Circular reasoning is generally understood to be a fallacy. The reason is that circular arguments assume what they purport to prove. At least one of the premises of a circular argument depends on the truth of the conclusion, which makes the argument lose all justificatory force. For in order to accept the premise in question, one would have to already believe the conclusion. But if one already believes the conclusion, one does not need the argument, and if one does not believe the conclusion, the argument will not provide any basis for belief.
Despite the apparent obviousness of what I have just said, the claim that circular reasoning is, in some cases, acceptable and—worse still—ultimately inevitable remains surprisingly popular. This claim is common among Christian apologists known as presuppositionalists (though it is by no means limited to them). It is not my purpose here to criticize circular reasoning in general or to offer a noncircular alternative, though I have done so elsewhere. [1] My purpose here is to criticize a popular argument that purports to show that circular reasoning is inevitable.
The argument is often formulated as follows: “You must use reason to prove reason.” The thrust of the argument seems to be that since you cannot prove reason apart from reason, circularity is simply inescapable. [2] While I don’t encounter this argument much in the academic literature (at least not in this form), it is quite popular among presuppositionalists on the Internet. And while I generally prefer to discuss academic issues, the universality of this argument coupled with the fact that I am not aware of any direct interaction with it motivates me to write this article in response. [3]
In this article, I propose to briefly explain my motivation for taking up this argument. I will then attempt to disambiguate the argument and clarify both what it means and how it might be responded to. After disambiguating the argument, I will argue that it either assumes a theory of epistemic justification that can be rejected, or it fails to recognize an important distinction between two kinds of use. In either case, circular reasoning can be avoided.
Raising the stakes
After all, why should we care about argument? Is it really a problem if all justification is, in the end, circular? Or perhaps we shouldn’t even try to justify the reliability of reasoning. Maybe it’s simply a fundamental assumption of all philosophical inquiry that needs no justification at all.
It would be an understatement to say that many philosophers are content to say that belief in the reliability of reason can be justified only in a circular fashion. [4] Others, however, take the essential reliability of reason to be a fundamental principle incapable of justification and in need of no justification. But I have never found such answers satisfactory. I have never been content to suppose that I must demand justification for my beliefs down to the most basic level, but then give free rein to fundamental beliefs. That move seems entirely arbitrary and even incoherent. If our most fundamental beliefs are unjustified, then I take this to imply that all beliefs that depend on them for justification are equally unjustified. I suspect that many readers feel the same way.
But this conviction forces those who hold it to confront the original argument. For if there is no non-circular means of justifying core beliefs, then we may well have to face the conclusion that none of our beliefs are justified. For those who wish to avoid such a pessimistic conclusion, there is a strong motivation to address the original argument.
Clarifying the issue
Having provided some motivation, let us move on to assess the merits of the argument. Roughly speaking, it is the claim that reason should be used to justify reasoning. Put like that, the claim is quite incoherent. Reasoning is a deliberative cognitive process. It is not a proposition. It is not something that can be true or false. As such, reasoning itself does not need justification, since it is an action and not a belief. Imagine how absurd it would be to require justification for walking, or driving, or swimming. These activities do not need justification precisely because they are activities and not propositions. Once we understand that only propositions require justification because of their possibility of being false, it becomes clear that the act of reasoning does not need justification.
Sometimes the argument is phrased as a question: How do you know your reasoning is valid? But put like that, the argument is guilty of a category mistake. Validity is not a property of reasoning, but a property of arguments. [5] Saying that one’s reasoning is valid makes as little sense as saying that one’s driving is valid. Validity simply does not apply to activities.
But it may be objected that I have missed the point. After all, I am seizing on very poorly worded versions of the argument. And that is, of course, quite true. As I have noted before, this argument is not as prominent among academics as it is among those on the Internet. But I think that addressing these confused versions of the argument is an important task because it helps us clarify what is and is not at issue. It also forces those who use these problematic formulations of the argument to be more precise. Finally, pointing out the incoherence of these simplistic formulations of the argument can also serve to rob them of their rhetorical force.
Strengthening the Argument
So let me try to reconstruct a more sensible version of the argument. It seems to me that when someone says that we should use reason to justify reasoning, they mean that one should use one’s ability to reason to defend the proposition that reasoning is reliable. One should, in effect, assume that one’s ability to reason is reliable. This is certainly a much stronger argument. But to answer it, we must look for even further clarification.
Before we move on to respond to the strong version of the argument, we must ask what the phrase “reason is reliable” means. Taken literally, it means that the cognitive process of reasoning itself somehow produces justification for beliefs in virtue of its reliability. Thus, the argument says that one must assume that reasoning produces justification for beliefs by virtue of being reliable in order to conclude that reasoning produces justification for beliefs by virtue of being reliable.
Reliability vs. Evidentialism
So construed, the argument starts from a reliabilist epistemology. Reliabilism is a theory of epistemic justification according to which beliefs are justified if they have been produced by a reliable process. If this is what the proponent of the argument claims, then we can happily agree with him. It is not at all controversial that reliabilism is guilty of epistemic circularity. This is a well-known fact and is admitted by both reliabilists and critics of reliabilism.
However, it should be noted that if this is what the argument is trying to establish, then it assumes reliabilism and arrives at the incontrovertible conclusion that reliabilism leads to circularity. Not all philosophers are reliabilists, however. The main contender for reliabilism is so-called evidentialism. According to evidentialism, the justification any subject has for a belief is always relative to the evidence that subject possesses for that belief. [6] Evidentialism looks for justification in evidence – not in reliable processes. Thus, the argument considered above simply will not work against evidentialism because it assumes a theory of justification that the evidentialist rejects. [7] As such, one need only reject reliabilism for the argument not to establish that circularity is inevitable.
Functional Use vs. Justification Use
However, evidentialists still use reason to arrive at justified beliefs. Does this indicate that there is still some circularity on the evidentialist’s part? To answer this question, we need to be clear about what is meant by the use of reason. There are two very different ways in which we use things to justify our beliefs. We use things in a justificatory sense , and we also use things in a functional sense . Something is used in a justificatory sense when it is offered as a rational justification for a belief. Something is used in a functional sense when it is employed as a tool in the process of offering a rational justification. Fundamentally, nothing about a functional use contributes to the rational justification of a belief. It is simply a means to help a subject see that justification for what it is. The upshot is that the functional use does not even have the potential to be circular because circularity can only apply to justification.
We can see the distinction most clearly by way of an illustration. Suppose that I am debating with a friend about the existence of pencils. I am trying to convince him that pencils really exist. Suppose further that this debate is conducted via letters. In my attempt to convince my friend that pencils are real, I offer him numerous syllogistic arguments in support of the existence of pencils. Suppose that I use a pencil to write these arguments to him. In this case, it would be quite correct to say that I used a pencil to justify my belief in the existence of pencils. But the use was entirely functional. At no point did I use the proposition that pencils exist as a premise in an argument concluding that pencils exist. The premises of my arguments are the ones I use to justify my belief in pencils. Therefore, the justification for my belief in pencils is not circular, even though I used a pencil to justify the belief. This is because the use of the pencil was functional and not justificatory.
This illustration is quite analogous to what I have in mind when I say that evidentialists “use reason” to justify their beliefs. While it is true that we must think critically—we must reason—to justify our beliefs, we do not use reason as the rational basis for any of our beliefs. Evidence provides the justification for our beliefs, and reason is only the process of evaluating it. At no point does the process of reasoning itself justify a belief. Reasoning without evidence to reason with gets us nowhere. Reason is not some mystical ability that leads us to truth on its own. Reason requires facts to work with. It is simply a necessary means to arrive at justified beliefs. On the critical view, since we do not attribute justification to the process of reasoning itself, our use of it is not justificatory. It is functional. As such, our use of reason when seeking to justify our beliefs is not circular.
Summary and Conclusion
In this article, I have assessed the claim that epistemic circularity is inevitable, since one must, in fact, use reason to justify one’s beliefs about the truth-seeking nature of reasoning. I have determined that the argument is often unclearly and incoherently framed. When made intelligible, it assumes epistemic reliabilism and thus has no force against evidentialism. Any attempt to press the argument against evidentialism will raise the issue against evidentialism. Furthermore, attempts to modify it to meet evidentialism on the grounds that evidentialists “use reason” fail to recognize the distinction between functional and justificatory use. Since evidentialists only “use reason” in a functional sense, they are not guilty of epistemic circularity.
It has not been my purpose here to evaluate all the arguments for epistemic circularity or to offer a detailed exposition of a non-circular theory of knowledge. Others more able than I have done so elsewhere. [8] My purpose has been minimal. I have simply attempted to show that a single popular argument for the inescapability of circular reasoning fails as long as evidentialism is a viable option.
Grades
[1] See my video “Internalism Versus Externalism” available here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxOg5zKUYmU&t=12s
[2] For a set of arguments along these lines, see Sye Ten Bruggencate’s video “How To Answer The Fool (full film)” available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQKjUzotw_Y&vl=en&t=329
[3] In particular, conversations with Seth Bloomsburg and Tyler Vela convinced me of the need for this article.
[4] Examples include William Alston, Alvin Plantinga, Michael Bergmann, and Andrew Moon.
[5] We certainly sometimes talk about valid and invalid reasoning. But this kind of language does not refer to cognitive processes, but to the validity of the logical inferences that follow from reasoning.
[6] Earl Conee and Richard Feldman, Evidentialism, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 83
[7] See Berit Brogaard, “Phenomenal Dogmatism, Seeming Evidentialism and Inferential Justification”, in Believing in Accordance with the Evidence, Springer International Publishing, 2018, Kevin McCain editor, Pg. 55
[8] Some examples are Richard Fumerton, Metaepistemology and Skepticism, Rowman & Littlefield, 1995; Timothy McGrew and Lydia McGrew, Internalism and Epistemology, Routledge, 2007; Paul K. Moser, Knowledge and Evidence, Cambridge University Press, 1989; Brie Gertler, Self-Knowledge, Routledge, 2011
Recommended resources in Spanish:
Stealing from God ( Paperback ), ( Teacher Study Guide ), and ( Student Study Guide ) by Dr. Frank Turek
Why I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist ( Complete DVD Series ), ( Teacher’s Workbook ), and ( Student’s Handbook ) by Dr. Frank Turek
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David Pallmann is a student at Trinity College of the Bible and Theological Seminary. He is also a member of the Society of Evangelical Arminians and runs the YouTube apologetics ministry Faith Because of Reason.
Original Blog Source : https://bit.ly/3KPtewf
Translated by Jennifer Chavez
Edited by Elenita Romero
