Bashing BonJour on Basicality

Well, not *bashing* but I needed the alliteration...forthwith:

Intro
Though he was a long time advocate of a coherence theory of justification, Larry BonJour is now a foundationalist. And he’s not just some kind of moderate or minimal foundationalist: he defends a version of classical foundationalism. That is, he defends a form of foundationalism where the foundational beliefs are beliefs about the contents of our own states of awareness. I will attempt to state his view as clearly and concisely as I can and then raise what I take to be some troubling objections.

Foundations: Constitutive Awareness and Belief
In his presentation of his view in Epistemic Justification (Blackwell 2003) BonJour makes repeated reference to what he calls “constitutive” or “built in” awareness. It is a subtle notion but the key is in understanding BonJour’s seemingly novel account of belief. He takes belief to consist in the combination of two acts—or one act with two facets—an entertaining of a content and an awareness that one is entertaining it an “assertive” way (as opposed to, say, an optative or doubting or some other way). BonJour repeatedly emphasizes that beliefs are a species of conscious state. The characteristic which makes them the species of conscious state they are is the assertive mood of the state. What individuates particular beliefs are the propositions which form their content. According to BonJour there’s just nothing more to having a belief than consciously entertaining the content in this particular way.

First Foundations: 2nd order beliefs
BonJour first applies this notion of belief to 2nd-order beliefs. There is, then, nothing more to my second order belief that, say, “I believe I believe I’m typing right now” than entertaining the proposition “I believe I’m typing right now” and being aware of an assertive character. Once I’m aware of the assertive character of the entertaining I am in the conscious state of having the second-order belief. There is no “independent” judgement according to BonJour. This is why he calls it “built in”: the target content is itself a conscious state so I am ideally situated to be aware of the content and its associated assertive character. It is this ideally situated position which, says BonJour, gives me an “internally accessible” reason for thinking the belief true. I’m so well situated to see things correctly that unless there is some reason to think I’ve made a mistake, I am justified in holding the belief.

Not Aperception
This case is to be sharply distinguished, says BonJour, from the case of metabeliefs in which there is a “separate” judgement. According to BonJour I need not consciously consider evidence for whether or not I believe something (in simple cases), weigh the evidence, and make a judgement, finally forming the metabelief. Rather, he says, because of my ideal situation I can “directly’ notice that the content of the object-level conscious state (the target belief) and the (relevant part of) the content of the metabelief match. Again, the ideal situation is due to the fact that the target belief is itself merely a conscious state with a certain (assertive) character.

Further Foundations: Sense Experience
Nonconcptual perceptual content
The next application of his theory comes in beliefs about sensory experience. Like beliefs, sensory experiences are also conscious states. Thus I am again in an ideal position to be able to notice their content and character. However, things are more complicated with sensory experiences because, at least at the level with which BonJour is concerned, they lack propositional content. As an argument that they lack propositional or conceptual content bonjour offers the following argument. Even a simple instance of sensory experience has so much detail that to describe, say, the subtle patterns of light, shade, and color is quite outside my conceptual resources. Nevertheless, my perceptual beliefs can describe certain aspects of certain portions of this experience. Yet the richer features are right there in my experience. BonJour uses the term “perceptual content” to name the richer fuller experiential content.

Sensory Beliefs as Descriptions
We must also briefly examine BonJour’s notion of perceptual beliefs, i.e. beliefs about one’s sensory experiences. He says that such beliefs are essentially descriptions of the conscious states which constitute perceptual experiences. This is important because he ultimately has in mind to answer objections to skeptical concerns surrounding classical foundationalism. As with 2nd-order beliefs since the targets of what he calls the “descriptive content” of our beliefs about our experiences are themselves conscious states we have an “internally available” reason to trust them because of how we are ideally situated to notice the “match” between the descriptive content and what they purport to describe.

Sellers’ Dilemma
One concern is related to the Sellers Dilemma: non-conceptual contents can’t bear logical relations to beliefs, thus it seems they can’t epistemically support them via logical relations. BonJour says beliefs about perceptual experiences can receive a kind of epistemic support from non-conceptual perceptual content in virtue of the fact that those beliefs are mere descriptions of that content and that because the latter are a species of conscious state we are ideally suited to notice “directly” that the descriptions match what they are supposed to describe, at least in simple cases.

So with his notion of belief BonJour claims to have found two kinds of justified foundational beliefs: beliefs about our beliefs and beliefs about the content of our perceptual experiences. He suggests that from here we should be able to gain justified beliefs about the external world because positing an external world is the best explanation of features of our perceptual experiences (especially their being apparently non-voluntary and their having consistent patterns). He suggests that common sense explanations will always be better than skeptical explanations since the latter are in some way parasitical upon the common sense variety.


Objections
Nature of Belief
My first criticism is that BonJour’s notion of belief does not seem correct to me. It seems there is more to belief than merely entertaining a proposition and noticing something “assertoric” about it. It seems that there is a definite *judgemental* component. BonJour is explicit that he is talking only about occurant beliefs. So take the occurant belief that “I believe classical foundationalism is less defensible than BonJour thinks.” It’s not just that I entertain it and notice that it seems to assert itself to me or that I don’t just hope that is the case or wonder whether it is the case. I seem to be aware of an act of judgement which applies a certain predicate-concept to a certain subject. I’ve judged that this thing BonJour calls “classical foundationalism” has the property of being less defensible than he thinks (or stands in the appropriate relation). Without this judgemental aspect it is hard to recognize BonJour’s account as an account of belief.

Possibility of error
On the other hand, if the kind of awareness BonJour has in mind is judgemental—and it seems that this is a possibility since he sometimes—oddly to me—talks about the possibility of this awareness being mistaken:how can an awareness be mistaken?—then there arises just the same possibilities of error in judgement as in any case of judgement. I could mistake an optative character for an assertive one. Or I could mistake one content for another. The kind of skeptical scenarios which motivate external world skepticism seem all able to be modified for “internal world skepticism”. A Cartesian demon might cause me to think I’ve entertained one proposition when I have not done so or to think a description matches a scene when it does not. It is hard to provide details for such skeptical hypotheses since BonJour provides so little detail about what it is to be aware that a description in a metabelief matches the perceptual content of a perceptual experience. Anyone who’s played the children’s matching game realizes that even in very simple cases one where one is concentrating one can make mistakes about whether things match. In the end, retreating into the mind cannot all by itself defeat the skeptic. If Descartes’ Demon can give me false impressions and it’s possible to have false impressions about my beliefs and about the character of my perceptual content, then I can be deceived about the latter. I’m not suggesting for a moment that the possibility of error will bear the skeptic out. I am only suggesting that the usual skeptical resources are just capable of being effective about our beliefs about our conscious states as about the external world.

Irrelevance to answering skeptic
But even if this criticism were not correct, even if one granted BonJour these two kinds of beliefs. It is very doubtful we could get the full panoply of beliefs we tend to think are justified. BonJour makes a very brief allusion to the fact that most people don’t and some probably can’t form beliefs about their beliefs and about the character of there perceptual content, but he does not begin to do the worry justice. A theory which states that only those (very) rare people who think a certain way in (very) rare circumstances is just a form of just-barely-non-global skepticism. On the view the vast majority of beliefs come out not justified. And it’s no good saying that the justification must be “available in principle” because the beliefs of dogs and small children will still not come out as justified. Even for the heard-hearted epistemologist who can accept this consequence, otherwise normal adults could be such that nothing could trigger this disposition in them. Possibly, there are individuals who are such that were they to form beliefs about the character of their perceptual content it would only be in the context of considering Cartesian skepticism and in such circumstances they loose all their beliefs. So I think that the account of belief is not a good one, that it offers no advance against traditional skepticism, and that it necessarily constitutes its own form of skepticism.