Critical Notice Rational Starting Points

Epistemic justification has been claimed to be a special case of argument by philosophers such as Accordingly for each attempt, epistemic justification is the occasion of the arguer making a case for some conclusion based on other premises, when the audience and the arguer are the same person. The dialectical model of argument is used to inform how it is that a subject could come to justify her beliefs. In contemporary epistemology, such a move has been viewed as a move away from traditional foundationalism. Just as frequently , such a move has been seen to be dangerously close to a form of vulgar relativism. Among its defenders, Foley is unique in that he explicitly holds out hope that a " subjective foundationalism " can be truth conducive. First, we must examine Foley's reasoning for this claim. Unfortunately, his robust optimism regarding the epistemic power of subjective foundationalism is found to be lacking in virtue of the inadequate epistemic " starting points " that he must use. To foreshadow a bit, the problem with his starting points are that they are either too strong to preserve the subjective nature of his theory of rationality, or else they are too weak to be truth conducive in any meaningful way. Finally, the lessons learned from this examination of Foley will be directed towards a more considered understanding of the limitations of an account of epistemic justification as intra-personal argument. Even though the account fails in an important way, the theory of epistemic justification that is provided by Richard Foley is the most interesting attempt at fully working out the implications of justification as intra-personal argument. Consider his opening paragraph of the book The Theory of Epistemic Ration-ality, in which he calls for a minimal understanding of argument: