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^1.61 The infinitists and coherentists try to account for the possibility of justified belief in terms of the rational support provided by more justified beliefs. On this view, the justification for any justified belief is derivative in the sense that it derives the necessary rational support from further justified beliefs. The coherentists and infinitists disagree about how supporting beliefs have to be structured to ensure that justified beliefs are justified, but they agree that stopping the justificatory regress doesn't involve any belief that (i) can justify further beliefs and that (ii) does not derive its justification from any further belief. These beliefs, which have been called properly basic, foundational, non‐inferentially justified, and immediately justified beliefs, are, according to the foundationalist, epistemically essential. Without them, none of our beliefs could be justified.

^1.62 Foundationalists would say that we should modify the Supporting Justified Belief Rule to allow for properly basic beliefs:

Supporting Justified Belief or Non‐Doxastic Justifier Rule: an entry in Your Book of Beliefs gets to be an entry in Your Book of Justified Beliefs iff it is adequately supported by more justified beliefs or something else.

^1.63 As the foundationalist sees things, every justified belief will either derive its justification from a set of justified beliefs that provide adequate support or derive its justification from something else. The foundationalists will disagree among themselves about what this something else might be. The crucial points are these:

 First, all justification will ultimately derive from something outside of the circle of belief. This justification will then flow “upwards” from the non‐inferential beliefs to other beliefs through inference.

 Second, this source of justification can sometimes provide all the justification needed for a belief.

^1.64 If we're going to settle the debate between the infinitists, coherentists, and foundationalists, we'll have to settle the question as to whether there can be properly basic beliefs. Let's look at two arguments for foundationalism before turning to objections.

^1.65 Perhaps the most influential argument for foundationalism is the Regress Argument for Foundationalism:³³

Regress Argument for Foundationalism

P1.There are some justified beliefs.

P2.If there are some justified beliefs, either some of these beliefs are justified without requiring support from further beliefs or they are all justified only because of the support provided by further justified beliefs.

C1.Either some of the justified beliefs are justified without requiring support from further beliefs or they are all justified only because of the support provided by further justified beliefs.

P3.If all of the justified beliefs are justified only because of the support provided by further justified beliefs, the set of required supporting beliefs will either form a circle or extend back infinitely.

P4.Neither circular structures of justificatory support nor infinite chains of justified beliefs can provide the support required for a belief to be justified.

C2.So, not all of the justified beliefs are justified only because of the support provided by further justified beliefs.

C3.So, some justified beliefs are justified without requiring support from further beliefs.

^1.66 The basic argumentative strategy is simple. We list the three possible non‐skeptical responses to the regress argument (i.e. infinitism, coherentism, and foundationalism). On the assumption that the objections to infinitism and coherentism outlined above are decisive, we conclude that the remaining view that hasn't been eliminated must be the right one. The objections discussed above are supposed to provide the support for P4.

^1.67 Now, you might wonder about the argument's starting point, P1. In this discussion, it was assumed by all sides that some belief could be justified. And so the Regress Argument for Foundationalism simply tries to trace out an implication of this non‐skeptical assumption. Thus, the Regress Argument shouldn't be thought of as an argument against skepticism. Rather, it should be thought of as an argument that purports to show that there must be two kinds of justified belief if the skeptic is wrong and some of our beliefs are justified. We'll be discussing the viability of skepticism in more detail in Chapter 11.

^1.68 The Regress Argument is not, it should be noted, the only viable rationale for foundationalism. A second rationale is a kind of argument from cases.³⁴ When you think about beliefs about how you feel right now (tired? sad?), what you're trying to do or what you're doing (reading? tapping your feet?), what you're thinking about or imagining (epistemology?), or what the sum of two small numbers is, it is very difficult to imagine what propositions you'd have to rely on to justifiably form a belief about these matters. If you're typing (or trying to type), it seems you can know that that's what you're up to “straight off,” in the sense that you form these beliefs, seemingly unimpeachably, without first explicitly considering other things. What evidence would you appeal to in order to justify your belief that you are trying to type?

^1.69 It seems that in these kinds of cases at least, you can simply tell that you're tired or sad, that you're trying to type or tap your feet, that you're thinking about epistemology, or that the sum of two twos is four. If pressed, you could offer some sort of argument in support of these claims, but the idea that you ran through such an argument (consciously or not) in order to form a reasonable belief about these matters seems to misrepresent your epistemic position. Maybe your friend would have to consult some evidence to decide whether you were typing in your office or trying to type (e.g. gather witness statements, listen for the clicking and tapping, etc.), but your situation is very different from your friend's if you're the one trying to type. Similarly, you might try to gather evidence to determine whether you are tired; but wouldn't this be in a sense superfluous? Can't you just think about it and work it out without having to argue from some further assumptions about how red your eyes are or how much sleep you had the night before?

^1.70 To understand the foundationalist's proposal, an analogy should be helpful. Consider this sudoku grid:³⁵

	3	8	7	9	2	5	1
	6	9	4		1	7
2						4
		4		1			6
9	1						8	7
	2			8		1
				7	3			1
		7	1			2	9
	4	3		6	9	8	7

^1.71 Some of the boxes you start with will be empty. Some will already contain a number. The boxes that contain numbers from the start are given. You don't need to engage in any sort of reasoning to know that it's a 3 that goes in the second box from the left in the top row. That box is given to you for free. So are all the other boxes that contain numbers. The only rational basis for adding more numbers to the grid will derive other numbers from the numbers given. If there is no reasoning that is available to you that takes you from the numbers given to some conclusion about what number to put into an empty box, you simply cannot know what goes in there and cannot justifiably judge that some number gets in there. If nothing is given to you for free, you simply could not have any justified beliefs about what number would go where.

^1.72 The foundationalist thinks that something similar is true when it comes to the justification of any belief. Without non‐inferentially justified beliefs (i.e. givens, or freebies, if you like), you couldn't rely on reasoning to provide you with any justified beliefs. The rational support for any justified belief has to trace back to the support provided to a non‐inferentially justified belief. (In the limiting case, that belief will itself be one of the non‐inferentially justified beliefs.) Happily, the foundationalist says, we do have some non‐inferentially justified beliefs. They are justified even if we cannot find support for them in other justified beliefs we have, and they are the foundation that accounts for all the derivatively justified beliefs we form by reasoning well from these starting points.