But if it’s true that something you believe is true then, being true, it can be knowledge, right, by this criterion? So in itself there could be second-order knowledge. But then how do you know that’s true? Etc., etc.
No, you’re quite right – the objection is that it starts the infinite regress.
And how is it known they conform to reality?
Well, fallibilists would say that we don’t need any form of second-order certainty, only second-order justification. “I know that my car is white.” How do I know? Because I have memories of it being white. How do I know that my memories are veridical? I have the experience of it being veridical in the past. How do I know I am not deceived? I don’t. Thus enters the uncertainty.
This sounds like coherentism. None of these beliefs need conform to reality if they’re justifying each other. Sure, if you’re willing to give up the idea that knowledge need conform to reality there’s no problem. Maybe there is no reality, only illusion.
This isn’t really coherentism, though, because the claim is that no justification is the same as any other justification. It’s not circular, in other words, and there is no requirement that the beliefs form a unity, only that they can be traced back along a line. One does wonder where sensory perception comes into such a system, though.
And how do you justify that belief?
Convergence of evidence, perhaps. I’m not going to attempt a full-scale defense. It’s interesting, however, how “emergent beliefs” in epistemology relate to “emergent properties” in metaphysics. The intuition that “I am justified” is similar to the intuition that “that shoe is red”; when you reduce either claim to its constituent parts (epistemological or subatomic), it becomes nonsensical. But if that doesn’t work as an argument for the nonexistence of red, why would it work as an argument for the irrationality of the belief?
It’s just “turtles all the way down” no matter how you slice it it seems.
That’s got to be one of the awesomest sayings ever.
OK but now you have only beliefs not knowledge. Yet the Church maintains things can be known, not just believed.
Merely a semantic distinction, based on *my *definition of knowledge. If knowledge is JTB, then as long as a Christian can *justify *a true belief, he has knowledge.
Consequently, the situation of those, who by the heavenly gift of faith have embraced the Catholic truth, is by no means the same as that of those who, led by human opinions, follow a false religion; for those who have accepted the faith under the guidance of the Church can never have any just cause for changing this faith or for calling it into question…
If anyone says that the condition of the faithful and those who have not yet attained to the only true faith is alike, so that Catholics may have a just cause for calling in doubt, by suspending their assent, the faith which they have already received from the teaching of the Church, until they have completed a scientific demonstration of the credibility and truth of their faith: let him be anathema.
This is saying that truth about cannot, by definition, be proven scientifically, something we both agree on. “Calling into doubt”, here, means “suspending [your] assent”. If a Catholic were to suspend his assent to the Church’s beliefs, and still claim to be a Catholic, then he ought to be anathema. (The intellectual honest thing would be to suspend assent, and thus voluntarily leave the church, until you changed your mind.) “Anathema”, here, means “separated”: perhaps excommunicated, but not condemned.
