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BonJour on Foundationalism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
Both the ‘coherentist’ and the ‘foundationalist’ theories of the justification of our claims to empirical knowledge are subject to considerable difficulty, as Laurence BonJour admirably brings out in his book The Structure of Empirical Knowledge. (Coherentism is the view that justification of a proposition is always and exclusively a matter of its coherence with a whole system of propositions; foundationalism, that it is at least sometimes also a matter of its having foundations in things which are not propositions, typically a range of sense-impressions or observations of physical objects.) BonJour argues, however, that while the difficulties encountered by the foundationalist view are insuperable, a version of the coherentist position can be salvaged by considerations which render it proof against the usual objections. I myself maintain exactly the opposite view, which I shall try to defend in what follows.
If every empirical belief requires justification by another empirical belief, we seem to be faced with either a vicious circle or an infinite regress; and the sceptical conclusion appears to follow, that there is no reason to think that any empirical belief is true. The foundationalist tries to stop the regress by maintaining that some empirical beliefs are justified in a way that does not depend on inference from other such beliefs. One influential way of doing this (and the one which I shall try to defend) is to maintain that while indeed all empirical beliefs have to be justified, in the case of some of these beliefs, the justification consists of reference to mental states other than beliefs which do not themselves have to be justified; these are described in various ways by various authors, but are usually said to be ‘given’, ‘represented’, or something equivalent.
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- Copyright © 1990 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1985.
2 BonJour's coherentist stance has also been attacked by Paul K. Moser, ‘Internalism and Coherentism: A Dilemma,’ and ‘How Not to be a Coherentist’ (Analysis, October 1988).
3 BonJour, op. cit., xi.
4 33.
5 69, 72, 75.
6 78.
7 77
8 75, 79.
9 58.
10 One needs in addition some justification of the assumption that our experiences can provide us with evidence for states of affairs which obtain prior to and independently of those experiences. I have tried to provide such justification in ‘Scepticism Revisited’ (Philosophy, October 1984). For discussion of Lewis and Quinton, cf. BonJour, op. cit., 65–79.
11 BonJour, op. cit., 73–4.
12 73.
13 BonJour's italics; but it would have suited my book to add them had they not been original.
14 32.
15 ‘Follows’ in the sense that, in the example which I discussed, it ‘followed’ from my visual experiences as though of my grey overcoat hanging on the wall of my room in a certain position, that it probably really was hanging there.
16 xii.
17 Loc. cit.
18 25.
19 170–171.
20 139–40.
21 143.
22 148.
23 147.
24 148.
25 ‘How Not to be a Coherentist’.
26 BonJour, 101.
27 102.
28 ‘Approximately’ stands in italics in the original; but this is not relevant to the present argument.
29 104
30 ‘How Not to be a Coherentist’, 166.
31 Cf. Plantinga, A., 'Rationality and Religious Belief, in Cahn, S.M. and Shatz, D. (eds), Contemporary Philosophy of Religion (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Wolterstorff, N., Reason Within the Bounds of Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984)Google Scholar.
32 Kenny, Anthony, Faith and Reason (New York and Guildford: Columbia University Press, 1983), 16Google Scholar.
33 Cf. Meynell, Hugo, The Intelligible Universe (London: Macmillan, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Faith, Objectivity, and Historical Falsifiability’ (in Davies, B., ed., Language, Meaning and God. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987)Google Scholar. It may be noted that this issue of foundations of faith has been one that has traditionally divided Roman Catholics and classical Protestants.