SUMMARY OF EPISTEMOLOGY

WHAT IS JUSTIFICATION AND WHY DOES IT MATTER IN EPISTEMOLOGY? DISCUSS ANY THREE THEORIES OF EPISTEMIC JUSTIFICATION, SHOWING HOW RELEVANT THEY MIGHT BE TO IDEAL LIFE-SITUATION.

The theory of justification is a part of epistemology that attempts to understand the justification of propositions and beliefs. Epistemologists are concerned with various epistemic features of belief, which includes the ideas of justification, warrant, rationality, and probability. Justification, according to the tripartite theory of knowledge, is the difference between merely believing something that is true, and knowing it. To have knowledge, on this account, we must have justification, and to have justification about our belief is to have good reasons to think that they are true. Therefore, justification has been considered being epistemologically important properly for a claim to count as knowledge claim. It is one that is important in our evaluation of our beliefs qua beliefs, a methodic speech act wherein the epistemist offers reasons in defense of one’s propositional attitudes, that is, of one’s beliefs and conclusions. However, how beliefs are justified is among the central questions of epistemology. Justification could also be done in repudiation of a given claim. In this case, the epistemologist tends to distinguish deontological and non-deontological justification.

Deontological Justification: This has to do with offering reasons in defense of one’s knowledge claims, purely out of a sense of epistemic duty, in other words, justificatory activity is purely perfunctory.

The deontological understanding of the concept of justification is common to the way philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, Moore and Chisholm have thought about justification. Today, however, the dominant view is that the deontological understanding of justification is unsuitable for the purpose of epistemology since for some, deontological justification presupposes that we can have a sufficiently high degree of control over our beliefs. But beliefs are not akin; they simply arise in or happen to us. Therefore, beliefs are not suitable for deontological evaluation. The other reason is that deontological justification does not tend to ‘epistemize’ true beliefs: it does not tend to make them non-accidentally true. Deontological justification could be represented as follows:

        I.            S is justified in believing that p, iff

     II.            S believes that p

  III.            S is obliged not to refrain from believing p.

Non-deontological Justification: This claims that probabilification and deontological justification can diverge: it is possible for a belief to be deontologically justified without being properly probabilified. So, for a belief to be justified, it has to instantiate the property of proper probalilification. It can be represented logically as

        I.            S is justified in believing that p, iff

     II.            S believes that p

  III.            S believes that p in a properly probabilified manner.

As an epistemic process, justification is done in fidelity to the standard of philosophical discourse, otherwise, it fails to be a case of justification hence reasonableness remains the yardstick for justification. However, although it is true that one cannot proffer indefeasible reasons to the skeptics in order to justify one’s claims, one has to be modest as dubitability, corrigibility and fallibility will always be present in a bid to justify our knowledge claims.  Following the tripartite account of knowledge, justification being very important in the knowledge process, has to be methodic, well thought out, and well articulated. To justify our claims, we have to be systematic, coherent, compelling, consistent and convincing. But that does not mean that we should not be modest with regards to the incorrigibility and indefeasibility of our claims.

Why does justification matter in epistemology?

William Alston had claimed that justification is of no epistemic importance. Alston in the work: “Concepts of Epistemic Justification (1985) argues for the importance and superiority of reliabilist warrant over and above justification. Alston’s argument is that one is more likely to attain truth by believing the warranted proposition than the justified propositions; since beliefs that could be reached by a method that is in fact reliable is likely to be true. For him, truth-conduciveness should be the standard for evaluating beliefs. Contrary to this view, Matthew Weiner, in his work: “Why Does Justification Matters” (2005), argues that Justification is an important epistemic property. For him, the criterion for epistemological importance is effectiveness and knowability. This views claims that epistemological importance, contrary to the claims of some scholars, does not only require truth-conduciveness, as measured by effectiveness, but also dependence on experience, as measured by knowability.

Weiner posited that being justified on this completely experience-dependence conception of justification makes a belief good from the epistemic point of view; hence, justification is epistemologically important. Weiner also argues that Alston’s proposal makes warrant more effective property than justification but for Weiner, to make effectiveness the sole criterion of epistemological importance would make truth the only epistemologically important propositional property.

Weiner argues that the importance of effectiveness and knowability averts the collapse of positive epistemic status to truth. Truth is not the only epistemologically important property, because truth is not completely knowable. Warrant is superior to justification with respect to effectiveness, but inferior with respect to knowability.

Weiner thus ascertains that, if one succeeds in believing what is warranted, one would be more likely to attain the truth than if one believes what is justified. But believing what is justified, however, requires no information other than what one’s experience has made available, while believing what is warranted will require guess work. It is this complete experience-dependence, he concludes, that makes justification epistemologically important.

Another reason why justification matters in epistemology is that it helps to distinguish between knowledge and mere belief; as the third condition in the tripartite account of knowledge, justification serves as an intermediary between doxa (option) and epistemic (knowledge). Certainly, an opinion remains an intangible claim unless it is justified. In a similar fashion, justification ensures certainty in our claims to knowledge. it is that epistemic property that qualifies any potential candidate (beliefs/ claims) as knowledge.

Justification also helps to distinguish lucky guess and fact. Here, though it’s properly experience-dependent, justification provides us with facts to strengthen our arguments as against lucky guess. In all, justification distinguishes between reasonable and possible doubts, where reasonableness is the yardstick for justification. In other words, reason (rather than uncalled doubts) should be the ultimate court of appeal where our claims are to be justified.

Theories of justification

Foundationalism: this is the position that all beliefs are of two kinds: basic beliefs which are self justifying and non-basic beliefs that needs to be justified by their inferential relationship to the basic beliefs. Foundationalism as a theory of justification posits that some beliefs are incorrigible and infallible, hence do not need to be justified; these beliefs are said to be self-evident or derived from intuitions. The claim that some beliefs are infallible and self-evident is fundamental to the argument of the fundamentalists. They argue further that other beliefs, that is the non-basic beliefs, can only be justified, if and only if they are inferentially related to the self evident ones which they call the fundamental beliefs.

The most popular example of the foundationalist theory is the view expressed by Rene Descartes. In fact, Descartes introduced the architectonic image of foundationalism by affirming the need for a deconstruction of epistemic superstructures until one gets to a solid base upon which one can erect other forms of epistemic beliefs. Obviously, his “basic belief” is evident in his famous dictum cogito ego sum while other beliefs which are derived inferentially form it are non-basic beliefs.

Similarly, the position of the foundationalists is basically that any belief can either be justified if it is self-evident such as: “I think therefore I am” or 2+2 = 4, while other beliefs which are not self-evident are justified by their relationship to the basic ones. E.g, two mangoes and another two mangoes will be four mangoes can be derived from the self-evident basic belief of 2+2=4.

This way of conceiving beliefs by the foundationalists has created an architectural model in the minds of people. The foundationalist drawing inspiration from the Cartesian metaphor conceives beliefs as a superstructure with the basic beliefs serving as the foundation, while non-basic beliefs represent the structure itself. Like a good architecture, to continue with the metaphor, the foundationalists beliefs that the survival of the non-basic beliefs rests on the support supplied by the foundational beliefs, just as the survival of an edifice rest on the strength of the base. In essence, the justification of non-basic beliefs depends on the strength of the basic beliefs.

Criticism

It has been argued that the incorrigibility factor is the Achilles’ heel of foundationalism. The attempt to maintain that some beliefs are self-evident and infallible has raised questions such as: what do they mean by an infallible belief? Do we have certain beliefs that do not need any justification?

Another serious criticism against the foundationalists is the point that foundationalist, in terminating the regress of justification, do so arbitrarily. Furthermore, foundationalists have been criticized of conceiving beliefs as linearly and hierarchically arranged. The claim here is that beliefs, as against the foundationalists, are not developed in a constructive manner which can make us talk of a linear or hierarchical order of epistemic chains.

One the whole, in order that the demise of foundationalism should not be announced, modesty should be introduced in our knowledge claims such that some forms of defeasibility could be welcomed. 

Coherentism: Coherentism is from the verb “cohere”, this word is cognate with verbs as “adhere”. To cohere means to stick together. Coherenticism, as an alternative to foundationalism, holds that a belief is justified or justifiably held, if it coheres with a set of beliefs, and by this they reject the notion of any foundational belief. So, knowledge and justified belief does not in any way rest on a foundation of non-inferential justified beliefs. Beliefs are justified, therefore, to the extent they cohere with other beliefs in a given system of beliefs. The better our belief fit into our already existing system of beliefs, the better that belief is justified, and this reduces justification to a question of relationship. The most obvious weakness in this view is the failure on their part to account for the things that must cohere in order for a given belief to be justified, and the relationship that must hold among these things in order for the belief in question to be justified.

Contextualism: This view claims that whatever we know is in a context. Context here is seen in relation to certain features, such as intentions and presupposition of members of a conversational situation. These features determine under what standards one’s claims are taken to count as knowledge. However, this theory does not support the objectivity of knowledge, since one context differs from another, and the presupposition of members of a conversation implies relativising knowledge, since they accept that standard of justification varies from context to context.

Michael Williams while taking epistemological contextualism to a more prominent form rejects skepticism as unnatural, since it is dependent on essentially contentious ideas and being theoretical, it cannot be forced on our ordinary way of epistemic thinking. He argued that, independent of any situational, disciplinary, and other contextually variable factors, a proposition has no epistemic status whatsoever. There is no fact of the matter as to what kind of justification it either admits or requires. David Annis, on his part, pointed out that foundationalism and coherentism both ignore the social nature of justification. For him, a subject is justified to hold knowledge of an object, if the subject can meet certain objections that express doubt.

Despite all these arguments, it appears that contextualism has failed to satisfactorily explain “how”, not “why” we can be puzzled by the epistemic puzzles of the skeptics. Their arguments, rather, imply that when we make epistemic claims within a context, we systematically confound our claims to what we will claim in some other contexts. This, Steven Schiffer says, is not true, because it means that the claimant is ignorant of the context of his epistemic claim. In such a case, Schiffer argues that the contextualist’s solution has not also satisfactorily explained what he set out to explain. Whether Schiffer’s assessment is true is open to debate, but suffice it to say that from our discussions so far, the skeptical challenge to justification seems to have no adequate response, such that even contemporary western epistemology still battles with providing a refutation of various forms to skepticism. This is confirmed by the popular saying that all the problems of the theory of knowledge, even the more general ones, have their roots in the belief that knowledge is impossible or at least, not certain; an attitude of a typical skeptic.

DISCUSS THE GETTIER PROBLEM, AND ATTEMPT A PHILOSOPHICAL CRITIQUE OF THE COUNTER-EXAMPLES PRESENTED IN EDMUND GETTIER’S “IS JUSTIFIED TRUE BELIEF KNOWLEDGE?” (1964)

Edmund Gettier’s problem consists in his epistemic concern regarding what conditions are individually necessary and collectively sufficient for a claim to count as epistemic one. Thus, the expression “Gettier problem” refers to a problem in modern epistemology or first-order logic, issuing from counter-examples to the definition of knowledge as “Justified True Belief” (JTB), dealing extensively with the concept of JTB, thr scope of the concept as well as thr attacks upon JTB which Gettier’s examples introduce.

In opposition to the criteria for knowledge found in the Theatetus’ tripartite account of knowledge as “Justified True Belief”, Edmund Gettier in his article “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? (1964)” offered counter examples to the three criteria proposed in the Theatetus in a bid to show that justified true belief is not sufficient for one’s having knowledge hence the need for the fourth criteria. He painted systematic scenarios whereby beliefs were both true and justified, but for reasons unrelated to the justification. The problematic for Gettier therefore is: since such beliefs are not based on the right kind of justification, should we intuitively claim to have knowledge of such?

For Gettier, while justified belief in a proposition is a necessary condition for knowing, it is not sufficient. In fact, in some circumstance, even when all traditional conditions for knowledge are met, one might still fail to have knowledge. Thus, it is possible to mistake as knowledge, a true belief whose justification is based on epistemic guess or luck, rather than good evidence. Such would then constitute a defective justification of a true belief. There is therefore need for the fourth condition which would render any form of Gettierization impossible.

Philosophical critique of the counter-examples

As J. T. Ekong intimated in his article “ A Critique of Edmund Gettier’s Account of Knowledge”, responses to Gettier’s counter-examples can be grouped into three (3): the first group are those who attempts to offer a fourth condition for knowledge, the second group are those who attempt to strengthen the traditional JTB account of knowledge such that it becomes Gettier-resistant or undefeated by Gettier’s counter-examples, and finally, the third group are those who considers the entire argument of Gettier as defective, on the grounds that they rely on a false principle namely: That false proposition can justify one’s belief in another proposition. Thus, the falsity of the principle on which the counter-examples depends, they said, invariably entails the falsity of the counter-examples.

The reliabilist, Alvin Goldman and Richard Kirkham belongs to the first group. He proposes infallibilism as a fourth condition. He argues that the only definition of knowledge that could ever be immune to all counter-examples is the infallibilists one. Hence, for a belief to be considered as knowledge, it must not only be true and justified, but this justification of the belief must necessitate its truth, the justification for the belief must also be infallible. Another fourth condition proposed is indefeasibility wherein proponents of this argues that there should be no overriders or defeasible conditions to the reasons that justify one’s belief if such beliefs must count as knowledge.

Proponents of the second group include the likes of Henri Poincare and L. E. J Brouwer. For them, given that attempts to offer a viable fourth condition as required by Gettier has been very thorny, it appears what the Gettier problem wants is not a fourth condition rather, the JTB needs a formalized reconstruction. They often call into question the law of excluded middle (a thing either is or is not), by this, they argue that a justified true belief either constitutes knowledge or does not. So the definition of knowledge must set it apart from that which does not constitute knowledge. The JTB account must then be revised in such a way that it can account for what stands for knowledge, without having to seek additional conditions to make it pass the scrutiny of critics. 

D. M Armstrong, John Pollock, and Richard Feldman belongs to the last group. in his work: “An Alleged Defect in Gettier Counter-Examples”, Feldman argues that we cannot fault Gettier’s counter-examples, since for him, they rely on the allegedly false principles; that false propositions can justify one’s belief in other propositions. Armstrong in his part posits that Gettiers argument is based on a false ground that is too weak to serve as suitable            grounds.

WRITE SHORT NOTES ON: VIRTUE EPISTEMOLOGY, RELIGIOUS EPISTEMOLOGY, SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY, NATURALIZED EPISTEMOLOGY, FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY, AND MORAL EPISTEMOLOGY.

Virtue Epistemology

Virtue is a version of epistemology which argues that rather than focus on the subject’s beliefs, its justification and how one’s belief can translate to knowledge, a preoccupation of traditional epistemology, rather, we should analyze the epistemic virtues and vices of the subject. It is in determining which way of forming belief that is epistemic virtue and which is epistemic vice that we can determine the epistemic quality of a particular belief.

Virtue epistemology is committed to firstly, the claim that epistemology is normative in character, and secondly, they claim and take intellectual agents and communities to be the                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         primary sources of epistemic values and primary focus of epistemic evaluation. Virtue epistemologists can be divided into two groups. Virtue reliabilists conceive of intellectual virtues as stable and reliable cognitive faculties or powers and cite vision, introspection, memory, and the like as paradigm cases of intellectual virtue. These virtue epistemologists tend to focus on formulating virtue-based accounts of knowledge or justification.

Virtue responsibilists conceive of intellectual virtues as good intellectual character traits, traits like attentiveness, fair-mindedness, open-mindedness, intellectual tenacity, and courage. While some virtue responsibilists have also attempted to give virtue-based accounts of knowledge or justification, others have pursued less traditional projects, focusing on such issues as the nature and value of virtuous intellectual character as such, the relation between intellectual virtue and epistemic responsibility, and the relevance of intellectual virtue to the social and cross-temporal aspects of the intellectual life.

Ernest Sosa introduced the notion of an intellectual virtue into contemporary epistemological discussion in a 1980 paper, “The Raft and the Pyramid.” Sosa argued in this paper that an appeal to intellectual virtue could resolve the conflict between foundationalists and coherentists over the structure of epistemic justification. One of the major proponents of virtue epistemology is Duncan Pritchard.

Religious Epistemology

Religious Epistemology is the branch of epistemology which questions religious beliefs and propositions in a bid to know whether they are rational, justified, warranted, reasonable, based on evidence and so on. It is therefore a broad label which covers any approach to epistemological questions from a religious perspective, or attempts to understand the epistemological issues that come from religious belief. It questions the possibility of attaining a rational foundation of faith or attaining knowledge of God and how we can attain knowledge of God, if he exists. It seeks to know whether or not God can be perceptible, or is h known only through mystical experience. Religious epistemology also attempts to know if, given the existence of evil in the world which many have used to argue against the possible existence of God, if based on the evidence given, we can lusciously posit the non-existence of God. Some of the proponents of Religious Epistemology include Alvin Plantinga, Willaim Alston and the likes.

Social Epistemology

Social epistemology refers to a broad set of approaches to the study of knowledge that construes human knowledge as a collective achievement. Another way of characterizing social epistemology is as the study of the social dimensions of knowledge. There is little consensus, however, on what the term "knowledge" comprehends, what is the scope of the "social", or what the style or purpose of the study should be. The term "social epistemology" was first used by the library scientists Margaret Egan and Jesse Shera in the 1950s

Social Epistemology, as a field within analytic philosophy, foregrounds the social aspects of knowledge in the creation and dissemination knowledge. What precisely these social aspects are, and whether they have beneficial or detrimental effects on the possibilities to create, acquire and spread knowledge is a subject of continuous debate within the ambience of epistemology. Within the field, “the social” is approached in two complementary and not mutually exclusive ways: firstly, the social character of knowledge can either be approached through inquiries in inter-individual epistemic relations or through inquiries focusing on epistemic communities.

The inter-individual approach typically focuses on issues such as testimony, epistemic trust as a form of trust placed by one individual in another, epistemic dependence, and epistemic authority. The community approach typically focuses on issues such as community standards of justification, community procedures of critique, diversity, epistemic justice, and collective knowledge. As a field within Analytic philosophy, Social Epistemology has close ties with, and often overlaps with Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. While parts of the field engage in abstract, normative considerations of knowledge creation and dissemination, other parts of the field are naturalized epistemology in the sense that they draw on empirically gained insights. The Major proponents of Social epistemology are Alvin Goldman and Steve Fuller.

Naturalized Epistemology

There is not generally acceptable definition of Naturalized Epistemology even among different Naturalists. C. B. Wreen explains that this is not only because of the dispute on the kind of empirical sciences they consider as relevant to epistemological questions, but also because of the kind of question it should ask, and the degree to which epistemology should employ empirical sciences and so on. A narrow view of naturalized epistemology defines it as a theory that employs empirical science in epistemological theories. This view is not an adequate way of explaining the details of this domain, since it places naturalism in one category without distinction. But Richard Feldman defines naturalized epistemology as an attempt to make epistemology closely related to the natural science. Feldman went ahead to divide naturalized epistemology into three broad groups: the replacement naturalism, the substantive naturalism, and the co-operative naturalism, with all types differing in the way they interpret the relationship between the empirical sciences and epistemology.

       I.            Replacement naturalism aims at discovering the relation between our theories and their evidence. It eliminates any need for conceptual analysis. They reject traditional epistemology, arguing that the epistemological project show employ the methods of the natural science if it must record progress. The major proponent of this group is W. V. O Quine. In his work; “Epistemology Naturalized” (1968), Quine attempts to make epistemology a chapter of psychology since for him, there is no demarcation between empirical science and epistemology. Both have the same aims, tackle the same questions, and employ the same methods.

    II.            Substantive naturalism argues for a combination of the tools of traditional epistemology with the tools of the empirical sciences. This group applies empirical science, theories, and methods of cognitive psychology, in pursuing epistemology. Prominent in this group is Alvin Goldman.

 III.            Cooperative naturalism is an overlap between cooperative naturalism and substantive naturalism. This group argues that empirical results of psychology are necessary in answering the evaluative questions pursued by epistemology. Thus, they view epistemological progress (especially in answering epistemic and evaluative questions) as one which is dependent on the input of the empirical sciences. Amirah Albahri, further categorized this group into: Strategic Reliabilism, Pragmatism, and Natural kind theory. In general, Theories of cooperative naturalism argue for empirical science to be the starting point for epistemological investigation. For them, the methods and theories of empirical science can help answer epistemological questions. Prominent in this group is C. S. Stich and Hillary Kornblith.

Feminist Epistemology

Feminist epistemology studies the ways in which gender does and ought to influence our conceptions of knowledge, the knowing subject, and practices of inquiry and justification. It identifies ways in which dominant conceptions and practices of knowledge attribution, acquisition, and justification systematically disadvantage women and other subordinated groups, and strives to reform these conceptions and practices so that they serve the interests of these groups. Furthermore, feminist epistemology aims at explaining why and how entry of female researches into sciences (particularly biological and social sciences) has generated new questions, theories, and methods showing how gender has in fact played a causal role in these transformations “defending these changes as cognitive, not just social, advances”

What is common to feminist epistemologies is an emphasis on the epistemic salience of gender and the use of gender as an analytic category in discussions, criticisms, and reconstructions of epistemic practices, norms, and ideals. While feminist epistemology is not easily and simply characterized, feminist approaches to epistemology tend to share an emphasis on the ways in which knowers are particular and concrete, rather than abstract and universalizable. Feminist epistemologies take seriously the ways in which knowers are enmeshed in social relations that are generally hierarchical while also being historically and culturally specific. In addition, feminist epistemologies assume that the ways in which knowers are constituted as particular subjects are significant to epistemological problems such as warrant, evidence, justification, and theory-construction, as well as to our understanding of terms like “objectivity,” “rationality,” and “knowledge.”

Susan Bordo in the work: The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (1990) and Genevieve Lloyd in her work: The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy (1984) tried to analyze the ways in which metaphors of masculinity operate in constructions of ideals of rationality and objectivity and of the role of the symbolic imaginary and metaphor in modern epistemological projects, both Lloyd and Bordo argues that the operations of the symbolic imaginary are implicated in the metaphysics of subjectivity and objectivity and in the characterization of epistemic problems that follow from that metaphysics. The result of the work done by these feminist historians is that ideals of reason, objectivity, autonomy, and disinterestedness operating in assumptions about inquiry, as well as the idea that the “perennial” problems of epistemology are gender neutral are now revealed to be connected to and constitutive of gender relations.

Moral Epistemology

Moral epistemology is the study of moral knowledge and related phenomena. Historically, this branch of epistemology could be traceable to Socrates’ inquiries into whether virtue and expertise in governance can be taught. Moral epistemology seeks to determine whether any of our moral judgments count as knowledge and to provide an account of whatever moral knowledge we do have. Unfortunately this traditional understanding puts moral epistemology at risk of being a field with which many ethical theorists can have no substantial engagement.

Moral epistemology questions the possibility of moral knowledge. Since the basic moral categories are those of right and wrong action, moral epistemology questions how we can arrive at the knowledge of which action is right and which is wrong.

CRITICALLY DISCUSS THE NOTION OF “EPISTEMOLOGICAL FORCING” AS A TRENDY WAY OF CONFRONTING THE CHALLENGE OF SKEPTICISM, AND ACCOUNT FOR ITS PLAUSIBILITY OR IMPLAUSIBILITY AS A PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD OF DISPUTATION

Literature has it that Skepticism has, for centuries, proven to be the “gadfly” to epistemic dogmatism, since by being reluctant to accepting anything at face-value, the skeptic wants to lead epistemists to the awareness of the epistemic plight of possible error even at the face of evidence for our knowledge claims. It calls for a justification of the justification for our knowledge, but this will lead the epistemist to commit the fallacy of begging-the-question. To the dismay of all, attempts to escape the challenge of skepticism have proven abortive, despite all the divergent theories which have been expunged to shut the skeptic. Consequent upon this, skepticism presents itself as a major limiting factor and challenge to epistemological accomplishment.

Among such attempts is the view that the skeptic question, just like any other rude question should be answered with silence, others appeal to Fallibilism about certainty, still others employs the principle of closure of justification. Despite these attempts, the skeptics still wear their garment of knowledge vacuity, claiming that knowledge faculty is cognitively vacuous, and as such, knowledge is unachievable. However, it seems the argument-by-argument technique will continue to yield less. This led to the emergence of the principle of “epistemological forcing” which presents itself as a better candidate to confront the challenge of skepticism. Our aim therefore shall be to critically examine this principle.

Epistemic forcing is a technique of constraining skeptical maneuvers within an appropriate range of situations; it is a trendy way of confronting the skeptics. The heuristic principle of forcing is this: whenever knowledge claims are challenged by the alleged possibility of error, the strategy is to shoe that the possibilities of error fail to be genuine in the relevant sense. Here, one could also appeal to certain pre-philosophical intuitions, or spontaneous convictions that the skeptic holds unquestioned, and without which it would be extremely difficult to embark on any rational enquiry.

This technique is based on the principle of reasonableness of doubt, such that doubts which are reasonable will have the epistemic warrant to be answered, while doubts which are unreasonable do not. The technique emphasizes two things: cognitive limits, and the limit of reasonableness of doubts. With this they mean that when the bonds of reasonableness are violated, skeptical demands lose their initial force and legitimacy.

The Plausibility of this technique as a philosophical method of disputation

This technique, as a philosophical method of disputation, is very plausible, reasonable and reliable to thrive in its aim of confronting the challenge of skepticism. Firstly, epistemological forcing uses the modest version of foundationalism in its quest to limit the range of possibilities within which the skeptical challenge can achieve success.

 The moderate version of foundationalism does not make absolute or exalted claims like the classical foundationalism even though it makes claims to certainty in epistemic justification, such claims is not construed to a definitive, fallible or non-revisable sense, rather, this model accommodates the concerns of epistemic anxieties of the anti-foundationalist including such as the skeptic and the falliblists, by characterizing the foundations of knowledge and justification in a manner that is of interest and relevance to them. It acknowledges both the certainty and fragility of our foundations upon which human knowledge and its justification rest.

The technique emphasizes cognitive limits as well as the limit of reasonableness of doubts. With this they mean that when the bonds of reasonableness are violated, skeptical demands lose their initial force and legitimacy. Therefore, with this principle, the skeptical challenge, even if not completely refuted, can at least be minimized.

This principle makes it known to the skeptic that error is accidental not essential to the human mind. This is explained by the fact that human mind can detect and correct its own errors of judgment, which shows that human reason is neither constitutionally incapable of knowing truth with certitude, nor congenitally unable to detect, admit and correct its mistakes in the process of cognition. If this were so, we will not be able to alter our views when we err, and even of discovering and recognizing truth.

The argument-by-argument approach to the skeptical challenge smacks of a “justificationist addiction”, a method which provides a huge failure for the classical foundationalists, and has scarcely any prospects of success in our time. The classical foundationalism made claims to strong justification, epistemic corrigibility and indubitability. But it fails to satisfy that standard it set and that is why it crumbled. It simply could not provide non-question-begging guarantees for the robust claims it made.

Relevance of this principle to real life situation

This strategy has implications for the principle of reasonable doubts in jurisprudence. A reasonable doubt is a doubt that is based on reason and common sense, the kind of doubt that would make a reasonable person hesitate to act. In the law court, the judge would only pass a judgment when evidence has been given beyond any reasonable doubt.

In the same way, to justify or prove epistemic claims beyond reasonable doubts of the skeptic means providing them in such a convincing manner that a reasonable person would not hesitate to rely and act upon them. A reasonable doubt is different from possible doubt because everything thing relating to human affairs is open to some possible or imaginary doubt. Reasonable doubt is a kind of doubt that is founded upon a real, tangible, substantial basis, and not upon mere caprice or conjectures.

ATTEMPT A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF “KNOWLEDGE “, WITH EMPHASIS ON PLATO’S THEATETUS (201d), AND MENO (98), AS FOUNDATIONAL LITERARY SOURCES .

In the Theatetus, 201d, we are presented with a sustainable inquiry into the subject matter of knowledge, in a bid to answer the important question of what knowledge is especially as regards the individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for knowledge.

In this dialogue, Theatetus told Socrates that a man once told him that True judgment with an account is knowledge, and True Judgment without an account falls outside of knowledge. And things of which there is no account are not knowable, while those which have account are knowable. This reveals that an account of a true belief which is to account as knowledge must consist in evidentially compelling and sufficiently grounded reasons in favour of such a true belief.

In the Meno, 98, we can trace some textual evidence of the traditional notion of knowledge (JTB), wherein Socrates asserts that “for true opinions, as long as they remain, are fine thing and all they do is good. But they are not willing to remain, and they escape from man’s mind, so that they are not worth much until one tie them down by giving an account of the reason why. And that knowledge is recollection. After they are tied down, they become knowledge, and then they remain in a place. That is why knowledge is prized higher than correct opinion, and knowledge differs from correct opinion in being tied down”. Knowledge as Justified True Belief (JTB) thus emerges, and can be represented in a logical form as:

S knows that P if,

        I.            P is true

     II.            S beliefs that P

  III.            S is justified in believing P

Belief as one of the conditions for knowledge simply means, as used here, an unsubstantial claim that a certain state of affairs obtains. The traditional conception of knowledge sees belief as something inferior to knowledge, since knowledge involves a justification of what is held to be the state of affairs, but belief does not.

In epistemology, the belief condition consists in holding a certain cognitive content as true. Thus knowledge basically implies belief as one of its important conditions, but a belief still needs truth and justification as adjectival properties to qualify the belief.