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Epistemic Regress

Image result for raft made of logs


In a post last Thursday I mentioned the epistemic issue of "regress."

And I described the issue as a trilemma. If we believe A because of B, and B because of C, and so forth ... where and how does this chain stop? If it does stop, why is the chain of reasons that stop better than simply allowing A to float around by itself unsupported? If it doesn't stop, is that because it is infinitely long or because it is circular? All three possibilities seem bad ones.

Each of the three possibilities has defenders, though, I mentioned last week that Robert Audi was a defender of a form of foundationalism: the chain does have a final link and that's okay.

Infinitism, too, has contemporary champions, notably Peter D. Klein, who has written that this view doesn't amount to "claiming that in any finite period of time ... we can consciously entertain an infinite number of thoughts," merely that "there are an infinite number of propositions such that each one of them would be consciously thought were the appropriate circumstances to arise."

 Well ... okay then.

An acceptance of the circularity of such chains also has defenders. Among these, Ernest Sosa. The idea is that knowledge is more like a floating raft than a pyramids. The logs have to stay together. They have to be coherent to keep us afloat. So it is okay if our raft-checking procedure is circular.

A bit more on Sosa's raft some time soon.
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