Congrats to Robert Audi

Brian Leiter's blog informs me that the American Academy of Arts and Sciences recently elevated seven philosophers to the elite honor of membership in said Academy.

Sadly, I only recognized one of the seven names on the list. With all due respect to the other six (my ignorance is my problem, after all, not theirs), I will say a few words now about that one, Robert Audi, a professor at Notre Dame (go Irish). Not only does Audi teach philosophy there, he formerly held a chair in the Notre Dame Business School.

Audi, whose image you see here, has distinguished himself in epistemology as an advocate of fallibilistic foundationalism. He developed this view in response to the epistemic regress argument. What is all that? Glad you asked, dear reader.

We typically seek to defend and justify our beliefs by reference to other beliefs. I believe that the sun will rise in the east in the morning because I believe that the earth will continue to rotate in the same direction that it always has, over the next few hours. I believe THAT because ... etc.

But this creates "epistemic regress." Can all justified beliefs be justified by reference to other beliefs, or do some have to be go unjustified? There are, it seems, three possibilities -- we can and in principle must go on forever so there will be no unjustified beliefs; or we need not go on forever, so there are some "foundational" beliefs, the bottom turtle on which our belief systems rest; or we go on until we find that we've gone around in a circle, and we're justifying other beliefs by reference to our confidence that the sun will come up in the east, which was what we started off trying to justify.

This is a trilemma, and an argument for skepticism, because all of the possibilities seem bad ones: accepting the infinite regress amounts to accepting a lifetime of frustration chasing an ever receding hare; stopping at any foundation will seem arbitrary -- why that far and no further?; accepting the circle is perhaps the least appealing of all (though it has its champions).

Audi maintains that there are natural stopping points. Thus, his view is a foundationalism. But he also maintains that the foundations can be fallible. We don't have to demand that our foundations be necessary truths in order for them to serve us as foundations.

A detail in his argument for this proposition sticks to my mind. Audi writes somewhere about a trustworthy secretary for his faculty department who told him last Thursday that he has an appointment this Friday afternoon. Today, (Wednesday we will suppose), Audi is asked by a third party whether he is free Friday afternoon. He replies, "No, I'm not -- our department secretary told me last Friday that I have an appointment that day."

In this case, he has a true belief (that he is not free this Friday afternoon) based on a somewhat false memory (he is retrospectively misdating that conversation with the secretary.) This would seem to prove that valid inferences can flow from flawed premises, and that would seem in turn to support fallibilistic foundationalism.

Please don't critique that example under the impression you're critiquing Audi. IIRC, it's in a footnote of one of his books, and he would be aghast to have it invoked as paradigmatic of his philosophy. It is only paradigmatic of the skewed-yet-granular workings of MY memory.

I'll end here because, as Audi recognizes, one must end somewhere.

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Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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