Introduction

Defending Direct Realism

• Chapters five and six proposed a naturalistic account of procedural epistemic justification and epistemic norms, focusing on the nature of the norms.

• What remains is to describe the content of these norms—the actual norms governing human epistemic competence.

• Most of the book has worked to eliminate general theories of those norms.

• The claim is that epistemic norms must be internalist.

• The doxastic assumption is false, implying some epistemic norms must appeal to internal states other than beliefs, leading to nondoxastic internalism.

• An objection to holistic coherence theories is their failure to explain the difference between justified and justifiable beliefs, hinging on the reasons for holding beliefs.

• This failure highlights the essential role of reasons and reasoning in justification.

• The foundationalist structure seems essentially correct regarding the role it assigns to reasoning.

• Foundationalism and doxastic theories fail to accommodate perceptual knowledge properly.

• Vision starts with a two-dimensional retinal pattern, converted into a percept, from which beliefs about surroundings are formed.

• Two possible models:

  1. The percept directly gives rise to beliefs about physical objects.

  2. A more complex model where the percept gives rise to beliefs about the percept itself, and then beliefs about objects are inferred (traditional foundationalist view).

• Human cognition aligns with the first model: humans move directly from percepts to beliefs about physical objects, not via beliefs about percepts.

• Traditional foundationalists, due to the doxastic assumption, thought direct epistemic justification from percepts to beliefs impossible.

• This is based on a misunderstanding of how epistemic norms guide cognition.

• Once the intellectualist model is rejected, epistemic norms can appeal to any internal states, not just beliefs.

• Thus, epistemic norms can license a direct cognitive move from percepts to beliefs about physical objects.

• This leads to a theory resembling traditional foundationalism but with foundations as percepts, not beliefs about percepts—called direct realism.

• Direct realism means the move from percepts to beliefs about the real world is direct and unmediated by beliefs about internal states.

• Rejection of foundationalism is only as a description of human rational cognition; other cognitive agents might conform to traditional foundationalism.

• Humans likely move directly from percepts to beliefs about the world because forming beliefs about percepts is usually unnecessary and cognitively costly.

• Forming beliefs about percepts can be done when useful but would unnecessarily expend limited cognitive resources if always required.