What the Internalist Should Say to the Tortoise

Abstract

Carroll's (1895) short piece “What the Tortoise said to Achilles” in many ways anticipates issues that arise in a number of contemporary controversies. One might argue, for example, that initially plausible attempts to deal with the problem of easy knowledge will land one in the unfortunate position of Achilles who followed the Tortoise down a road that leads to vicious infinite regress. Or consider the conditions required for inferential justification. For idealized inferential justification, I have defended (1995, 2004, 2006) the view that to be justified in believing P on the basis of E one needs to be not only justified in believing E, but justified in believing that E makes probable P (where entailment is the upper limit of making probable). And again, critics have argued that such a strong requirement fails to learn the lesson that Achilles should have been taught by the Tortoise. Even more generally, one might well argue that strong access internalists will need to deal with a variation of Carroll's puzzle even for their accounts of non-inferential justification. In this paper I'll examine these controversies with a mind to reaching a conclusion about just exactly how one can accept intellectually demanding conditions on justified belief without encountering vicious regress.

Inferring by Attaching Force

“…No regress threatens. The grain of truth in the inferential internalism that gives rise to threats of vicious regresses is that if one has justification for the claim that P doesn't support Q, that can undermine one's rationality in inferring Q from P (Fumerton, 2015). Where such views go wrong is the claim that the rationality of an inference must be explained in terms of the justification of 'takings.'…”

Inferential seemings and the problem of reflective awareness

“…He thinks of logical probability in Keynesian terms, as a sui generis abstract relation between propositions (where entailment is the upper limit of making probable). Fumerton (2015) concedes that (2*) may be dropped. ToIS and Fumerton’s thus essentially diverge because of (3*).…”

Comments on “What the Internalist Should Say to the Tortoise”

“…It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to comment on ‘What the Internalist should say to the Tortoise’ by Richard Fumerton (2015), which makes detailed and intriguing use of the problem posed by Lewis Carroll in his dialogue between the Tortoise and Achilles to subtly reform and refine the principle of inferential justification which he has argued to be distinctive of inferential internalism. The Tortoise problem from Carroll, taken as a problem for internalists generally, seems well suited to motivate this refinement and also a useful tool in specifying exactly the nature of the needed reform to inferential internalism.…”

“…This is the formulation of the PIJ used in the present paper put into the format fromFumerton (1995) for clarity.Episteme, 12, 2 (2015) 219-223 © Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/epi.2015.15 e pi ste m e vo l um e 12-2…”