Re: Criticism and explanation versus justification

On 2 Jan 2013, at 01:53, David Deutsch <david.deutsch-LR/[email protected]> wrote:

> On 1 Jan 2013, at 19:09, Alan Forrester <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> David's criticism of the idea of foundations in FoR applies with just as much force to particular arguments. The idea of explaining everything from foundations would leave the foundations unexplained. In an individual argument there can never be any possibility of proving the argument true or probably or anything like that. To say you had done that would be to leave out the possibility that you have made some assumption that you would have to discard if it was properly explained and that discarding this assumption would refute the argument. I think the logic of the anti-foundational argument in FoR implies that justification should be totally removed from all of our ideas about knowledge root and branch.
>> 
>> I don't think it would be necessary to make many changes to the ideas explained in David's books as a result of making that change. Many of the instances of the word 'justification' could be replaced with 'explanation' and the argument would be non-justificationist. Some instances of 'justification' in the books are in scare quotes and so they would remain the same since they are compatible with the complete rejection of justificationism. There is one instance that I know of that would have to be completely deleted. (The Hermes quote from BoI you posted in another message.)
> 
> The only places in BoI where justification is mentioned are:
> 
> (1) Many places where I'm giving arguments against justificationism.
> 
> (2) pp210-11, 328 and 395 where it's a different meaning of the verb 'to justify', namely the everyday meaning 'to classify something as just' (i.e. legitimate, morally right): E.g. "If the political process is seen as an engine for putting the right rulers in power, then it justifies violence, for until that right system is in place, no ruler is legitimate; and once it is in place, and its designated rulers are ruling, opposition to them is opposition to rightness".
> 
> (3) Only one other place: p226, the Hermes quote I think you're referring to: "But, in truth, beliefs cannot be justified, except in relation to other beliefs, and even then only fallibly." But there it is referring to deduction. Beliefs can be deductively entailed by other beliefs.
> 
> Perhaps I should have said that. But in any case, I don't think it could possibly be mistaken for a claim that ideas can be "designated as true (or at least ‘probable’) by reference to some authoritative source or touchstone of knowledge" (which is what I call justificationism), could it? So what mistake could it be mistaken for?

One possible confusion if that sentence was taken in complete isolation from the rest of the book is the idea that you have some kind of proof that if you have an argument saying that idea A is a consequence of idea B that idea is justified in the problematic  sense by virtue of the laws of logic or something like that. Our knowledge of those laws and of other background assumptions used in an argument are all totally unjustified and so if you had been making that claim you would be wrong.

Making the claim that you're a justificationist using one sentence that could be interpreted as justificationist if it was taken in isolation is a bad negative interpretation. That interpretation doesn't make sense in the light of your condemnation of justificationism in the rest of the book.

Alan


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