Some philosophers, such as N. R. Hanson, have suggested that one's perceiving an object entails one's having a particular perceptual belief, and not just some belief or other, about that object. This article constructs an argument showing that such a view generates an infinite regress of required perceptual beliefs.

Foundationalist, Coherentist. Skeptic etc., have all been united in one respect—all accept epistemic justification cannot result from an unending, and non‐repeating. chain of reasons. Peter Klein has recently challenged this minimal consensus with a defense of what he calls “Intinitism”—the position that justification can result from such a regress. Klein provides surprisingly convincing responses to most of the common objections to Infinitism, but I will argue that he fails to address a venerable metaphysical concern about a certain type of regress. (...) My conclusion will be that until Klein answers these metaphysical worries he will not have restored Infinitism as a viable option in epistemology. (shrink)

Foundationalist, Coherentist, Skeptic etc., have all been united in one respect--all accept epistemic justification cannot result from an unending, and non-repeating, chain of reasons. Peter Klein has recently challenged this minimal consensus with a defense of what he calls "Infinitism"--the position that justification can result from such a regress. Klein provides surprisingly convincing responses to most of the common objections to Infinitism, but I will argue that he fails to address a venerable metaphysical concern about a certain type of regress. (...) My conclusion will be that until Klein answers these metaphysical worries he will not have restored Infinitism as a viable option in epistemology. (shrink)

In this paper, I will present and defend an argument from the conditional character of inferential justification against the version of epistemic infinitism Klein advances. More specifically, after proposing a distinction between propositional and doxastic infinitism, which is based on a standard distinction between propositional and doxastic justification, I will describe in considerable detail the argument from conditionality, which is mainly an argument against propositional infinitism, and clarify some of its main underlying assumptions. There are various responses to be found (...) in Klein’s works to this argument, and my aim is to show that none of those responses can be plausibly held without infinitism losing its title to being a genuine non-skeptical alternative. (shrink)

What follows is a taxonomy of arguments that regresses of inferential justification are vicious. They fall out into four general classes: conceptual arguments from incompleteness, conceptual arguments from arbitrariness, ought-implies-can arguments from human quantitative incapacities, and ought-implies can arguments from human qualitative incapacities. They fail with a developed theory of "infinitism" consistent with valuational pluralism and modest epistemic foundationalism.

I will assume here the defenses of epistemic infinitism are adequate and inquire as to the variety standpoints within the view. I will argue that infinitism has three varieties depending on the strength of demandingness of the infinitist requirement and the purity of its conception of epistemic justification, each of which I will term strong pure, strong impure, and weak impure infinitisms. Further, I will argue that impure infinitisms have the dialectical advantage.

Turri argues against what he calls an “orthodox” view of the relationship between propositional and doxastic justification, according to which (Basis) it is sufficient for S to be doxastically justified in believing p that p is propositionally justified for S in virtue of having reason(s) R and S believes p on the basis of R. According to Turri, (Basis) is false and hence the orthodox view is wrong. Turri offers “an alternative proposal,” the definitive thesis of which is that the (...) subject’s intellectual abilities explain why a given proposition, p, is justified for her, and argues that, contra the orthodoxy, this proposal leads to explaining propositional justification in terms of doxastic justification rather than vice versa. In this paper, I argue for the following claims: (i) There are good reasons to think that Turri misidentifies “the orthodox view” and his objection thereby misfires, (ii) Even if we assume that Turri’s identification of the orthodox view is correct, his counter-examples to that view are far from being decisive, and (iii) Turri’s own proposal is not “an alternative” to the orthodox view but can be accommodated by it. (shrink)