BONJOUR'S RECONSIDERATION OF FOUNDATIONALISM

ABSRTACT: In BonJour's recent essay, "The Dialectic of Foundationalism and Coherentism," he argues for a reconsideration of foundationalism.BonJour makes three assumptions: (i) that the realist conception of truth as correspondence with the appropriate region of mind-independent reality is correct; (ii) that foundationalism is offering an account of "the fundamental structure of the epistemic justification of contingent or empirical beliefs, where what is distinctive about epistemic justification is that it involves an acceptably strong reason for thinking that the belief in question is true or likely to be true;" and (iii) that an internalist conception of epistemic justification is correct.BonJour then argues that an internalist foundationalism offers the correct conception of epistemic justification.I argue that, given the assumption of the correspondence theory of truth, an internalist foundationalism fails to provide an acceptably strong reason for supposing any belief to be true with regard to a mind-independent reality.After explicating BonJour's notions of foundationalism, internalist justification, and truth as correspondence, the nature of foundational beliefs is explored through a dilemma posed as a challenge for metajustification.I attempt to demonstrate that foundationalism does not provide an adequate basis for epistemic inference to the external physical world, and use this to show that BonJour's three assumptions are together incompatible.This is the goal of the first part of the thesis.In the second part of the thesis, both to emphasize that it is only this specific triumvirate that is incompatible and to suggest viable directions to proceed that are free from this criticism, I show that any two of these three notions plus the contrary of the third are compatible.Finally, I suggest that the combination of internalism, a correspondence theory of truth, and coherentism, thereby rejecting the assumption of foundationalism, shows the most promise for a complete and internally compatible theory of epistemic justification.