Читать книгу This Is Epistemology - J. Adam Carter - Страница 35

^2.74 Modest foundationalists might respond to the Epistemological Argument from Error with a shrug. Let's suppose that experience doesn't give us evidential certainty? It still might give us knowledge and still might justify our beliefs. Neither knowledge nor justification requires evidential certainty, they would say.

^2.75 We saw above why someone might be cool to the idea that justification requires evidential certainty. The modest foundationalist might say that once we're open to the idea that experience provides justification without providing us with certainty, there is little that would prevent it from providing us with knowledge. Suppose I have the experience as of a red tomato. If I'm having this experience because I'm hallucinating, I wouldn't have knowledge. However, if I don't have any reason to suspect that I'm hallucinating, it seems that I would have justification. And if I'm not hallucinating, it's not plausible that my experience would do less well when it comes to justifying belief. In that case, I would have a justified belief about a tomato that's true. We're getting pretty close to knowledge at this point.

^2.76 The interesting challenges for modest foundationalists arise when we try to fill out the details of the view. The claim that certainty isn't needed for non‐inferential justification is a negative claim. It tells us nothing about what is needed and it tells us nothing about how experience provides us with the justification we need for our perceptual beliefs. As we shall see in the chapters that follow, there are a number of different ways to fill in the details of the view. Perhaps experiences justify because they're inputs to reliable processes. Perhaps they justify because they provide us with evidence for believing things about the external environment. As you develop a better idea of what it takes to acquire knowledge and to justify belief, you should use this to help you decide between proposals about how precisely experiences justify.