Response to critics

I’d like to thank my critics for their thoughtful and challenging commentary. I appreciate the time and consideration they have given to my book, and I hope I can do justice to their objections in return. This project started off in my mind as a way of solving a problem for reliabilist theories of justification, namely, their unacceptably lax treatment of doxastic, or inferential, justification. Clairvoyance cases are just the tip of an iceberg: it seems undeniable to me that some beliefs require argument, that they require inferential, or doxastic support, if they are to be justified. ‘‘Simple reliabilism’ ’ holds that reliability is sufficient for prima facie justification, thus, in essence, denying that any belief requires inferential support.1 But take any hard-won item of science or philosophy: the belief that reliabilism is true, that bats are more closely related to primates than to rodents, that the moon is 2178 miles in diameter, and so on. There are many more: my belief that it’s likely to rain today, that Christmas is going to be on a Thursday this year, etc. These are beliefs that—for us, at least—require inferential support. Any theory of justification that doesn’t explicitly single out a class of beliefs as requiring doxastic/inferential justification is in danger of refutation from such examples. Coherentists won’t have any trouble here, for they standardly take all beliefs to require support from other beliefs. But this goes too far in the other direction—surely it’s okay to claim that some beliefs are basic, so long as we don’t claim that all are? Reliability seems sufficient for the justification of those beliefs that result from perception, memory, introspection, and perhaps some other sources, as even BonJour (1985, p. 49) admits