We Don’t Know For Certain That the Sky Is Blue, but We Can Know for Certain That We Are Thinking That the Sky Is Blue Fantastic Mountainous Landscape with a Starry Sky by Robert Caney (1847 – 1911), via the National Gallery of Art. This, he claims, must be non-inferential and basic and will serve as a foundation for the rest of our epistemically justified beliefs (Chisholm, 1977). In true foundationalist style, Chisholm starts by saying that in order to stop the epistemic regress of justification (but why?) for each proposition, we need a justified belief which is in need of no further justification – something that is evidently and undoubtedly true. In his theory, Chisholm says that when a person believes in a proposition or thinks about the world in one way or another, others are of course in a position to ask what reason or justification they have for believing it. Roderick Chisholm attempted to overcome this challenge by redefining what we mean by having a thought and reflecting on an internal thought (Chisholm, 1977). This is what anti-foundationalists call The Problem of Arbitrariness (Pollock & Cruz, 1999), and it is this issue that must first be overcome by foundationalists who want to provide a plausible account of how we can ever really know anything with certainty.Ĭan Foundationalists Escape the Problem of Arbitrariness? Faience polyhedron inscribed with letters of the Greek alphabet, 2nd–3rd century A.D., via the Met Museum. Given the arbitrariness of our sensory experiences and ideas of concept, which differ from one person to the next and are often wrong, some philosophers claim that foundationalism would amount to accepting some beliefs as true for no reason at all. Many Philosophers reject the idea that our own internal experience of thinking is enough to justify all of our subsequent beliefs and knowledge about the world. More than 1000 years later, when Renes Descartes said “I think therefore I am”, foundationalist philosophers now had one undoubtable truth to work with – that if one can contemplate their existence, then one must surely exist, voilà! All of our knowledge and beliefs now had one indisputable foundation that could serve to justify all of our other beliefs and knowledge about the world.įoundationalist theories of knowledge have not gone without skepticism.
0 kommentar(er)
