Abstract

The debate between coherentism and foundationalism is familiar in the literature of epistemology. But neither position has been satisfactorily worked out. My project is to examine critically a specific type of coherence theory of justification, namely Laurence BonJour's internalist coherentism. In his book The Structure of Empirical Knowledge, he is willing to confront coherentism's difficulties as he tries to establish a coherence theory of justification, married to a correspondence theory of truth. ;My aim is to expose the inadequacies of BonJour's coherence theory of justification and, conversely, to defend against his criticisms the plausibility of the foundationalist conception of justification. ;In Chapter 1, I briefly sketch what the coherence theory is and focus on K. Lehrer's subjectivist version. This enables one to see the reason why BonJour wants to establish his own new system. I then look at BonJour's project, which requires the following three constituents: an observation requirement, a Doxastic Presumption, and a metajustification. ;In Chapter 2, I consider BonJour's motivation for requiring that any epistemology supply a metajustification. Here, the Doxastic Presumption is examined. I argue that the DP is not only false but also unnecessary for the epistemic justification of empirical knowledge, if one adopts a foundationalist theory of justification. ;In Chapter 3, I examine BonJour's own metajustification . I argue that his correspondence hypothesis is really no better than various competing hypotheses, and that the MJ has to appeal to empirical facts. ;In Chapter 4, I discuss a priori justification. I argue that a priori knowledge cannot alone suffice to provide an epistemic justification for the claim that a certain type of coherence among empirical beliefs is truth-conducive, whereas an a posteriori metajustificatory argument begs the question against the skeptic. ;In my conclusion, I propose that an internalist foundationalism is in a better position than BonJourian coherentism. The possibility that empirical knowledge can be justified by appeal to an empirical basis survives BonJour's attacks on foundationalism. Thus my discussion will open the door to a serious reconsideration of foundationalism.