Perception and Reason by Bill Brewer

Author:Bill Brewer [Brewer, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 0199250456

end p.134

the epistemology of empirical observation, which, as I explain below, diverges significantly from the original at a number of key stages in responding to the current line of objection.20 His suggestion here is this. If there is to be a genuine question about whether a person's empirical belief that p, say, is justified, or whether his utterance of s, say, is expressive of observational knowledge, then it must be the case that he does indeed believe that p, or utter s. This is a presupposition of coherently raising the question. Hence it can simply be taken for granted in answering it. The required account of his reason for believing or saying what he does can legitimately assume that he does so. No justification need therefore be given for this premise in the overall story justifying his belief or utterance. So the most recent difficulties for Sellars's views about a person's self-knowledge of his own utterances or beliefs simply do not arise.

I find this move completely unsatisfactory. According to both Sellars and BonJour, the subject's self-ascription of the belief or utterance in question provides a crucial premise of an argument to the likely truth of this belief or utterance, which is supposed explicitly to articulate the reasons by appeal to which he is able to defend it, epistemologically speaking, as (expressive of) a piece of knowledge. Any such argument constitutes a satisfactory defence of this kind in the current context, though, only if the subject is himself justified in supplying its premises. For how else could it constitute a genuinely reasoned defence of the belief or utterance in question? It is quite irrelevant to this that there may be a pragmatic presumption in favour of the truth of the relevant self-ascription involved in actually raising the question of its epistemological status. For, I take it, the status of a belief or utterance as (expressive of) knowledge is prior to, and quite independent of, the issue of whether or not any question as to this status is actually raised. Yet BonJour's move quite clearly denies that the subject has, or can have, any justification for the relevant self-ascription. Thus, it seems to me quite inadequate.

Waiving these worries about the subject's knowledge of his own utterances (or beliefs) for the sake of the argument, two

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