Ur-foundationalism 43 philosophy. That they explained this special feature in very

different ways hardly needs to be said; what is remarkable is their agreement on our possession of a cognitive home in which everything lies open to our view. Much of our thinking

— for example, in the physical sciences — must operate out-side this home, in alien circumstances. The claim is that not all our thinking could be like that.

To deny that something is hidden is not to assert that we are infallible about it. Mistakes are always possible. There is no limit to the conclusions into which we can be lured by fallacious reasoning and wishful thinking, charismatic gurus and cheap paperbacks. The point is that, in our cognitive home, such mistakes are always rectifiable. Similarly, we are not omniscient about our cognitive home. We may not know the answer to a question simply because the question has never occurred to us. Even if something is open to view, we may not have glanced in that direction. Again, the point is that such ignorance is always removable. (Williamson, 2000, 93-94)

Like cognitively domestic facts, discernible facts are not such that one is omniscient about them, nor that we cannot be mistaken about them. But they are such that we are always in a position to avoid mistakes about them.

Williamson characterises luminous conditions in terms of what one is in a position toknow. I have characterised discernible conditions in terms of what one wouldbelieveif one were attentive enough.³¹ The notions of luminosity and discernibility are thus distinct. There are advantages and drawbacks in using the latter. The major advantage is that Ur-foundatio-nalism can be formulated as a non-circular analysis of knowledge. If we

31. Barring exceptional cases, what one is in a position to know coincides with what one wouldknowif one was attentive enough. “If one is in a position to know p, and one has done what one is in a position to do to decide whether p is true, then one does know p.” (Williamson,2000, 95).

relied on Williamson’s notion of luminosity, we could only say that the Ur-foundationalist conception of basic knowledge is that it is knowledge based on a mark whose presence one is always in position to know.

The main drawbacks are two. First, we need to assume some notion of relevant kindsof properties (sec. 2.2.1). Second, the idea that discernible facts are known may face sophisticated counterexamples. Cases might be set up in which attentive subjects always get things right about a domain of facts and yet there is no intuition at all that they know such facts. (Perhaps a case in which even attentive subjects engage in wishful thinking but the gods systematically fulfil their wishes.) Williamson’s notion of luminosity automatically screens aways such cases, since there would not be any intuition that the subjects are in position to know those facts. Still, in all but a few recherchécases, luminosity and discernibility coincide. So the coarser notion of discernibility captures well enough the notion of cognitive home while being more informative about the condition under which one is supposed to know.

2.2.6 Basing

One may worry that Ur-foundationalism, as defined, is too generous on basic knowledge. Consider the following case:

S is in pain, and believes that she is. However, she only believes it because her crystal ball says so. (Her attention is so focused on the ball that she does not introspectively notice the pain, as it were.)

Now it seems that there is a fact discernible toSthat guarantees the truth of her belief, namely, that she is in pain. Still we would not want to say that she knows that she is in pain, for her belief is not adequately based on the fact. Thus, the thought goes, we should also require that the subject’s belief bebasedon the fact that her belief bears the mark.

The problem is real, but it does not require a modification of the clause for basic knowledge. The basing relation should be included in the relevant properties of beliefs. For instance, instead ofbeing the belief

2.2. Ur-foundationalism 45

of a subject who is in pain, we should rather take the relevant mark to be being a belief based on the fact that one is in pain. This undoubtedly creates issues with discernibility (would an attentive subject not only believe that she is in pain, but that such-and-such a belief is based on that fact?) and packs even more into the restriction to relevant kinds of properties.

But again, most historical Ur-foundationalists simply ignore such issues.

They assume without discussion that some relevant basing relation is satisfied. We will supplement their accounts with such a requirement wherever needed, without getting any further into the problems it may raise.

2.2.7 Coherentist Ur-foundationalism

Paradoxical as it may seem, Ur-foundationalism can be developed in a coherentist manner. Given any notion of coherence of belief systems, a belief may have the corresponding property ofbeing a member of a coherent belief system. Necessarily, if a belief has that property, all the other beliefs of the system have it. It is a property that beliefs can only satisfy in clusters. If the property is said to be discernible and infallible, we get a coherentist version of Ur-foundationalism.

In later Stoic epistemology, the notion of “absence of impediment”

may be seen as a step in that direction (see below2.3.2). Russell’s sketch of a coherentist epistemology — which he presents as the way Hegel should have developed his own view — can be seen as a version of coherentism Ur-foundationalism:

“The coherence theory in its extreme form maintains that there is only one possible group of mutually coherent beliefs, which constitutes the whole of knowledge and the whole of truth.”

(Russell,1948, 172)

If the coherence of one’s beliefs is discernible, and if the unique coherent set of beliefs must be true, then coherence is an infallible and discernible mark of truth. (Like Russell, I am unable to tell whether Hegel held such a view.)

Now suppose that the coherence of a belief system ensured thatmost of its members are true, without ensuring that all are. This would lead to aholisticnotion of knowledge. Roughly: even though we cannot say of any particular belief member of the system that it is knowledge, we could say that the system somehowcontains knowledge, since it is overall guaranteed to be mostly true. On this sort of view it would make less sense to talk of knowledge as instantiated by particular beliefs, as we commonly do. Knowledge would rather be a property of belief systems or theories. I am not sure whether this position of the logical space has been occupied, but Davidson (1983/2001) comes close.