The speckled hen has been pecking away at various versions of classical foundationalism for well over sixty years. 1 It has been raised again recently by Ernest Sosa (2003a and b) to criticize the kind of acquaintance theory of noninferential justification that I have defended in a number of articles and books. 2 In this paper I want to re-examine the problem(s) Sosa raises and to canvas a number of solutions available to those who are interested in defending an acquaintance theory of noninferential justification. Classical Foundationalism and Direct Acquaintance:Classical foundationalists claim that all knowledge and justified beliefs owe their justification ultimately to noninferentially justified knowledge/belief. The most obvious and most critical question for all foundationalists concerns what could render a belief noninferentially justified. And it is an understatement to suggest that classical foundationalists have differed amongst themselves concerning the answer to that question. Some of the most hard-core foundationalists, however, have sought to identify plausible candidates for foundations with infallibility. The foundations for knowledge and justified belief are found by following a Cartesian method of doubt. We strip away from our beliefs all that can be in error and what is left will be the foundations upon which we can build through legitimate inference the rest of what we know and justifiably believe.It is important when thinking about infallibility to make distinctions. So one might take the above view to amount to the suggestion that foundations consist of infallible belief, where a belief is infallible if the mere having of the belief entails that it is true. 3 Descartes, for example, was confident that he had found at least one building block of the foundations of knowledge when he reflected on the fact that he couldn't believe that he existed without his existing. The mere contemplation of the question by him requires that he exist.
Setting aside radical skeptical concerns, it seems almost a truism that much of what we believe is based on the testimony of others. Beliefs about the distant past are based on the writings of historians. Beliefs about the microworld are based on the word of physicists. Beliefs about the names, ages, histories, habits, likes and dislikes of friends are largely based on information those friends provide. There are important distinctions one can make between kinds of testimony. 1 Throughout this paper, however, I will be relying on a very broad understanding of the term. Any genuine assertion one person makes for the consumption of another will count, for these purposes, as that person"s testifying to some putative fact. The assertion can be oral or written, formal and under oath, or casual in some familiar context of conversation. Again, understood this way, the road to much of what we believe travels through the testimony of other people. Any plausible epistemology must distinguish questions about the genesis of belief from its epistemic justification. 2 If it is relatively uncontroversial from the perspective of commonsense that we very often rely on information provided by other people, it is far less clear how to construe the nature of the evidential path we need to travel in getting justified belief through reliance on testimony. The traditional view of testimony and the way in which it contributes to justified belief makes the epistemic road long and winding. We hear sounds or see marks. We then must reasonably interpret those sounds and marks as meaningful assertions. Critically, we must have some reason to believe that the assertions in question are likely to be true. Only then are we in a position to reach a rational conclusion that takes into account what other people say. More recently, however, philosophers have begun to challenge the idea that the epistemic contributions
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