Christianity and Contemporary Epistemology

An article reviewing John L. Pollock's Contemporary Theories of Knowledge (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1986). Originally published in Westminster Theological Journal  52:1 (Spring, 1990), 131-141.

A Review Article

John M. Frame

            Theologians have traditionally taken an interest in

philosophical epistemology because of their concern with the

knowledge of God. Sometimes they have sought to use secular

epistemological theories to their advantage; sometimes they have

sought to refute such theories. But the interaction has often

been vigorous. This history suggests the value to theologians of

keeping current in the field. We are still writing quite a bit

about the classical epistemologies of Plato and Aristotle

(against the background of Parmenides and the sophists), about

traditional rationalism and empiricism, Kant and Hegel. Some

theologians have also developed interest in certain twentieth

century developments, particularly those associated with logical

positivism, the later Wittgenstein and the existentialists, and

especially the movement away from "objective" knowledge

represented in different ways by Thomas Kuhn, Michael Polanyi,

Norwood Hanson, Paul Feyerabend, Alasdair MacIntyre, D. Z.

Phillips, and others.

            Like most theological works, my own Doctrine of the

Knowledge of God[1] only goes this far.[2] Of course, its purpose was not to survey secular

theories but to set forth some biblical teachings about

knowledge. But some comparison between biblical and secular

notions was inevitable, and I regret now that I did not in that

book refer at greater length to more current developments in the

secular field.

            John Pollock's Contemporary Theories of Knowledge is

an excellent recent survey of the present-day epistemologies of

secular philosophy. Roderick Chisholm, perhaps the best known

contemporary epistemologist, calls the book "A thorough and

accurate survey of the present state of the subject, [Pollock's

book] is also an original contribution of first importance. I

know of no better introduction to contemporary theories of

knowledge" (back cover).  I agree with Chisholm's estimate, and I

think this book is a very useful tool for bringing theological

readers up to date in this area and a good focal point for some

Christian evaluations of the contemporary theories.

            It is, for the most part, a highly technical book,

difficult to read, a book which takes the reader more deeply

into the details of its arguments than many of us would prefer to

go. At times, however, Pollock wakes us up with vivid

illustrations and convenient summaries of his argument. In the

former category is the opening of the book, a three-page suspense

tale ending with the discovery of Harry. Harry's brain has been

surgically removed from his body and placed in a vat of

nutrients, where it continues to live. A computer sends impulses

over wires attached to the brain, which give Harry the impression

that he is living his normal, pre-vat life. The narrator

concludes, "racked by the suspicion that I am really a brain in a

vat and all this I see around me is just a figment of the

computer" (p. 3).

            From this tale, one might anticipate that the book would

consist largely of reflection upon skepticism. Actually, however,

Pollock deals with the skeptic in short fashion. The skeptical

conclusion, that we know precisely nothing, is, to Pollock, so

implausible, so unlikely, that it actually functions as a

reductio. If an argument logically entails skepticism, he

maintains, there must be something wrong with the premises. Pure

skepticism, of course, is irrefutable, since the skeptic allows

his critic no knowledge on the basis of which to debate. But we

know that the skeptic is wrong; for if we don't know that, we

don't know anything else. And if we do know that, it is evident

that we know some things (e.g. skepticism is false) which we

cannot prove.

            Skepticism as such, then, is not of much interest to

Pollock. But skeptical arguments, he says, are useful; for they

alert us to false premises. If a premise leads to skepticism, it

cannot be accepted. So skeptical arguments are of considerable

negative value (p. 7). From them we can learn various things

about what knowledge involves and does not involve.

            From here, Pollock takes it for granted, not only that we

have knowledge, but also that we have various kinds of knowledge:

perceptual knowledge, memory knowledge, knowledge by induction

and deduction (pp. 10ff). These are the four kinds of knowledge

on which the book focuses. Pollock also seems to believe that we

may have a priori knowledge and moral knowledge, but he

notes candidly that these are highly problematic in modern

epistemology, and he says nothing more about them through the

book. He also ignores, after mentioning it briefly (p. 10),

knowledge of other minds. He does not mention the possibility of

knowledge coming through the testimony of other persons, which I

consider important and sufficiently distinct from the other forms

to deserve separate treatment.[3]

            Nor does he say anything about knowledge through divine

revelation. God plays no role in Pollock's epistemology

whatsoever, and one gathers that when Pollock describes his

position as "naturalistic" (pp. 168ff, elsewhere) he means to

reject not only the Cartesian ego, the "ghost in (the) machine"

(p. 161), but to reject any dependence on religious or

supernatural concepts. He claims an advantage to his view in the

fact that his concept of knowledge can be applied to a "cognitive

machine" (p. 149), and he spends some time speculating on how

such a robot might be made to function (pp. 149ff). Pollock's

discussion of the cognitive robot is not satisfying to me. He

proposes that "Oscar" be given "sense organs" (149), "'reasoning'

faculties, both deductive and inductive" (149), "pain sensors"

(150), "a 'language of thought'" (150), "pain-sensor sensors"

(151), perceptual organ activation sensors (155), cognitive

process sensors (155), mental representations for objects and

self (156-161). But he doesn't give us any suggestion as to how

these remarkable faculties might be built into a robot. Until he

does, the way is open for a critic to argue that such abilities

can only be performed by a spirit, even a "Cartesian ego." If

Pollock is simply trying to illustrate his epistemological

proposal, perhaps Oscar serves a purpose; but if he is presenting

this as an argument for naturalism, it certainly does not

succeed.

            What is knowledge? Before 1963, most all analytic

philosophers defined knowledge as "justified, true belief." In

1963, however, there appeared Edmund Gettier's article "Is

Justified True Belief Knowledge?"[4]Gettier suggested by

counterexamples that not every case of

justified true belief was knowledge. Here is one of Gettier's

counterexamples, paraphrased by Pollock (p.

180):

...consider Smith who believes falsely but with

good reason that Jones owns a Ford. Smith has no idea where

Brown is, but he arbitrarily picks Barcelona and infers from the

putative fact that Jones owns a Ford that either Jones owns a

Ford or Brown is in Barcelona. It happens by chance that Brown is

in Barcelona, so this disjunction is true. Furthermore, as Smith

has good reason to believe that Jones owns a Ford, he is

justified in believing this disjunction. But as his evidence does

not pertain to the true disjunct of the disjunction, we would not

regard Smith as knowing that either Jones owns a Ford or

Brown is in Barcelona.

Many others published articles trying to

solve the "Gettier problem," mostly by adding a fourth condition

to knowledge besides justification, truth, and belief (p. 9). But

still others found counterexamples to those fourth conditions,

and so the debate continues to this day.

            Pollock's own solution to the Gettier problem involves

some reconstruction of the concept of "justification," to which

we should now turn. "A justified belief," says Pollock, "is one

that is 'epistemically permissible' to hold" (p. 7). He

distinguishes epistemic permissibility from both prudential and

moral permissibility. I am not persuaded by these distinctions.

Pollock argues only by giving examples of beliefs that he thinks

are prudentially or morally right but epistemically wrong and

vice versa. E.g., someone promises not to think ill of

another; in this case, thinking ill might be morally wrong,

though epistemically right. My own analysis of this case,

however, is that such a promise is invalid, since it pledges

something that cannot be pledged. It is never right to promise

someone that I will regard the truth as false or vice versa.

Therefore thinking ill (when epistemically justified) is both

epistemically and morally right, and the illustration does

nothing to show that the former is not a subset of the latter.

Even Pollock's evaluation, however, entails only that epistemic

permissibility is not the only kind of prudential or moral

permissibility, not that epistemic permissibility is outside

these two realms. Surely epistemic permissibility is founded upon

our ethical obligation to believe only the truth. If it is not,

then I don't know what basis it might have. (I shall discuss

Pollock's basis at a later point.)[5]

            Pollock also distinguishes epistemic permission from any

concept of epistemic obligation:

epistemic norms never tell us that it is epistemically obligatory to

believe something-- only that it is epistemically

permissible to do so. It is not true, for example, that if I

believe both P and "if P then Q" then, in the absence of

conflicting reasons, I ought to believe Q. This is because I

might not care about Q. (P. 84, emphasis his; cf. pp. 124, 185.)

Of course, we might be morally obligated to care about Q, which

would prevent us from bringing our uncaringness as an excuse.

Apart from that, however, Pollock's argument does present a good

reason why we would not in this case be obligated to believe Q

consciously. Most of our beliefs, however, are not being

entertained consciously at a particular moment. "Caring" is one

reason (among others) why we might consciously attend to a

particular belief at a particular time; but it doesn't seem to

have much to do with what we believe or don't believe.

            My own account of this is that if someone believes P and

"if P then Q," in one sense he already believes Q, since Q does

not include any information not included in the premises; in

another sense he will believe it if and when he has (at least

once) become conscious of the entailment. The element of

obligation becomes evident when someone tries to deny what he

knows-- denying it either to himself or to someone else. At that

point, it becomes legitimate to say "you ought to believe Q;

and when asked in an appropriate forum, you ought to admit that

you believe Q."

            One reason Pollock seems to resist any subjection of

reasoning to moral evaluation may be his view that we "do not

literally 'decide' what to believe" (p. 22). On p.80, he

adds,

We do not have voluntary control over our

beliefs. We cannot just decide to believe that 2 + 2 = 5 and

thereby do it. We have at most indirect control over what we

believe. We can try to get ourselves to believe something by

repeatedly rehearsing the evidence for it, or putting

countervailing evidence out of our minds, or by deliberately

seeking new evidence for it, but we cannot voluntarily make

ourselves believe something in the same sense that we can

voluntarily clench our fists.

There is much truth in this. It

may be that we simply believe what we believe, and apparent

"struggles to decide what to believe" are either struggles to

form a new belief (by confronting evidence as Pollock outlines

above), struggles to determine which of two or more inconsistent

beliefs will prevail in our thinking, or introspective struggles

to determine what we already believe in our heart of

hearts.[6]

Nevertheless, if there is no voluntary decision

concerning what to believe as such, there certainly are voluntary

decisions to be made as to whether and how a belief is to be

confessed, applied, implemented, etc. Especially when people

refuse to acknowledge what they know to be true ("exchanging the

truth for a lie"), the will is obviously active. And there are

voluntary decisions concerning the use of evidence as Pollock

mentions in the above quote. Thus there is plenty of room for

moral evaluation in the epistemic sphere. And since epistemology

deals not only with the beliefs we actually have but also with

the processes by which we confess, defend, implement, apply,

resist, deny our beliefs, it is not wrong to say that there are

certain beliefs which we "ought" to hold,[7]

beliefs which are justified by a kind of moral rightness.

            The final thing to note about Pollock's view of epistemic

justification is that it is subjective, rather than objective (p.

10; cf. p. 183). He also characterizes this concept as the

"belief-guiding" or "reason-guiding" sense of justification (p.

10). It helps us "in determining what to believe."[8] A justification gives us reasons for

adopting a particular belief.

            Justifications in this sense are person-variable. A good

reason for one person to believe P will not necessarily be a good

reason for someone else to believe it. A child may believe in

the existence of Santa Claus because his mother has testified to

that proposition. He has found his mother to be trustworthy, and

so he rightly believes he has good reasons for his conclusion.

But the child's father, having had much broader experience of

Christmas celebrations in their cultural context, would not be

right to accept the child's justification for belief.

            Now on this view of justification, one may be justified

in believing something, say P, even though P is false. That fact

is illustrated in the previous paragraph. The child has good

reasons to believe in Santa and no good reasons to deny that he

exists. Therefore he is justified in believing a proposition

which, most of us would say, is objectively false.

            The rest of the book focuses on the exploration of this

concept of justification. Pollock insists that "The central topic

of epistemology is epistemic justification rather than knowledge"

(p. 9). He is right as to the importance of this concept in the

epistemology literature.[9] I would agree that subjective

justification is an important category and therefore deserves

study. I don't understand, however, why this concept dominates

the literature (including the present volume) to the extent that

it does. It is certainly not the only kind of epistemic

justification, and it may not even be the most important kind.

            Consider again the child who believes in Santa Claus on

his mother's testimony. Is he justified in believing in Santa

Claus? I have explained how we could answer "yes" to this

question, by taking "justified" in the subjective sense. But

is it not obvious that in another sense the child's belief is

not justified? Is it not common for freshmen entering

college to be told that beliefs uncritically acquired at mother's

knee are not adequately justified for the purposes of higher

education?

            Is it not also common for a reviewer of, say, a

biography, to criticize the author for making "unjustified

allegations?" In that context, the reviewer is not referring to

whatever private, subjective reasons the author may have had for

his disputed beliefs. Rather, the reviewer is expressing

disappointment that the author has not given reasons in the

book sufficient to convince others to believe as he does.

            I think that usually when we[10] speak of justified beliefs, we are speaking of

beliefs well enough grounded to stand the scrutiny, not only of

those holding the beliefs, but of those who know the subject

best.[11]

            Remarkably, Pollock, in the Appendix where he considers

the Gettier problem, notes that subjective justification as he

has earlier defined it is not the kind of justification necessary

for knowledge. In response to the Gettier challenge, Pollock

develops a concept of "objective" justification which he thinks

will do justice to our intuition that justification is a

necessary condition of knowledge. After exploring several

possibilities, he settles on this one:

S knows P if and

only if S instantiates some argument A supporting P which is (1)

ultimately undefeated relative to the set of all truths, and (2)

ultimately undefeated relative to the set of all truths socially

sensitive for S. (p. 193).

"Instantiates" here roughly means

"accepts," but see p. 188 for more precision. "Ultimately

undefeated" means that all of the potential refutations to the

argument can themselves be decisively refuted. "Socially

sensitive" truths are truths which S is "expected to know" by

others in his social group. If S is expected to know a

proposition Q which if true would defeat P, and if he does not

know an adequate defeater for Q, then S does not know P even if Q

is false. But if S's argument defeats such Q's and all other

potential defeaters, then S knows P. This concept of "objective

justification" makes more precise the concept which I sketched

intuitively in the previous paragraphs.

            Well, if Pollock is right that objective, not subjective

justification is the kind of justification necessary to

knowledge, and if I am right that objective justification is at

least as important to epistemology as subjective, then I cannot

understand why Pollock devotes 95% of the book to subjective

justification! Is it perhaps that, having eliminated any role for

God in this epistemology, he is thus unable to give any cogent

account of "objective truth?"

            Let me try to show how a theistic commitment would modify

his perspective and make it more cogent. It is perhaps

significant that in describing objective justification, Pollock

gives a role to the knower's social group, to what the knower is

"expected to know." If Pollock were sufficiently broadminded to

accept the membership of God in such a social group, then

"expected to know" would take on moral significance (contrary to

Pollock's earlier insistence) and we would have some concrete

guidance on how to evaluate claims to objective knowledge: since

God is omniscient, anyone who meets condition (2) will

automatically meet condition (1). We can then judge A's claim to

knowledge on the basis of our knowledge of what God expects A to

know  = knowledge of God's revelation. (Otherwise, we would need

to be omniscient ourselves to judge whether someone has met

condition (1).)[12]

            The main body of the book is devoted to a survey of

contemporary epistemologies in which Pollock defends one type of

epistemology and attempts to refute the others. By

"epistemologies" we are here to understand views of subjective

justification, and the term "justification" will henceforth refer

to subjective justification unless I indicate otherwise. He first

distinguishes between "doxastic" and "nondoxastic" theories. (His

taxonomy is found on pp. 19-25.) The former holds that

justification of a belief for S is entirely a function of the

other beliefs held by S. On a doxastic view, one justifies his

beliefs by relating them (by comparison, deduction, induction,

etc.) to other beliefs one holds. On a nondoxastic view, one is

not limited to this sort of justification. E.g., on one kind of

nondoxastic view, a belief derived "directly" from perception is

justified because perception is a legitimate cognitive process,

whether or not we have beliefs about the origin of the

belief and the legitimacy of perception.

            Pollock's taxonomy of epistemological views is as

follows:

            I. Doxastic

                        A. Foundationalism

                        B. Coherentism

                                    1. Linear positive

                                    2. Holistic positive

                                    3. Negative

            II. Nondoxastic

                        A. Externalism

                                    1. Probabilism

                                    2. Reliabilism

                        B. Internalism

                                    Direct Realism- Pollock's view

            Under the doxastic category are two distinct views,

foundationalism and coherentism. On a foundationalist view,

beliefs are ultimately justified by reference to "foundational"

or "basic" beliefs. Among all the beliefs we hold, some are more

fundamental to justification than others. Through the history of

philosophy, various sorts of beliefs have been considered

"foundational:" we will recall Descartes' "clear and distinct

ideas," Spinoza's "axioms," Leibniz's "laws of thought, Hume's

"impressions,"[13] Thomas

Reid's "common sense," the "logical atoms" of Russell and the

early Wittgenstein. We may recall also the recent proposal of

Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff that belief in God be

considered "epistemologically basic."[14] The

most common view today, however, is a variety of empiricism in

which the foundation consists of reports of sense-experience, or

at least of reports of the "appearances" with which we are

acquainted.[15] These beliefs are considered self-justifying, and all other

beliefs must be justified in relation to them. The

nonfoundational beliefs are derived from the foundational by some

kind of "reasoning."

            Pollock tries very hard to present views he ultimately

rejects in their very best form. His practice in this respect is

commendable. J. Gresham Machen was also very good at this, and

present day theologians would do well to follow such examples. I

will not, obviously, be able to reproduce Pollock's expositions

and arguments in detail, but I will try to summarize accurately.

            The following is a highly condensed summary of Pollock's

argument against foundationalism: (1) We do not always know how

we are being appeared to; indeed, we can be wrong about that.

After an accident, let us say, witnesses often correct their

first impressions of how they were appeared to (pp. 59-61).

Therefore appearance beliefs are not self-justifying. (2) We

rarely have beliefs about how we are appeared to. Evidence

of our senses does not take the form of beliefs (p. 61).

Therefore, if sense-perception plays some basic role in

justification, it is not by way of beliefs about our

perceptions, as on a foundationalist theory. (3) Should we say

that epistemologically basis beliefs are, not incorrigible or

self-justifying, but only prima facie justified? To say that

is to say that such beliefs are justified until we have reason to

disbelieve them, "innocent until proved guilty." But there is no

better reason to make this claim for sensory appearance-beliefs

than for any other kind of belief; so there is no reason, on this

basis, to make any particular kind of belief epistemologically

basic. Without "basic" beliefs, what we have is a coherence

theory, not a foundations theory (pp. 60-66). (This is, I think,

what Pollock would say in reply to the type of foundation theory

proposed by Plantinga and Wolterstorff.) (4) Even granting the

incorrigibility of sense beliefs, we can reason from them to

other beliefs only by way of memory, and that requires memory to

be an additional source of "basic" beliefs (in which case the

above problems recur) or to function nondoxastically (pp. 46-57).

            It is of course normal for us, when questioned about our

reason for holding a belief, to derive that belief inductively or

deductively from a belief of which we are more sure. This is the

intuitive basis for foundationalism. But we should keep reminding

ourselves of the specific question Pollock is addressing. That is

the question of subjective justification. Thus it is not

particularly relevant how we seek to justify our beliefs to other

people; that is more in the category of "objective" justification.

Rather, he is asking how we gain "epistemic permission" to

believe what we believe. And he is arguing, therefore, that

whatever role "assured beliefs" may play in our epistemic

self-defenses, they are not the reason why, in general our

beliefs are subjectively justified. Not every justified belief

can be derived from a sensory "basic" belief, and sensory beliefs

are not in any meaningful sense self-justifying.

            A coherence theory differs from a foundations theory in

that for the coherentist there are no "basic" beliefs, no

epistemically privileged propositions. A person justifies a

belief by relating it somehow to all his other beliefs.

("Beliefs," because like foundationalism, coherentism is

doxastic.) If that belief "coheres" with the rest, then it is

justified; otherwise, not. Pollock distinguishes positive

coherence theories, in which positive support is required for all

beliefs, and negative coherence theories, in which all

beliefs are "innocent until proved guilty" and are to be

abandoned only by sufficient negative reasons (pp. 71ff). Another

distinction is between linear and holistic coherence

theories. In the former, our basic reason for believing a

proposition is a small set of beliefs which, to be sure, when we

ask reasons for reasons, expands to include our entire stock of

beliefs. In the latter, one cannot reduce the justification for a

belief to any such linear chain.

            Against linear positive coherence theories, Pollock

argues that these cannot produce any "plausible candidates for

reasons for beliefs that result directly from perception" (p.

77). On a coherence view, all reasoning is by inference; but

"...perception is not inference. When I believe on the basis of

perception that the book is red, I do not infer that belief from

something else that I believe. Perception is a causal process

that inputs beliefs into our doxastic system without their being

inferred from or justified on the basis of other beliefs we

already have" (p. 75).

            Remember again that Pollock is concerned with subjective

justification, with how we acquire epistemic permission to

believe, not with how we defend our beliefs to others. In fact we

may always choose to defend our beliefs by inference; but that

cannot be the way our original subjective justification comes

about.

            Against holistic coherence theories, Pollock objects that

in fact we do not derive all our beliefs from beliefs about the

coherence of our belief system; in fact we very rarely have

such beliefs about coherence. And if we did, how would we get

those beliefs? In order to believe P, we would first have to

believe Q, namely that P coheres with our other beliefs. But to

believe Q, we would first have to believe R, namely that Q

coheres. The result is infinite regress.

            Against negative coherence theories, Pollock replies that

if we consider all beliefs justified until defeated or refuted,

then reasons play no positive role in justify beliefs, only the

negative role of rebutting. But this means that no sense can be

made out of the notion of believing something for a reason, a

notion crucially important to the concept of subjective

justification (pp. 83-87).

            Under nondoxastic theories, Pollock explores externalism

and internalism. A nondoxastic theory says that our beliefs are

subjectively justified not only by means of other beliefs, but

also by some states of affairs about which we may not have

beliefs. In an internalist view, those states of affairs are only

internal to us. In an externalist view, they may be external to

us as well.

            He examines two types of externalism, probabilism and

reliabilism. Probabilism, the view that beliefs are justified

when they have a sufficiently high probability, gets Pollock into

some complicated mathematics, from which he concludes that there

is "no appropriate kind of probability for use in probabilist

theories of knowledge" (p. 113). The more intuitive,

ordinary-English concept of epistemological probability, he says,

"is defined in terms of epistemic justification, so this provides

no analysis of epistemic justification and no support for

probabilism" (P. 113).

            Reliabilism teaches that "a belief is justified if and

only if it is produced by a reliable cognitive process" (p. 114).

Pollock rejects this principle also, on the ground that

reliability of processes has nothing to do with epistemic

(=subjective) justification. Poor Harry, the

brain-in-the-vat, has unreliable perceptive faculties. But

he has no reason to think his faculties are unreliable, so

he has no alternative but to trust them. In other words, Harry's

beliefs about his "normal life" are, in general, subjectively

justified, though mostly false. More fundamentally, Pollock

argues, most "reliable cognitive processes" (color vision is his

example) are reliable only in certain circumstances. But if we

narrow the circumstances too far (such as by presupposing the

truth-value of the belief under consideration) we reach the

conclusion that the belief is justifiable only if it is true,

which is not the way subjective justification is supposed to

work.

            Against all externalism, Pollock insists that in our

moment to moment belief formation we do not always have access to

data concerning the reliability of cognitive processes or

concerning the probability of propositions. We do, of course,

have access to the cognitive processes themselves; but those are

internal rather than external.

            By process of elimination, then, we are left with a form

of internalism. Pollock calls his version of internalism "direct

realism," because it is nondoxastic: in it we gain justification

for beliefs without the mediating presence of other beliefs. Our

reasons for believing, fundamentally, are our mental processes

themselves. We believe because our mental processes lead us to

believe as we do. We do not need to have beliefs about our

mental processes (e.g. about their reliability) for this to

happen. If we sometimes appeal to reliability or probability, or

to "basic" ideas or to systematic coherence, that is just the way

our mental processes sometimes work. So the fundamental

justification is not an appeal to reliability or whatever; it is

simply that our mental processes work in this particular way.

            But aren't our mental processes sometimes fallible? Yes,

but we discover that by means of mental processes themselves, one

checking another. And more importantly: don't forget that we are

here talking about subjective justification. There is often

a lack of correlation between subjective justification and truth.

So the fallibility of our mental processes is irrelevant to their

primacy in subjective justification.

            Consider poor Harry, the brain-in-a-vat. His faculties

are supremely unreliable; yet because he himself has no reason to

doubt them, his beliefs about his living a normal life are

subjectively justified. He is subjectively justified because that

is simply the way his faculties work.

            This does not mean that all of our beliefs are justified.

Some of our beliefs are chosen arbitrarily, the result of wishful

thinking, etc. They are not the result of the working of our

cognitive faculties. (But I wonder how on Pollock's basis one can

distinguish properly cognitive faculties from other

psychologically actual means of forming beliefs.)

            Pollock includes much more exposition and argument in

favor of his internalism, but I will stop my exposition here.

Internalism appears to be almost the inevitable conclusion of the

book, once the reader gains clarity as to the concept of

"subjective justification." Certainly it is true that we use

foundationalist, coherentist, reliability and probabilistic

arguments to justify our beliefs to others. Sometimes we use

these methods of justifying our beliefs to also ourselves in

situations where we gain some detachment from our own belief

commitments. But these are justifications which aim at showing

the objective truth of these ideas. They are not the original

means by which we acquire such beliefs.

            In the original acquiring of beliefs, much is

mysterious. Pollock is right; we rarely argue explicitly with

ourselves. We rarely appeal to "foundations" or coherence or

probability or reliability. Rather, we just find ourselves

believing. And when we are assured of them, we cannot always say

why or how we are assured. Rather, our minds are simply

"programmed" to give us assurance in certain situations.

            Foundationalism, coherentism, probabilism and reliabilism

therefore really confuse subjective with objective justification

to some extent. Internalism is the only fully subjective

mechanism available for subjective justification.

            Having agreed with Pollock's main point, however, I would

like to add something about its vacuity. For when I ask "how

am I justified in believing P?" Pollock's answer seems to boil

down to this: "You are justified by the justificatory faculties

of your mind." That's a bit like the scholastics' explanation of

falling bodies by reference to "falling tendencies" within those

bodies. Now Pollock isn't quite as bad as all that. He does

present some illuminating psychological description of how we

come to make up our minds about beliefs. But most of that

description is negative, telling us what we don't do. And,

we recall, Pollock does no more than to reflect on the general

ignorance on such important matters as a priori and moral

knowledge. (If my arguments in DKG are correct, without moral

knowledge there is no knowledge of anything.) He says nothing

positive about them. What he does say positively is mostly the

affirmation of such things as "sensors" (as in the Oscar

chapter); but we didn't need him to tell us we had such

faculties. So in general, he leaves our mental processes (and

hence subjective justification) under a great veil of mystery. In

the end, we think as we do because we think as we do. And as

Pollock's main conclusion that seems too vacuous to be of help.

            This reminds me of what some philosophers have called the

"paradox of analysis:" Often when someone tries very hard to

analyze something and insists on a rigorous equation between the

analysis and the analysandum, he comes up with something

uninformative. What are black holes? The only way to come up with

a perfect equation between analysis and analysandum is to say

that a black hole is a black hole. Has Pollock tried to seek too

much analytical perfection?

            It also reminds me of Cornelius Van Til's point that

philosophical rationalism, insofar as it seeks an exhaustive

explanation of reality, leads us to see the world in terms of

"blank identity," like Parmenides' "being," Plato's "good,"

Aristotle's "thought thinking thought," Plotinus' "one," etc.

            What might be an alternative, motivated by Christian

theism? Well, we can certainly concede that the mind works the

way it works! But we should insist that subjective justification

is only a small part of the story in epistemology. Objective

justification is part of our responsibility to "test all things"

and to seek and apply God's truth rightly. That deserves far more

analysis than Pollock gives it. And we have epistemic obligations

from the living God;[16] not just epistemic

permissions, as Pollock insists.

            As for subjective justification, well, a Christian view

would stress that God made man's mind to know him and to know his

truth. So in man as originally created, subjective justification

and objective justification coincided. Unlike Harry's brain, our

mental faculties were reliable. Sin, however, led man to flee

from the truth, especially from God. This fact introduced

distortions, self-deceptions.

            A Christian analysis would have to discuss this process

of self-deception[17]and also the restoration of

sound thinking as part of God's redemptive grace.

            We can learn much, certainly, from the thoroughness and

rigor of Pollock's argument. But clearly we need to learn much

more about human knowledge than Pollock (and, I gather, modern

philosophical epistemology in general) has to teach us.