Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Sources and acknowledgments
- Introduction: back to basics
- PART I WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE, AND HOW IS IT POSSIBLE?
- PART II THEORIES OF JUSTIFICATION
- 5 Epistemology today: a perspective in retrospect
- 6 Nature unmirrored, epistemology naturalized
- 7 Theories of justification: old doctrines newly defended
- 8 Reliabilism and intellectual virtue
- PART III INTELLECTUAL VIRTUE AND EPISTEMIC PERSPECTIVE: A VIEW PRESENTED
- PART IV INTELLECTUAL VIRTUE IN PERSPECTIVE: THE VIEW DEVELOPED
- Index
7 - Theories of justification: old doctrines newly defended
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Sources and acknowledgments
- Introduction: back to basics
- PART I WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE, AND HOW IS IT POSSIBLE?
- PART II THEORIES OF JUSTIFICATION
- 5 Epistemology today: a perspective in retrospect
- 6 Nature unmirrored, epistemology naturalized
- 7 Theories of justification: old doctrines newly defended
- 8 Reliabilism and intellectual virtue
- PART III INTELLECTUAL VIRTUE AND EPISTEMIC PERSPECTIVE: A VIEW PRESENTED
- PART IV INTELLECTUAL VIRTUE IN PERSPECTIVE: THE VIEW DEVELOPED
- Index
Summary
THE “ABSURDITY” OF FOUNDATIONS
Foundationalism has drawn fire repeatedly of late and stands multiply accused of itself resting on no better foundation than a “myth of the given,” and of requiring the evident absurdity of a “test” that compares our beliefs with reality itself in the absence of any intermediary concepts or beliefs. A recent salvo was fired by Donald Davidson in an important essay. Let us now examine the damage.
Davidson's “Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge” argues both against foundations and in favor of coherence. It attacks foundationalism for requiring a confrontation intrinsically absurd, and it objects to specific foundational “sources of justification” outside the scope of our beliefs. That is on the negative. On the affirmative, it presents and defends a coherentist alternative.
An allegedly foundationalist idea, that of “confrontation between what we believe and reality” is first argued to be “absurd,” thus opening the way for coherentism, subsequently offered as the alternative.
What distinguishes a coherence theory is simply the claim that nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief. Its partisan rejects as unintelligible the request for a ground or source of justification of another ilk. (426)
In explanation and support we are referred to Rorty, who claims that “nothing counts as justification unless by reference to what we already accept, and there is no way to get outside our beliefs and our language so as to find some test other than coherence.”
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- Knowledge in PerspectiveSelected Essays in Epistemology, pp. 108 - 130Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991
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