Richard Foley

One of the advantages of classical foundationalism was that it was thought to provide a refutation of skeptical worries, which raise the specter that our beliefs might be extensively mistaken. The most extreme versions of these worries are expressed in familiar thought experiments such as the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis, which imagines a world in which, unbeknownst to you, your brain is in a vat hooked up to equipment programmed to provide it with precisely the same visual, auditory, tactile, and other sensory inputs that you have in this world. As a result, your opinions about your immediate environment are the same as they are in this world. You have the same beliefs about your recent activities, your current physical appearance, your present job, and so on, but in fact you are a brain in a vat tucked away in a corner of a laboratory. Thus, in the brain-in-a-vat world, your beliefs about these everyday matters are mistaken, and mistaken not just in detail, but deeply mistaken.

In “Conceptual Diversity in Epistemology,” Richard Foley reflects on such central topics in epistemology as knowledge, warrant, rationality, and justification, with the purpose of distinguishing such concepts in a general theory. Foley uses “warrant” to refer to that which constitutes knowledge when added to true belief and suggests that rationality and justification are not linked to knowledge by necessity. He proceeds to offer a general schema for rationality. This schema enables a distinction between “rationality” and “rationality all things considered.” Foley proposes how these concepts can work together in a system that “provides the necessary materials for an approach to epistemology that is clarifying, theoretically respectable, and relevant to our actual lives.”

It is commonly thought that the requirements of inferential justification are such that necessarily the process of inferentially justifying a belief will come to an end. But, If this is so, We should be able to pick out those requirements of justification which necessitate an end to the justification process. Unfortunately, Although there is nearly unanimous agreement as to the need for such an end, It is by no means clear which particular requirements of justification impose this need. I examine and criticize several seemingly plausible ways of showing that regresses of inferential justification are impossible and then propose two requirements of inferential justification which, I argue, Are sufficient to show the impossibility

In his 1963 article, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”1 Edmund Gettier devised a pair of counterexamples designed to illustrate that knowledge cannot be adequately defined as justified true belief. The basic idea behind both of his counterexamples is that one can be justified in believing a falsehood P from which one deduces a truth Q, in which case one has a justified true belief in Q but does not know Q. Gettier’s article inspired numerous other counterexamples, and the search was on for a fourth condition of knowledge, one that could be added to justification, truth, and belief to produce an adequate analysis of knowledge

Part of the appeal of classical foundationalism was that it purported to provide a definitive refutation of skepticism. With the fall of foundationalism, we can no longer pretend that such a refutation is possible. We must instead acknowledge that skeptical worries cannot be completely banished and that, thus, inquiry always involves an element of risk which cannot be eliminated by further inquiry, whether it be scientific or philosophical. The flip side of this point is that inquiry always involves some element of unargued-for trust in one’s faculties and the opinions they generate.