Realistic Foundationalism

Preping for seminar, must write fast. Richard Fumerton over-intellectualizes both basic and inferential justification. His view require too many epistemic thoughts for non-epistemologists to be justified. Richard Feldman has stayed closer to Chisholm on this but has not built as much theory as Fumerton has leaving his view too undeveloped to constitute a rival. He provides an important new detail in Chapter 8 of _Evidentialism_ more aptly named in Chapter 4 of _Sosa and His Critics_. Feldman uses a mid-grade awareness relation to justify foundational beliefs and vaguely invokes IBE for inferential justification. Fumerton also has a two-tired view.

My last two papers have attempted to combine and streamline these views and I think I just got a step closer to seeing how it works. I call it "Realistic Foundationalism" the acronym seems appropriate.

(RF) S is justified in believing p at t iff there is some proposition q such that S is aware of q and aware of an objective epistemic supports relation holding between q and p.

I want to grade this giving us

(RFd) S is justified in believing p to degree d at t iff there is some proposition q such that S is aware of q and aware of an objective epistemic supports relation of strength d holding between q and p.

Key caveats are that awareness can come in a continuum of grades and I don't know how to denote the threshold above which justification occurs. My current view is that one is aware enough of q iff it is psychonomically possible that S consciously use q as a premise in reasoning.

For basic external world beliefs q will be the contents of an experience. For inferences it will be the conjunction of the premises. For introspective beliefs I suppose it would be the contents of the relevant mental state, might even be p itself hosted in a different way.

That's where I am right now and I'm pretty excited about it.