Day 18: BonJour on Foundationalism (Part 2)

•      BonJour on Metabeliefs

•      BonJour on Beliefs about Sensory Experience

•      Justification and the Conceptual Formulation of Sensory Content

•      BonJour on the External World

•      Inside-Out Epistemology

•      Read IE 133-158

BonJour on Metabeliefs

•      Occurrent beliefs (as opposed to other types of beliefs)

•      BonJour on the nature of occurrent beliefs

•      BonJour on how beliefs about beliefs can be foundational

BonJour on Beliefs about Sensory Experience

•      The status of sensory experience

•      Beliefs about sensory experience as descriptions of sensory experience

•      The foundational status of beliefs about sensory experience

Justification and the Conceptual Formulation of Sensory Content

•      Do we have the conceptual resources we need to generate the descriptions of sensory experience required to have justified beliefs?

•      Do we have the time to construct the required justifications?

•      Can the average person be said to be epistemically justified in believing anything?

BonJour on the External World

•      Why does BonJour think we can be justified in believing in the external world?

Inside-Out Epistemology

•                  The Qualitative Commitment: when we begin the project of epistemic justification, we have reason to believe that our beliefs about mental states are likely to be true in a way that we do not have reason to believe that our beliefs about non-mental states are true.

•                  The Temporal Commitment: in the course of epistemically reflecting on our beliefs, we come to be justified about mental states before we come to be justified about non-mental states, so we should start the project of epistemic justification with the justification of mental states, and then use those states as the basis for justifying our views about non-mental states.