•  417
    Beliefs, Degrees of Belief, and the Lockean Thesis
    In Franz Huber & Christoph Schmidt-Petri (eds.), Degrees of Belief, Springer. pp. 37-47. 2009.
    What propositions are rational for one to believe? With what confidence is it rational for one to believe these propositions? Answering the first of these questions requires an epistemology of beliefs, answering the second an epistemology of degrees of belief.
  •  296
    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…Read more
  •  241
  •  236
    Compatibilism
    Mind 87 (July): 421-28. 1978.
  •  183
    Justified belief as responsible belief
    In Matthias Steup & John Turri (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, Blackwell. pp. 313--26. 2013.
  •  174
  •  169
    In this new book, Foley defends an epistemology that takes seriously the perspectives of individual thinkers. He argues that having rational opinions is a matter of meeting our own internal standards rather than standards that are somehow imposed upon us from the outside. It is a matter of making ourselves invulnerable to intellectual self-criticism. Foley also shows how the theory of rational belief is part of a general theory of rationality. He thus avoids treating the rationality of belief as…Read more
  •  163
    What’s Wrong With Reliabilism?
    The Monist 68 (2): 188-202. 1985.
    An increasing number of epistmeologists claim that having beliefs which are reliable is a prerequisite of having epistemically rational beliefs. Alvin Goldman, for instance, defends a view he calls “historical reliabilism.” According to Goldman, a person S rationally believes a proposition p only if his belief is caused by a reliable cognitive process. Goldman adds that a proposition p is epistemically rational for 5, whether or not it is believed by him, only if there is available to S a reliab…Read more
  •  146
    Epistemic conservatism
    Philosophical Studies 43 (2). 1983.
  •  131
    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 invo…Read more
  •  127
    Quine and Naturalized Epistemology
    Midwest Studies in Philosophy 19 (1): 243-260. 1994.
  •  124
    A common complaint against contemporary epistemology is that its issues are too rarified and, hence, of little relevance for the everyday assessments we make of each other=s beliefs. The notion of epistemic rationality focuses on a specific goal, that of now having accurate and comprehensive beliefs, whereas our everyday assessments of beliefs are sensitive to the fact that we have an enormous variety of goals and needs, intellectual as well as nonintellectual. Indeed, our everyday assessments o…Read more
  •  122
    Universal Intellectual Trust
    Episteme 2 (1): 5-12. 2005.
    All of us get opinions from other people. And not just a few. We acquire opinions from others extensively and do so from early childhood through virtually every day of the rest our lives. Sometimes we rely on others for relatively inconsequential information. Is it raining outside? Did the Yankees win today? But we also depend on others for important or even life preserving information. Where is the nearest hospital? Do people drive on the left or the right here? We acquire opinions from family …Read more
  •  118
    Review: Knowledge and its limits (review)
    Mind 111 (443): 718-726. 2002.
  •  117
    Many interpretations of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion have labored under the assumption that one of the characters represents Hume's view on the Design Argument, and Philo is often selected for this role. I reject this opinion by showing that Philo is inconsistent. He offers a decisive refutation of the Design Argument, yet later endorses this very argument. I then dismiss two prominent ways of handling Philo's reversal: first, I show that Philo is not ironic either in his skeptic…Read more
  •  111
    Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others
    Cambridge University Press. 2001.
    To what degree should we rely on our own resources and methods to form opinions about important matters? To what degree should we depend on various authorities, such as a recognized expert or a social tradition? In this provocative account of intellectual trust and authority, Richard Foley argues that it can be reasonable to have intellectual trust in oneself even though it is not possible to provide a defence of the reliability of one's faculties, methods and opinions that does not beg the ques…Read more
  •  108
    Epistemically Rational Belief and Responsible Belief
    The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 5 181-188. 2000.
    Descartes, and many of the other great epistemologists of the modern period, looked to epistemology to put science and intellectual inquiry generally on a secure foundation. Epistemology’s role was to provide assurances of the reliability of properly conducted inquiry. Indeed, its role was nothing less than to be czar of the sciences and of intellectual inquiry in general. This conception of epistemology is now almost universally regarded as overly grandiose. Nonetheless, Descartes and the other…Read more
  •  106
    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 …Read more
  •  100
    Conceptual diversity in epistemology
    In Paul K. Moser (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Epistemology, Oxford University Press. pp. 177--203. 2002.
    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…Read more
  •  99
  •  90
    In epistemology Chisholm was a defender of FOUNDATIONALISM [S]. He asserted that any proposition that it is justified for a person to believe gets at least part of its justification from basic propositions, which are themselves justified but not by anything else. Contingent propositions are basic insofar as they correspond to selfpresenting states of the person, which for Chisholm are states such that whenever one is in the state and believes that one is in it, one’s belief is maximally justifie…Read more
  •  87
    Reply to Van Inwagen
    Analysis 40 (March): 101-103. 1980.
    I reply to professor vaninwagen's comment on an earlier paper of mine ("analysis", March 1979), In which I argue that compatibilists are not committed to accepting the claim that people might have control over the past
  •  87
    Fumerton’s Puzzle
    Journal of Philosophical Research 15 109-113. 1990.
    There is a puzzle that is faced by every philosophical account of rational belief, rational strategy, rational planning or whatever. I describe this puzzle, examine Richard Fumerton’s proposed solution to it and then go on to sketch my own preferred solution.
  •  83
    Plato's undividable line: Contradiction and method in
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 46 (1): 1-23. 2008.
    : Plato’s instructions entail that the line of Republic VI is divided so that the middle two segments are of equal length. Yet I argue that Plato’s elaboration of the significance of this analogy shows he believes that these segments are of unequal length because the domains they represent are not of equally clear mental states, nor perhaps of objects of equal reality. I label this inconsistency between Plato’s instructions and his explanation the “overdetermination problem.” The overdeterminati…Read more
  •  80
    Inferential Justification and the Infinite Regress
    American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (4). 1978.
    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 examin…Read more
  •  80
    Compatibilism and control over the past
    Analysis 39 (March): 70-74. 1979.