Epistemic Circularity: Malignant and Benign*

Abstract

Consider the following dialogue:Juror #1: You know that witness named Hank? I have doubts about his trustworthiness.Juror #2: Well perhaps this will help you. Yesterday I overheard Hank claiming to be a trustworthy witness. Juror #1: So Hank claimed to be trustworthy did he? Well, that settles it then. I'm now convinced that Hank is trustworthy.Is the belief of Juror #1 that Hank is a trustworthy witness justified? Most of us would be inclined to say it isn't. Juror #1 begins by having some doubts about Hank's trustworthiness, and then he comes to believe that Hank is trustworthy. The problem is that he arrives at this belief on the basis of Hank's own testimony. That isn't reasonable. You can't sensibly come to trust a doubted witness on the basis of that very witness's testimony on his own behalf. '

On doing better, experimental-style

“…First, bootstrapping arguments of this sort have proved generally unpopular with armchair-judging epistemologists, for whom the near-consensus seems to be that the problem of easy ''knowledge'' is indeed a problem (Cohen (2002); Elga (2007) is a nice example of taking this as an established view. I should note that there are at least some key dissenters, e.g., van Cleve (2003), Bergmann (2004).) Nonetheless this is not a route that the defender of the armchair can easily pursue.…”

Proper bootstrapping

“…But this is a topic for another paper. 4 That the problem of easy knowledge is not exclusively a problem for reliabilism was also noted in Cohen (2002), Bergmann (2004), Vogel (2008. But the versions of internalism considered in those papers are still committed to a qualified version of RT (like the claim that sensory perception gives us immediate justification).…”

“…In their view, it is still better that knowledge is sometimes easier to come by than we had thought than it is that knowledge cannot be attained at all, as the skeptic claims (see, e.g., Van Cleve (2003) and Bergmann (2004)); and they see no hope for diverting the skeptical threat unless we stick to RT. However, it goes without saying that even these philosophers would be happier if the above argument against their position could be blocked so that there was no bullet to be bitten in the first place.…”

Can the skepticism debate be resolved?

“…Earman and Glymour (1988)), and it is now widely accepted among confirmation theorists that macho-bootstrapping does not constitute a valid testing procedure; see Douven and Meijs (2006) for further discussion. More recently, epistemologists have also considered the question of the legitimacy of macho-bootstrapping, or epistemic circularity, as they tend to call it; see, e.g., Cohen (2002) and Bergmann (2004). I will not go into the intricacies of that discussion here.…”