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Seth,
Your reasons for being here and mine are essentially the same I think. You expressed them far better than I could. Anybody who wants to be intellectually responsible needs to subject his/her beliefs to the most difficult tests to which they can be subject.
You obviously know far more about this stuff than I do, so I’d like to ask you some questions to see if you can help clarify my position.
In the epistemology thread you said something to the effect that “epistemic contextualism is bullshit.” You also said, I think, that you reject the notion that knowledge must be absolutely certain. Knowledge claims can be fallible. I just started reading modern epistemology, so, based on your two claims, I think my understanding of contextualism must be off. I was under the impression that contextualism was simply the idea that two traditional presuppositions of skepticism need not be endorsed. Those two ideas being that knowledge claims are guilty until proven innocent, leading to an infinite, vicious regress, and, following from this, that knowledge claims need to be absolutely certain.
In other words, I thought that as long as one acknowledges that claims to knowledge are fallible, then one is a contextualist, since the way by which claims are show to be fallible is by the introduction of some defeater for a necessary premise. Depending on your context you may or may not be aware of, or you may or may not allow, certain defeaters. (Allowing/disallowing defeaters is obviously contentious, and I think the idea is only around to preserve the usefulness of terms like “justification” and “knowledge”. For example, scientific contexts do not concern themselves, for the most part, with skeptical defeaters like BIV scenarios in order to preserve the claim that knowledge and justification gained via the senses obtain in certain cases.)
Sooooo my first question is: “What problems do you have with contextualism?”
Second, I see one very clear claim you’ve made to an a priori foundation: the law of non-contradiction. What are some others? If these foundations are necessarily true, how would you respond to one who questions that claim of necessity? In other words, what separates a dumbass dogmatic assertion like "The bible is infallible" from the type of foundation you've described? That’s really four questions, but you get the idea.
Thanks
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