8 Comments

My interpretation of the arbitrariness was that you could sort of whimsically pick which beliefs you want to be the foundational beliefs - or perhaps less strongly, there could be multiple, inconsistent sets of foundational beliefs.

Expand full comment
author

Yes, I should have addressed that. Some think that if there are foundations, then any proposition at all may be foundational.

I would have said that this is a misunderstanding of foundationalism. Foundationalists give specific accounts of which propositions are foundational, and none of them imply that all propositions qualify.

Expand full comment

Evaluating whether a proposition is foundational depends on whether it has "justification that does not depend upon one’s having justification for any other beliefs." Wouldn't this require a belief in the correctness of some account of justification, making all such beliefs non-foundational? If you dont have to justify what justification is, the door to arbitrariness is open, even if no foundationalists have chosen to walk through.

Expand full comment
author

This sounds like what Alston calls a "level confusion", a confusion between (in this case) the conditions for being justified in believing P and the conditions for being justified in believing that one is justified in believing P.

Expand full comment

Suppose a belief B is justified by B' which is in turn justified by B'', and so on. Suppose also that we are not sure if the sequence of justificatory beliefs terminates but we know that even if it did not terminate, at each stage the reasoning justifying the previous belief is valid (for e.g. we are sure that no prior justificatory reasons would be repeated, etc). In that case, would we be justified in believing B?

Expand full comment

Very interesting. Does it mean I should stop citing the münchhausen trilemma?

This shows that there is more to argument than logic. Logic alone can only evaluate premises if they (or their negations) lead to a contradiction. If a premise is not a theorem of logic (or a negation of one), logic can’t say whether it is true or false, only that if it is true, it entails a conclusion.

I'm having trouble thinking of foundational beliefs, though. Lacking imagination, I guess. Maybe the example of utilitarianism's basic evaluation should satisfy me? Utilitarians could consider that to be foundational. But is it because they have this sort of justification in mind, or because they have inferred it from their experiences and various consequentialist arguments? Does it make sense to think of it as foundational if belief required seeing arguments? Can the reasons for belief be different from the reasons for considering it foundational? Or am I recapitulating the fallacy the article tries to clear up, where the reason for believing something is just some evidence, and the reason for thinking of it as foundational is because there is direct evidence for it? I should re-read later. I am probably confused.

I guess the laws of thought are foundational? But they are sort of circular, because we define propositions as statements that conform to those axioms, but the axioms also take propositions as primitive. I’m thinking of the analysis of the Liar's Paradox in Paradox Lost.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

Do our ethics have to fit into utility maximization because it constrains them, or because it is a tautology? Since we can’t observe preferences directly, any result can be interpreted as consistent with utility maximization by inferring the preferences from the results. Maximization only becomes a useful tool if we decide we want to use it on something measurable. And even then we can’t relax, in case our proxy doesn’t match what we really care about as well as we thought.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

There is a good reason - there is no other reliable way. The alternative is introspection and intuition, the unreliability of which seems to have motivated your original comment. To speak of maximization in a way that is not metaphorical, we need to be able to measure what we are maximizing.

Expand full comment