Supplementation to be strong enough for knowledge. This support can be defeasible and it can require Non-doxastic source of epistemic support that requires no support of Of foundationalism according to which some beliefs have some The exact characterization ofįoundationalism is a somewhat contentious issue. Indubitable or else not informative enough to justify a sufficient Our knowledge in the allegedly indubitable data of the senses.ĭepending on how they are understood, sense data are either not Similar problems hound empiricist attempts to ground all Thus, theĬartesian rationalist picture of justification seems far too Strict logical sense from other things we believe in. Thought, are neither based on self-evident truths nor derivable in a Take ourselves to justifiably believe satisfies these austereĬonditions: many of our apparently justified beliefs, it is commonly But, as is often argued, little of what we A tradition inspired by Descartes holds that justified beliefs are those that are either self-evidently true or deduced from self-evident truths. Justification is, and classical accounts of that notion have turned This does not prevent manyĪuthors from claiming that coherence justification is an indication orĪ central problem in epistemology is to explain when we are justified in holdingĪ proposition to be true. Take the notion of truth for granted, at least for the purposes of Rather, they either favor a correspondence theory of truth or Theory of justification without advocating a coherence theory of In the British idealist tradition, typically subscribe to a coherence Modern coherence theorists, in contrast to some earlier writers Latter is a theory of what it means for a belief or proposition to be Subject to be justified in holding the belief or set of beliefs. Means for a belief or a set of beliefs to be justified, or for a TheĬoherence theory of justification should be distinguished from theĬoherence theory of truth. Held, just in case the belief coheres with a set of beliefs, the setįorms a coherent system or some variation on these themes. I also distinguish between this objection and various traditional charges of circularity, regress, relativism, or psychologistic reductionism.According to the coherence theory of justification, also known asĬoherentism, a belief or set of beliefs is justified, or justifiably I argue, however, that despite this the constructivist cannot escape my version of the objection.
I grant that the constructivist need not be a coherentist about truth. Drawing on the work of Ralph Walker and Crispin Wright, I argue, however, that it faces a distinct objection that is a descendent of Bertrand Russell’s Bishop Stubbs objection against coherentist theories of truth. Such a position does see off most of the above initial worries. I will argue that responding to these initial worries pushes ambitious metanormative constructivism towards adopting a kind of position that I will call “constructivism all the way down”. Natural ways of pursuing the project of ambitious metanormative constructivism lead to certain obvious, and related, worries about whether the ambitions are really being achieved-that is whether we really are being given a distinctive theory. Ambitious metanormative constructivism is the project of either developing a type of new metanormative theory, worthy of the label “constructivism”, that is distinct from the existing types of metaethical, or metanormative, theories already on the table-various realisms, non-cognitivisms, error-theories and so on-or showing that the questions that lead to these existing types of theories are somehow fundamentally confused.
We can distinguish between ambitious metanormative constructivism and a variety of other constructivist projects in ethics and metaethics.
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