Volume 40, 2015
Jeremy Randel Koons
Pages 405-440
A Fatal Dilemma For Direct Realist Foundationalism
Direct realist versions of foundationalism (hereafter, DRF) have recently been advocated by (among others) Pryor, Huemer, Alston, and Plantinga. DRF can hold either that our foundational observation beliefs are about the simple perceptible qualities of objects (like color, shape, etc.), or that our foundational observation beliefs are more complex ones about objects in the world. I will show that whether our observational beliefs are simple or complex, the agent must possess other epistemically significant states (knowledge, or justified beliefs) in order for these observational beliefs to be justified. These other states are therefore epistemically prior to observation belief, and prevent them from being epistemically foundational.