Justification for Foundational Belief

[Angrboda]

First, let me get a few preliminaries out of the way.

First, Genkaus' claim that something is true by virtue of it corresponding to the reality of things as they are is a compact statement of the correspondence theory of truth, which is but one theory among about a dozen contending theories. Genkaus' statement here does not stand on its own without more support, which he likely cannot give. In fact, to ask how we know the correspondence theory of truth is true may very well be unable to avoid leading to a self-referential series of paradoxes, all of which would cleave it from the foundationalism you are examining.

Second, I've come to the conclusion that questions about whether something is real, corresponds to reality, and so forth are essentially meaningless. Philosophical thought experiments may ask, are we brains in vats, or ideas in the mind of God, or collections of particle. The simple answer is that, given our understanding of their presuppositions, there is no way to tell which, if any, is true. If the property or quality of being real doesn't refer to something that a thing or experience can be determined to possess in one instance, but not another, then that property has no meaning. It is as if you showed me two identical frying pans, and told me that one possessed flotgan, and the other didn't. After examining them, and determining them to be identical, and your still insisting that one has flotgan, I'd have to conclude that assertions involving flotgan have no meaning. (There is a subtle underlying paradox here concerning the notions of identity and identicality, but I'll leave that as a reader exercise.)

I just now read the Wikipedia entry on what foundationalism consists in, so I likely can't offer an educated opinion. I'm not a big fan of the concept of basic beliefs, as I think it doesn't actually satisfactorily dispatch the problems that it ostensibly solves so much as it hides them well. And you seem to be at war with yourself, both wanting to invest in a theory which accepts the bottom layer of terms to be unjustified, yet you want to justify that framework. You can't be a little pregnant, I think, it's all or nothing. It does however, point to the hidden conflicts within the concept of foundationalism itself. (I was going to mention Gettier problems here, but I can't remeber why, so I'll just leave it as a bare mention.)

I think ultimately, there are a number of properties of "the things which you are working with" (concepts, beliefs, ideas, propositions) which have the potential for leading to unsolvable problems of the sort alluded to above. The first of these is reference (and especially self-reference, which leads to things like the liars paradox, the strengthened liar's paradox, Godelizations, and Russell's paradox [to Frege]). The second is ambiguity and vagueness (the technical term 'vagueness', not the colloquial term). The problem of vagueness is a fundamental one which has no ready solutions, and ambiguity makes determinate meanings difficult (this was Wittgenstein's bailiwick, as noted). The third is incompleteness in the sense of underdetermination. No elucidation of a set of ideas can ever completely capture the ideas which that set includes and depends upon, and any attempt to do so is doomed to failure (this gets back to the Gettier problems, technical incompleteness, and epistemological holism, aka underdetermination of theory, aka, the Duhem-Quine thesis). And this problem crops up in practical aspects as well. Researchers in artificial intelligence believed that if you could program a computer with the right set of facts, and the right set of procedures for making inferences, you could make an intelligent machine. Such a project was undertaken in, I believe, 1984. Yet as each decade passed without success, the researchers have had to acknowledge that the problem was not as easy as had been thought. My favorite example in this area comes to me by Jeff Hawkins. If I tell you a story, that, "Jane saw a doggie in the pet store window. She wanted it." We don't have to clarify that she wanted the doggie, as opposed to wanting the window. There is an enormous amount of information required for processing even simple propositions or stories. (I would argue, it requires less information than it appears, as the above, vagueness, ambiguity, incompleteness, etc, allow us to appear to produce whole and complete answers that are accepted as such, even though they aren't, largely because we are sharing them with systems which operate exactly the same way as we do [other people], yet it still requires enormous amounts of information, information split between the content or ideas involved, and the information implicit in the structure and behavior of the systems which instance that content [i.e. minds; see also, Kantian idealism vis a vis, a priori knowledge 'given' in experience].) (This also branches off into the questions posed by John Searle and the work he was responding to in his essay, "Minds, Brains, and Programs" (1981) which became what we now call the Chinese Room problem. [There's a subtlety there, that if you read the original article, Searle equivocates fundamentally on what the Chinese Room is supposed to be doing.])

Well, this is getting to book length already, and I have other things to do. I will sum up, first, by saying that I believe there is a resolution to the problems above, but it would take a book that is thick enough to stun an ox for me to explain them. However, and I think this gets to Rhythm's point, the real world and things in it (there's that word real again; I'll use it as a placeholder for now), these things have neither properties of reference nor self-reference. If we conclude that important problems exist as a consequence of these properties, even if not all the important problems, then the actual things in the world can, in a sense, evade those concerns. (I know, this sounds like I'm mixing metaphor with reality, but I don't believe I am, and that's where the ox-stunning book comes in; I would just gesture weakly towards the notions of functionalism, and especially functional composition, experience qua experience, as opposed to a reflection of reality, and the world, not as a thing to be explained, but as a collection of systems within systems, inside which are the systems known as mind, behavior and evolution.)

And I don't see any good way to reach my goal of concluding this on a summary point, so I'll just end it in midstream in good post-modernist fashion. We'll see where that leads.

Well, this is what happens when you ask a philosopher a simple question. I hope you're proud of yourself.

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The issue of foundational belief has been a tough one for me, to say the least. Avoiding post modernism and radical skepticism isn't a simple chore, as the ticket to doing so for me is to justify the seemingly unjustifiable: foundational beliefs.

Beliefs of this nature are a priori issues and include self evident belief and axioms. Descartes established personal acknowledgement of reality with the cogito, but memory, induction (as dissected by Hume), sense-perception, and interpretation of the meaning of words ( I believe it was Wittgenstein who brought light to this) are all truths that humans intuitively assume and need in order to survive as a mentally and physically healthy individual.

The justification for many foundational beliefs is fairly simple, and I personally subscribe to it. The answer that has bubbled to the surface is, "You are either with me or against me in this world. Functioning in a world you don't believe to be real isn't healthy- some could say deadly or impossible. So I will assume these truths, all the while beings receptive to new information that contradicts these beliefs."

My issue with this is that I feel like I am shifting the burden of proof, waiting to be proven wrong. I had previously thought it to also be special pleading, however foundational belief is in another class from derived belief because it is an a priori issue that takes precedence over all other forms of belief.

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That has been my very limited understanding of foundationalism and is what governs my evidentialist beliefs. My question to anyone and everyone is, am I justified?
Am I justified in making an assumption on the part of foundational beliefs?