Not by Our Bootstraps: Stewart Cohen on Perceptual Justification

In a series of papers, Stewart Cohen has argued against basic justification accounts of perceptual justification: theories on which perceptual experience justifies perceptual belief about the external world immediately, regardless of whether the subject is independently justified in regarding perception as reliable. The main objection is that any such view will license a transparently bogus “bootstrapping” argument for the reliability of sense perception. This chapter offers a reply to Cohen on behalf of the basic justification theorist. A subject who comes to believe that p on the basis of its seeming to her that p thereby presupposes that things are as they seem on this occasion. This presupposition is not a premise in her reasoning; it need not be believed at all. It is rather a state we impute to her in virtue of the fact that she moves directly from experience to belief as she does. The resulting belief is justified if the presupposition is justified, as it will often be. But if she then seeks to reason from this belief (and a belief about her experience) to the conclusion that things are as they seem on this occasion—a key step in the bootstrapping reasoning Cohen rightly regards as bogus—she must first open the question whether things are as they seem; and as soon as she does that, her perceptual belief is no longer justified and is therefore no longer available to serve as a premise. The chapter sketches a toy model of inquiry as rational belief revision relative to a body of presuppositions and shows that in this framework, the bootstrapping problem for basic justification accounts of perceptual belief does not arise.