Another post on Enoch and Shechter

I don't think that I properly understood what Enoch and Shechter were trying to do until I started to think things through on my own. I was initially puzzled by their article(s). How could they hope to provide any sort of justification that itself goes beyond justification? OK, that sentence was incomprehensible, lemme try again. Here's what I thought that they were trying to do: provide a justification for a principle such as inference to the best explanation. What's wrong with that? Well, they also claim that inference to the best explanation (IBE) is basic, and isn't justified by anything else. You don't have to be that deep of a thinker to recognize a problem here: they want to justify something that itself is unjustifiable. What?!

In retrospect, I feel kind of stupid about this picture of their work. It's awfully simplistic. I always knew that this couldn't be quite what they were getting at, but I didn't know what they were aiming at either.

Here's what I think they're trying to do:

It's hopeless to try to justify the truly, truly basic beliefs. Some beliefs really are unjustified--for example, the first epistemic beliefs that you take on will be unjustifiable. After all, if all you have is a knowledge that epistemic realism is true (and so you are able to entertain the possibility that some given epistemic sentence is true) how are you able to evaluate the truth of some epistemic sentence? You have nothing available to justify it with, since you don't know of any other epistemic sentences that are true. On the other hand, this also means that you can't be rationally criticized for accepting this sentence as true, since the epistemic resources for challenging any belief-practice epistemically simply aren't available yet. So as far as the truly basic beliefs go--they're optional in a particular sense. Indeed, this is what I argue for in the first chapter. And so you can't expect this to help ethics at all, since ethics is not optional in this sense at all.

What about Enoch and Shechter? Are they simply trying to justify the unjustifiable basic beliefs? This would be silly. And we know that they are trying to provide justification ("How are Basic Belief-forming methods justified?" is the title of their article, after all). So the most plausible reading is that they're not actually trying to justify sentences that are unjustifiable (duh, right?).

So what does it mean to be a basic sentence? All it means is that it's a basic method. Here's an important quote: "We cannot justify our use of IBE by appealing to other belief-forming methods, since IBE is a basic rule. Thus, there is nothing in virtue of which we are justified in using IBE. Or so it may seem." I think that the idea in this sentence is that there are no methods--no other beliefs?--upon which IBE rests in order to gain justification. But justification is still possible, they argue, because pragmatic considerations can provide epistemic justifications. Then they give their account.

It remains unclear to me in virtue of what the pragmatic account doesn't deserve to be called a "belief-forming method" though. Because, if my understanding of them is correct, what they're saying is that a sentence like "a thinker who does not inquire about the world around him is intuitively doing something wrong" determines what has positive epistemic value. That is, what I think they're saying is that what is truly basic in epistemology is not the belief-forming methods, but rather certain projects that are "intrinsically indispensable"--certain projects have great, positive, epistemic value. Why not just say that there is a foundational belief-forming method: "You are justified in believing that which is indispensable to any of the following projects: explanatory, deliberative, etc." That seems just as much as a method as the other stuff. And if I've understood them correctly, this is much more clear then bringing in all these pragmatics.

You would still have to take this new, foundational principle for granted, but you're going to have to take something for granted (and you won't be able to be criticized for it--how could someone even begin to criticize you?)

I think that I still have worries about Enoch's argument that ethics gets in via this way of seeings things. But at least this makes way more sense to me than my first few readings.