Epistemic Circularity

Ernest Sosa’s virtue perspectivism can be thought of as an attempt to capture as much as possible of the Cartesian project in epistemology while remaining within the framework of externalist fallibilism. I argue (a) that Descartes’s project was motivated by a desire for intellectual stability and (b) that his project does not suffer from epistemic circularity. By contrast, Sosa’s epistemology does entail epistemic circularity and, for this reason, proves unable to secure the sort of intellectual stability Descartes wanted. I then argue that this leaves Sosa’s epistemology vulnerable to an important kind of skepticism.

This chapter critically discusses the relationship between political disagreements and political relativism, roughly, the idea that both parties to (at least some) political disagreements are right relative to their own perspective. Two key strands of argument that take a substantive stand on this relationship are considered. The first -- which is the primary focus of the chapter -- reasons from political disagreement to political relativism through premises about epistemic circularity. The second kind of argument diagnoses some political disagreements as 'faultless' on the basis of semantic considerations. As we'll see, considerations in favour of accepting or rejecting either variety of political relativism do not carry over as considerations for accepting or rejecting the other, and so these forms of political relativism -- despite some superficial similarities -- do not stand or fall together.

Can a belief source confer justification when we lack antecedent justification for believing that it’s reliable? A negative answer quickly leads to skepticism. A positive answer, however, seems to commit one to allowing pernicious reasoning known as “epistemic bootstrapping.” Puzzles surrounding bootstrapping arise because we illicitly assume either that justification requires doxastic awareness of a source’s epistemic credentials or that there is no requirement that a subject be aware of these credentials. We can resolve the puzzle by splitting the horns and requiring a non-conceptual awareness of, or direct acquaintance with, a source’s legitimacy. Requiring non-conceptual as opposed to doxastic awareness halts the regress and avoids the skeptical results. On the other hand, requiring non-conceptual awareness also guarantees that we are aware of evidence for a source’s reliability prior to using that source to form justified beliefs; we thereby avoid the problem of allowing epistemic bootstrapping to generate the illicit gains in justification.

There are two longstanding issues in analytic epistemology: epistemic luck and epistemic circularity. In this paper, I will explore whether Alvin Goldman's account of justification as reliability provides adequate solutions for the two concerns. In section one, I will explore the issue of epistemic luck. Specifically, I will first provide a brief account of true justified belief as necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for knowledge. Next, I will explicate how the Gettier problem proposed by Edmund Gettier illustrates the inadequacy of the aforementioned conditions in eliminating epistemic luck. Lastly, I will argue how Goldman’s reformulation of justification as reliability contributes to solving the issue of epistemic luck. In section two, I will explore the issue of epistemic circularity. More precisely, I will first argue how reliabilism as a theory of justification is circular, and as such, participates in the same circularity that traditional epistemologists have vehemently argued against. Next, I will propose a solution through a (re)reading of the predicate "truth conducive" that argues it may be possible to have justified epistemically circular beliefs through reliabilism. Due to the complexity of the issue, I will withhold my own verdict on the matter. However, I do contribute by presenting the ways in which reliabilism may be construed as a satisfactory theory of justification for some, or one that (re)conceptualizes the field of epistemology in a more pragmatic trajectory that some may deem as unsatisfactory. Section three will conclude.

Virtue perspectivism (e.g., Sosa 2007, 2009) is a bi-level epistemology according to
which there are two grades of knowledge, animal and reflective. The exercise of reliable
competences suffices to give us animal knowledge; but we can then use these
same competences to gain a second-order assuring perspective, one through which we
may appreciate those faculties as reliable and in doing so place our first-order (animal)
knowledge in a competent second-order perspective. Virtue perspectivism has
considerable theoretical power, especially when it comes to vindicating our external
world knowledge against threats of scepticism and regress. Prominent criticisms,
however, doubt whether the view ultimately hangs together without succumbing to
vicious circularity. In this paper, I am going to focus on circularity-based criticisms
of virtue perspectivism raised in various places by Barry Stroud (2004), Baron Reed
(2012) and Richard Fumerton (2004), and I will argue that virtue perspectivism can
ultimately withstand each of them.

ABSTRACT: Functionalists about truth employ Ramsification to produce an implicit definition of the theoretical term true, but doing so requires determining that the theory introducing that term is itself true. A variety of putative dissolutions to this problem of epistemic circularity are shown to be unsatisfactory. One solution is offered on functionalists’ behalf, though it has the upshot that they must tread on their anti-pluralist commitments.

Epistemic circularity occurs when a subject forms the belief that a faculty F is reliable through the use of F. Although this is often thought to be vicious, externalist theories generally don't rule it out. For some philosophers, this is a reason to reject externalism. However, Michael Bergmann defends externalism by drawing on the tradition of common sense in two ways. First, he concedes that epistemically circular beliefs cannot answer a subject's doubts about her cognitive faculties. But, he argues, subjects don't have such doubts, so epistemically circular beliefs are rarely called upon to play this role. Second, following Thomas Reid, Bergmann argues that we have noninferential, though epistemically circular, knowledge that our faculties are reliable. I argue, however, that Bergmann's view is undermined by doubts a subject should have and that there is no plausible explanation for how we can have noninferential knowledge that our faculties are reliable.

According to the evolutionary sceptic, the fact that our cognitive faculties evolved radically undermines their reliability.  A number of evolutionary epistemologists have sought to refute this kind of scepticism. This paper accepts the success of these attempts, yet argues that refuting the evolutionary sceptic is not enough to put any particular domain of beliefs – notably scientific beliefs, which include belief in Darwinian evolution – on a firm footing. The paper thus sets out to contribute to this positive justificatory project, underdeveloped in the literature. In contrast to a “wholesale” approach, attempting to secure justification for all of our beliefs on the grounds that our belief-forming mechanisms evolved to track truth, we propose a “piecemeal” approach of assessing the reliability of particular belief-forming mechanisms in particular domains. This stands in contrast to the more familiar attempt to transfer warrant obtained for one domain (e.g. common sense beliefs) to another (e.g. scientific beliefs) by showing how one is somehow an extension of the other. We offer a naturalist reply to the charge of circularity by appealing to reliabilist work on the problem of induction, notably Peter Lipton’s distinction between self-certifying and non-self-certifying inductive arguments. We show how, for scientific beliefs, a non-self-certifying argument might be made for the reliability of our cognitive faculties in that domain. We call this strategy Humean Bootstrapping,

Disagreement and debunking arguments threaten religious belief.  In this paper, I draw attention to two types of propositions and show how they reveal new ways to respond to debunking arguments and disagreement.  The first type of proposition is the epistemically self-promoting proposition, which, when justifiedly believed, gives one a reason to think that one reliably believes it.  Such a proposition plays a key role in my argument that some religious believers can permissibly wield an epistemically circular argument in response to certain debunking arguments.  The second type of proposition is the epistemically others-demoting proposition, which, when justifiedly believed, gives one a reason to think that others are unreliable with respect to it.  Such a proposition plays a key role in my argument that some religious believers can permissibly wield a question-begging argument to respond to certain types of disagreement.

O objetivo do artigo é apresentar e discutir o modo como a filosofia do senso comum de Thomas Reid responde ao ceticismo sobre a fiabilidade epistêmica das faculdades da mente. A hipótese aqui apresentada estabelece que a resposta reidiana possui três argumentos. Em primeiro lugar, Reid mostra porque é impossível provar a fiabilidade das faculdades da mente e porque os filósofos podem começar suas investigações aceitando a verdade das crenças devidas a estas faculdades. Em segundo lugar, Reid mostra que é inconsistente escolher uma destas faculdades como única fonte de crenças verdadeiras. Isto é arbitrário. Aqueles autores que escolhem, por exemplo, a consciência como única fonte de conhecimento fiável, apenas reforçam a defesa de que todas as faculdades da mente são igualmente fiáveis. Em terceiro lugar, se as faculdades da mente operam apropriadamente, isto é, quando a mente não é afetada por uma desordem ou doença, não há boas razões para colocar em questão sua fia­bilidade e, portanto, questionar a verdade das crenças devidas a elas.

Reliabilism is an intuitive and attractive view about epistemic justification. However, it has many well-known problems. I offer a novel condition on reliabilist theories of justification. This method coherence condition requires that a method be appropriately tested by appeal to a subject's other belief-forming methods. Adding this condition to reliabilism provides a solution to epistemic circularity worries, including the bootstrap-ping problem. Reliabilism is motivated by a compelling thought: we care about the reliability of the sources of our beliefs. After all, epistemic norms are plausibly truth-oriented in some way or another, and so how frequently our belief-forming methods deliver the truth is of paramount importance. This intuitive thought has yielded a variety of reliabilist theories which purport to solve many epistemological problems. However, reliabilism faces a number of significant difficulties, as has been well-recognized for decades. In order to solve many of these difficulties, I will propose a new reliabilist theory of justification. My new theory adds a novel condition for justification. It is inspired by the same intuitive notion just mentioned: that we care about how we form beliefs. It is a kind of coherence condition, but the kind of coherence I am after is distinct from previous proposals in that it focuses on the coherence of belief sources or methods, rather than on sets of beliefs. As I will argue, this new method coherence condition solves a number of extant problems for reliabilism. Most importantly, it provides a solution to epistemic circularity and bootstrapping objections. Although I have a favored version of this new theory of justification, what I will provide is really a schema for creating new reliabilist theories incorporating this novel condition. .