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Modest Infinitism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Jeremy Fantl
Jeremy Fantl*
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA03128, USA
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Extract

Infinitism, a theory of the structure of justification most recently developed and defended by Peter Klein, is the view that justification is a matter of having an infinite series of non-repeating reasons for a proposition. I argue that infinitism is preferable to foundationalism in that only infinitism can plausibly account for two important features of the structure of justification: 1) justification admits of degrees and 2) complete justification makes sense.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 33 , Issue 4 , December 2003 , pp. 537 - 562
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2003

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References

1 Many thanks to Jason Kawall, Robert Howell, Matthew McGrath, Ernie Sosa, and Thane Weedon.

2 Alston, W. ‘Concepts of Epistemic Justification,’ in Moser, P.K. ed., Empirical Knowledge: Readings in Contemporary Epistemology (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield 1986), 25Google Scholar

3 Dretske, F. ‘The Pragmatic Dimension of Knowledge,’ in Perception, Knowledge, and Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000), 49CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Justification is indexed to a subject at a time, both of which, throughout the article, I at times suppress.

5 Chisholm, R. Theory of Knowledge, Ist ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall 1966), 28Google Scholar

6 Goldman, A. ‘What is Justified Belief?’ in Pappas, G.S. ed., Justification and Knowledge (Dordrecht: D. Reidel 1979), 21Google Scholar

7 Reasons are propositions. You have a reason to believe something just in case you have access to a certain kind of proposition that bears a certain kind of epistemic relation to the proposition you have a reason to believe. Therefore, ‘belief in a reason’ just means belief in the proposition that is the reason and ‘the truth of a reason’ just means the truth of the proposition that is the reason.

8 See, for example, Sosa, E. ‘We have found a surprising kinship between coherentism and Substantive foundationalism, both of which turn out to be varieties of a deeper foundationalism’ (‘Reflective Knowledge in the Best Circles,’ in Steup, M. ed., Knowledge, Truth, and Duty: Essays on Epistemic Justification, Responsibility, and Virtue [Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001]), 180Google Scholar; Chisholm, R. ‘Many coherent theorists seem to believe … that they can develop a nonfoundational coherence theory of epistemic justification — even though no one has ever shown just how this might be done’ (Theory of Knowledge, 2nd ed. [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall 1989], 88)Google Scholar; and L. Bonjour, ‘Weak foundationalism thus represents a kind of hybrid between strong foundationalism and the coherence views discussed earlier’ (‘Can Empirical Knowledge Have a Foundation?’ in P.K. Moser, ed., 100).

9 Bonjour, L. ‘The Dialectic of Foundationalism and Coherentism,’ in Greco, J. and Sosa, E. eds., The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology (Malden, MA: Blackwell 1999), 123Google Scholar

10 This from Bonjour, : ‘If a given putative knower is himself to be epistemically responsible in accepting beliefs in virtue of their meeting the standards of a given epistemological account, then it seems to follow that an appropriate metajustification of those standards must, in principle at least, be avallable to him’ (The Structure of Empirical Knowledge [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1985], 10)Google Scholar. To the extent one agrees with Bonjour, one cannot be what I am calling a metajustificatory foundationalist. Metajustificatory foundationalists hold that your foundations require no further reasons. To require that the metajustification (in Bonjour's sense) be avallable to you is to require that you have reasons avallable to support the foundations. This is just to deny metajustificatory foundationalism.

11 Some might think that the same objection can be raised even to those traditional foundationalists who allow only completely self-justifying reasons to serve as foundations. We can ask why self-justifying reasons are self-justifying. If the traditional foundationalist has an answer, it seems like it must involve some metajustificatory feature. If the traditional foundationalist has no answer, it seems like the view has arbitrary foundations. (See Bonjour, Structure, 30-3, for a similar argument.)

However, the traditional foundationalist can argue that completely self-justifying reasons are not self-justifying in virtue of some metajustificatory feature, nor are they arbitrary. It may be that certain reasons have to be assumed to be self-justifying if skepticism is to be avoided. This is a rather familiar form of rationalist argument for the existence of a priori justification. Here, the main implication of these arguments is that there might be a way to non arbitrarily show that we need to take certain reasons to be completely self-justifying without requiring that there be a metajustificatory feature which makes those reasons self-justifying. What convinces us we need to take those reasons to be self-justifying need not make them self-justifying.

This move does not seem to be avallable in the case of reasons that are self-justifying only to a degree.

12 This is on the initial assumption that foundationalism can only satisfy the requirements by specifying the way the foundational reasons should be treated.

13 It may turn out that, for a web of beliefs to be completely coherent, completely comprehensive, and completely explanatory, it is necessary that you have an infinite series of reasons. If so, then any coherentism that satisfies the completeness requirement will end up being a version of infinitism.

14 It does not matter why your Coming to have as a reason that the feature is present and important will increase the degree to which the foundational reason is justified (for example, even if your Coming to have as a reason that a foundation is reliably delivered increases the reliability of the foundation). If the degree to which the foundational reason is justified can always be increased, then the metajustificatory foundationalist has not satisfied the completeness requirement.

15 Some reliabilists will want to insist that your Coming to have as a reason that a certain process initially delivered p changes the processes currently sustaining p. So the degree to which p is justified might increase because the relevant p-delivering and p-sustaining processes might change. Alternatively, a reliabilist could insist that your Coming to have as a reason that a certain process initially delivered p changes the context in which the process is to be evaluated. The reliability of processes is to be evaluated relative to a context. Relative to the context in which further reasons have been offered, the reliability of the process might change. On these sorts of views, reliabilism is not incompatible with infinitism. Therefore, I construe the radical reliabilism presented here as not allowing for the reliability of the process to change with further reasons.

16 Goldman accepted defeater conditions as early as 1979 and reaffirmed them in 1986. He says, ‘S's believing p at t is justified if and only if … this permission is not undermined by S's cognitive state at t’ (Epistemology and Cognition [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1986], 63). Robert Nozick says, ‘while it would be too strong to require the belief [that the tracking conditions are satisfied] in order for the person to know … perhaps it is appropriate to require that he not believe the negations of [the tracking conditions]’ (Nozick, R. Philosophical Explanations [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1981], 196)Google Scholar. Alvin Plantinga makes notorious use of defeater conditions. See, for example, Plantinga, A. Warrant and Proper Function (New York: Oxford University Press 1993), 40-2CrossRefGoogle Scholar. And Senor, Thomas notes that ‘any plausible theory of justification will have to include some no-defeater clause’ (ߢThe Prima/Ultima Facie Justification Distinction in Epistemology,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 56 [1996] 551-66, at 558)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 This, plausibly, is exactly what Descartes thought. That is why it was so crucial not only that he did clearly and distinctly perceive that he exists, but that could show that he did, why it mattered, and what validates clear and distinct perception.

18 This formulation of the second way is ambiguous and contains a reference to justification simpliciter. More precisely, here is what I mean: for each degree of justification p might have, it is justified to a degree that p is justified to that degree. When the degree to which it is justified for you that p is justified increases, ceteris paribus, the degree to which it is justified for you that p is justified for you to some particular degree increases at the expense of the degree to which it is justified for you that p is justified for you to some lesser degree.

The more precise formulation of Mini J-J, then, is:

(Mini J-J) Ceteris paribus, if it is more justified for you at tl than at t2 that p is justified to a certain degree, while it is less justified for you at tl than at t2 that p is justified to a lesser degree, then it is more justified for you at tl than at t2 that p.

19 Carroll, L. ‘What the Tortoise Said to Achilles,’ Mind 104 (1995) 691-3CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 See E. Sosa, ‘The Raft and the Pyramid: Coherence Versus Foundations in the Theory of Knowledge,’ in M. Steup, ed., 199. Sosa seems to be talking about a change (for the better) in kind of knowledge, whereas my view is that the change is a matter of degree, not of kind. How great a difference this ultimately amounts to, I leave up to the reader. Whether Sosa ultimately should be categorized as an infinitist, I similarly leave up to the reader.

21 This formulation does not allow us to compare degrees of justification between different propositions. So, it will not predict which is more justified: your well supported belief that 2+2=4 or your poorly supported belief that your sister is arriving tonight on flight 172. This is acceptable, however, since a theory of the structure of justification should not be expected to tell us which propositions are justified or what in particular goes into justification. How justified a particular proposition is will depend on what kinds of reasons support it. This will be determined by what goes into something being an adequate reason. And on this issue, theories of the structure of justification can remain mostly neutral.

22 Post, J. ‘Infinite Regresses of Justification and Explanation,’ Philosophical Studies 38 (1980) 31-52CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 Klein, P. ‘Why Not Infinitism?’ in Cobb-Stevens, R. ed., The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 5: Epistemology (Boston: Philosophy Documentation Center 2000), 203Google Scholar

24 This is not a version of foundationalism, because p's justification does not derive from the fact that p is situated in such an array. Rather, p's justification derives from the reasons that support p, whose justification is in turn derived from the reasons that support them. This makes infinitism akin to the implausibly circular model of coherentism discussed above, not to the foundationalist version of coherentism.

25 See Rudner, R. ‘The Scientist Qua Scientist Makes Value Judgments,’ Philosophy of Science 20 (1953) 1-6CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Owens, D. Reason Without Freedom: The Problem of Epistemic Normativity (London: Routledge 2000)Google Scholar, esp. 26 for arguments to this effect.

26 Klein, P. ‘Human Knowledge and the Infinite Regress of Reasons,’ Philosophical Perspectives 13: Epistemology (1999), 297-326, at 298-9Google Scholar

27 Williams, B. ‘Persons, Character, and Morality,’ in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981), 18CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 See Plantinga, A. ‘The Prospects for Natural Theology,’ Philosophical Perspectives 5: Philosophy of Religion (1991) 287-315Google Scholar, at311 for a similar view about the justification for belief in other minds.

29 As indicated earlier (in note 14), it does not matter whether the additional reasons increase the degree to which the proposition is justified in virtue of increasing the degree to which some metajustificatory feature (like reliability) is exemplified. That is, it doesn't matter if reasons increase the degree to which p is justified only in virtue of increasing the reliability of p. As long as further reasons can always increase the degree to which p is justified, then infinitism is true.