Swain's theory, which derives from the lottery paradox.
Knowledge is often said to, at times, be based on evidence or reasons. In
my paper, several distinct basing relations are considered. A believed pro
position, h, is said to be inferentially based on evidence e provided that h
is deductively, inductively, or epistemically derivable from e. And it seems
quite plausible to say that a person has knowledge on the basis of some
evidence only if his belief is inferentially based on the evidence.
It also seems that a person's knowledge is based on evidence only if his
belief, and not the believed proposition, is based on the evidence or the hav
ing of it. A number of different interpretations of belief-basing are thus
considered, but for none of them is it found that knowing on the basis of evi
dence requires belief-basing. This somewhat counterintuitive result is not the
opposite of that defended by Swain, however, unless the notion of evidence is
replaced by that of reasons.
I also distinguish the notion of one's justification for belief being based on
one's evidence. The central suggestion here is that different theories of justifi
cation-basing can be scaled according to whether they require that the subject
be a perspicacious agent or not, and if so, to what degree. That is, roughly,
some theories of what it is to be justified on the basis of one's evidence
require that the person either know or justifiably believe a great deal about
his evidence and its relation to his putatively justified belief, while other
theories require considerably less perspicacity, vis-a-vis one-'-s evidence, of the
subject. Several accounts of justification-basing are examined, and an account
which incorporates a weak perspicacity condition is proposed,
The first three papers are concerned primarily with epistemic justification
and basing relations. In the next two papers, by Keith Lehrer and Ernest
Sosa, different analyses of factual knowedge are proposed and defended.
Lehrer first advances a distinction between acception and believing it.
Many analyses of knowledge, including some earlier endorsed by Lehrer, have
stated that knowledge entails belief. Such accounts, Lehrer says, are mistaken;
knowledge entails, instead, acceptance.
Lehrer explicates reasonable acceptance of a proposition in terms of comp
etition. Roughly, a proposition is reasonably acceptable by a person just in
case the proposition fares well in competition with others. This idea of linking
reasonable acceptance and competition (which is also found at the end of
Swain's paper) is then put to use in distinguishing several distinct ways of
dealing with types of sceptical ploys. Lehrer also defends a specific analysis of
INTRODUCTION xiii
factual knowledge by a discussion of Gettier and Gettier-like examples, and
by contrasting his analysis with those recently proposed by Risto Hilpinen
and Peter Klein.
In his paper, Sosa introduces the notion of epistemic presupposition,
which he then uses to help shed light on Gettier-type problems and, as well,
on several recent proposals for dealing with Gettier problems (made by
Harman, Goldman, and Sosa himself in an earlier paper). These matters are
treated, first, informally. Then, in the fmal section of his paper, Sosa more
precisely sets out and clarifies the concept of epistemic presupposition, and
incorporates it in a wider theory of factual knowledge and justification.
The remaining five papers deal more specifically with epistemic justifica
tion. In his paper, John Pollock first characterizes foundational theories of
epistemic justification, and distinguishes several varieties. The variety stems
from the fact that basic beliefs can be characterized in different ways and
the relationships of non-basic beliefs to basic beliefs in virtue of which the
former are justified can be stated in a number of distinct ways. Pollock
rejects all such theories, however, on the grounds that most people seldom
have the beliefs that are candidates for being basic, yet we do not want to
say that they lack other justified beliefs for that reason.
Pollock defends a theory he calls 'direct realism', a theory that is closely
related to foundationalism. Yet, after helpfully distinguishing several types
of coherence theories, Pollock ends up also defending a specific theory of the
latter group. The apparent inconsistency is avoided with the claim that these
are really theories of different subject matters. Direct realism, as Pollock con
strues it, is a theory of objective justification, while the coherence theory he
advocates is held to be a theory of subjective justification.
In his contribution, Roderick Chisholm revises a theory of justification
he had proposed in earlier papers and books. He had earlier argued for a foun
dational theory according to which each person's knowledge is based upon
that person's I-propositions - the propositions a person would express by
using the first person as grammatical subject. These I -propositions were
held to concern the self-presenting. However, in the present paper, Chisholm
presents reasons for thinking that there are no I-propositions, so that his
foundational theory needs amendment.
Chisholm provides the needed amendments with a new account of the
self-presenting. He goes on to present a battery of definitions. Some of these
defmed concepts are familiar from earlier writings, but the proposed definit
ions sometimes differ significantly. And some defined concepts are new, es
pecially the notion of a state of affairs being epistemically unsupported for
