Positism in Contemporary Epistemology

Abstract: The epistemic regress problem revolves around what can or must be the structure by

which a proposition or belief is justified, if such a structure exists. Positism is a theory about the

structure of epistemic justification that states a chain of justifying reasons can terminate in a

reason or reasons which are not justified themselves. This article briefly examines the historical

origins and two recent defenses of positism, concluding that these defenses are unsuccessful in

their attempts to legitimate positism as a solution to the epistemic regress problem.

I. Introduction and Background

The epistemic regress problem revolves around what can or must be the structure by

which a proposition or belief is justified, if such a structure exists. Suppose a person S believes x.

Is x propositionally or doxastically justified [for S]?1 Assuming so, what are the possible

structures of justification for x? There appear to be four options, or some combination thereof:

i) Foundationalism: x can itself be immediately justified or can be justified by a chain of

reasons which terminate in a reason which is itself immediately justified.

ii) Coherentism: x can be justified by a circular chain of reasons.2

iii) Infinitism: x can be justified by a chain of infinite and non-repeating reasons.

iv) Positism: x can be justified by a chain of reasons which terminate in a reason which is

itself unjustified.

Historically, epistemologists have had relatively little to say about this last option, which

has only recently been forwarded as viable. James van Cleve coined the term “positism,” 1 While the terminology is controversial, the principle distinction between doxastic and propositional justification is that doxastic justification is concerned with the justificatory relationships among and statuses of one’s actual beliefs, whereas propositional justification concerns the justificatory relationships among and statuses of propositions that do or could serve as the objects of beliefs for an epistemic agent.

2 Among others, Ernest Sosa (1980) and Peter Klein (2005, 2014) have each noted that “emergent” coherentism, on which the justification for a proposition or belief emerges in virtue of its being a member of a coherent set, is a form of meta-justificatory foundationalism.

defining it as the belief that “chains of justifying reasons can terminate in reasons that are not

justified themselves, but are simply individual or societal posits” (van Cleve, 2005, 168). In a

footnote to his essay, van Cleve notes:

The distinction between positism and foundationalism is lost on those who cannot hear the

word “justified” as anything but a past participle, implying that some act or relation of

justifying has occurred whereby a belief is justified by something else that serves as a

reason for it. For foundationalists, “justified” simply connotes a favorable epistemic status,

which a belief may have even though the subject has no reason for it. In this connection,

another term, such as “evident” or “credible,” might be less misleading than “justified.”

(Ibid., 178)

For van Cleve, then, a pure positist about doxastic justification would admit that non-

inferential or unreasoned beliefs do not have a favorable epistemic status. Nevertheless, such a

positist would argue either or both 1) that other actual beliefs of his could be justified by chains

of reasons which terminate in unjustified beliefs and 2) that by such unjustified beliefs, he can be

justified in coming to believe other things.

Ryan Herbert provides a definition of position which is narrower than van Cleve’s in

several respects. Herbert defines positism as the position that basic beliefs “can serve to justify

other beliefs” (Herbert, 2011, 15), although these basic beliefs “are not autonomously warranted

and… are neither epistemically justified nor unjustified” (Ibid., 14). Herbert believes a positist’s

chain of reasoning terminates in beliefs which are neither epistemically justified nor unjustified,

whereas van Cleve simply states that a positist’s chain of reasoning terminates in beliefs which

are not justified. Furthermore, Herbert remarks that positism holds that basic beliefs are neither

propositionally nor doxastically justified, whereas whether positism is tied to both propositional

and doxastic justification is left as an open question for van Cleve. As there are some infinitists

about propositional but not doxastic justification, so might there correspondingly be some

positists about doxastic but not propositional justification.

Both van Cleve and Herbert credit the origin of positism to Ludwig Wittgenstein:

…the questions that we raise and our doubts depend upon the fact that some propositions

are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn.  

That is to say, it belongs to the logic of our scientific investigations that certain things are

in deed not doubted.  

But it isn’t that the situation is like this: We just can’t investigate everything, and for that

reason we are forced to rest content with assumption. If I want the door to turn, the hinges

must stay put. (Wittgenstein, 1969, §§341-3)

Any act of questioning or doubting presupposes belief in some propositions. In a

skeptical context, question or doubt relates to some or even all propositions. However, such

questions or doubts must either acknowledge the existence of these propositions or that which

gives this or these propositions meaning. In short, one cannot deny, doubt, or question everything

without rendering those denials, doubts, or questions unintelligible.

Identification of Wittgenstein’s “hinge propositions” with an incipient form of positism

may make sense due to his definition of knowledge: “One says “I know” when one is ready to

give compelling grounds. “I know” relates to a possibility of demonstrating the truth” (Ibid.,

§243). On this definition, only something believed by inference can be “known.” Furthermore,

positism also has structural similarities with the emotivist moral theory accepted by certain

logical positivists, a group with whom Wittgenstein was involved early in his life. However,

“hinge propositions” do not prima facie rule out, for instance, the possibility of basic beliefs

which have a favorable epistemic status and are therefore epistemically justified. It seems, then,

that Wittgenstein cannot be attributed as having fully anticipated positism.

II. Two Recent Defenses of Positism

A. Mylan Engel Jr.

A scholarly, conscientious appraisal and defense of positism in particular was lacking

prior to Mylan Engel Jr.’s “Positism: The Unexplored Solution to the Epistemic Regress

Problem.”3 Following van Cleve’s definition of positism, Engel purports to defend the legitimacy

- though not justificatory exclusivity - of it:

...there is a third form of coherence theory that epistemologists have not recognized. Like

foundations theories, modest nondoxastic coherence theories acknowledge that some

reasoning is linear and admit that some beliefs are basic, for example, simple perceptual

beliefs. Unlike foundations theories, however, modest linear noncircular nondoxastic

coherence theories insist we can be justified in holding nonbasic beliefs that do not

ultimately trace their justification back to basic beliefs. In section 3, I argue that a Positist

version of this sort of Modest Coherentism (PMC) allows us to solve the regress problem

for ex ante justification as it most frequently arises. (Engel, 2014, 149)

3 At least two epistemologists have alleged Peter Klein has endorsed positism or an “unjustified foundations” view. See Mylan Engel Jr. (Engel, 2014, 155, 157) on Klein, permission norms, and provisional inferential justification, and Michael Bergmann (Bergmann, 2014, 44-49) on Klein and doxastic justification. In his own article in Ad Infinitum, Klein appears to specifically amend or clarify his views with respect to Engel Jr.’s observations on an earlier, workshop presentation of it, stating that “infinitists can grant to the foundationalist that there is some sense in which it is true that S is partially provisionally doxastically justified in believing that x without S’s having to appeal to a reason” (Klein, 2014, 120). This could also distance Klein from his previous position which is the subject of Bergmann’s criticism, that beliefs “can be (at least partially) doxastically justified even if the beliefs from which they are inferred are unjustified” (Klein, 2007). His appeal to a “rapprochement” between infinitism and foundationalism seems to lead him to accept a form of contextualism, specifically that one’s context determines whether a belief of his can be “basic” - unreasoned yet fallibly justified (Klein, 2014, 122).

As positism only states that a proposition or belief can justified by a chain of reasons

which terminates in a reason which is itself unjustified, epistemologists who would agree with

positism may vary in their respective answers to questions about the potential legitimacy of other

structures of justification or theories regarding the nature of the justification itself.

Engel specifies that his defense of positism is with reference to ex ante and ex post

justification. Accepting Alvin Goldman’s definitions, Engel believes:

The ex post use occurs when there exists a belief, and we say of that belief that it is (or

isn’t) justified. The ex ante use occurs when no such belief exists... Here we say of the

person, independent of his doxastic state vis-à-vis p, that p is (or isn't) suitable for him to

believe. (Goldman, 1979, 21)

Thus, ex ante justification determines whether one may or should acquire a belief; ex post

justification determines whether a belief one already accepts can or should be kept or discarded.

Engel explains that we can identify these cases by consideration of the circumstances under

which a person is worthy of epistemic praise for believing that p, saying that this “personal

justification” occurs when one believes or came to believe “that p only if she has an undefeated

reason for believing that p” (Engel, 2014, 147). In this context, her reasons must be “internally

accessible.” In other words, her reason “to believe that p is a consideration, from [her] egocentric

point of view, that suggests that p is true” (Ibid., 147).

Engel highlights that “the epistemic regress problem was put forth as a skeptical

challenge designed to undermine the very possibility of rational belief.” (Ibid., 149). What is a

rational belief? In a subsection entitled “The Argument from Rational Commitment,” Engel

argues that one is “rationally committed” or “justified” in believing q if he also believes “that p

and that p entails q” even if he is unjustified in believing either that p or that p entails q (Ibid.,

152). It is “his commitment simpliciter to p and p entails q that rationally commits him to q”

(Ibid., 153).

The internal reasoning of the individual should lead him to believe q if he believes that p

and that p entails q. Engel seems to take this to mean his belief in q would be “rational.” In that

case, however, then due to other statements made by him regarding a person’s being justified in

believing q, Engel’s own internal reasoning should lead him to consider the rational belief that q

to be distinct from the justified belief that q. For suppose that one encounters a defeater for p yet

still believes that p and that p entails q; would Engel say that he is still justified in coming to

believe q? If so, then to maintain internal consistency, he would need to revise the conditions

under which personal justification occurs - specifically, the condition that one have no defeaters

for p as a reason for q. If not, then to maintain internal consistency, Engel would need to either 1)

distinguish rational and justified beliefs or 2) revise his position regarding rational commitments.

Option 2) would probably be the most appealing to Engel, as it seems to be the one with

the most potential for maintaining coherence among his other beliefs. On the other hand, a

revision could cost Engel an intended argument against what he calls the “transmission-only

thesis” (Ibid., 152). One reason why positism has remained in obscurity may be that philosophers

had, until recently, intuited that epistemic justification can only be either intrinsic or transmitted.

In his abstract, Engel defines this contraction or transmittance assumption as follows: “Person S

is mediately justified in believing p iff (1) S has a doxastic reason q for p and (2) S is justified in

believing q” (Ibid., 146). Requiring that S be justified in believing q in order for q to function as

a doxastic reason for his being mediately justified in believing p would leave no logical room for

a hypothesis that a belief can be justified by an unjustified belief.

However, the assumption that epistemic justification is either intrinsic or transmitted has

been increasingly recently challenged by infinitist epistemologists; it is not unexpected, then, that

at least one defendant of positism would see and take the opportunity to likewise suggest that

“reasoning itself can be justification generating” (Ibid., 152). Two defenders of infinitism,

Jeanne Peijnenburg and Scott Aikin, highlight this aspect of Engel’s defense of positism.4

Indeed, positism about doxastic justification was foreshadowed by Carl Ginet in a debate with

Peter Klein about infinitism:

In my essay I said that the (to my mind) most severe difficulty with Klein’s infinitism is

that it is committed to the thesis that inference alone can create justification. Here Klein

seems to embrace this commitment wholeheartedly, holding that the longer the chain of

inferential justification for a given belief the greater the justification created, and that, if

the chain is long enough (but still finite), the justification can “increase to the degree

required for knowledge.” This seems to give us the result that knowledge does not require

infinitely long chains of inferential justification after all: infinitism gives way to

inferentialism. Worse yet, given Klein’s thesis that inferential justification is the only sort

of justification there can be, we seem to get the result that one could start with a belief (or

set of beliefs) that is totally unjustified, because it lacks any inferential justification, and

4 “Mylan Engel Jr.'s “Positism: The Unexplored Solution to the Epistemic Regress Problem” develops and defends the view that a justification-conferring chain of reasons may legitimately begin with an unjustified belief. Engel holds that, under certain circumstances, reasoning itself can be justification generating, and not just justification transmitting. He argues that a person S can be justified in coming to believe a proposition p on the basis of an unjustified posit R, provided S does not realize she is unjustified in believing R and she has no defeaters that defeat R's status as a reason for p. Engel maintains that when one believes a proposition p, one is rationally committed to what is knowingly entailed by p, unless one is prepared to abandon p in light of those entailments. Accordingly, the propositions one believes provides defeasible reasons for believing the propositions they knowingly entail. Engel characterizes his positist view as a form of nondoxastic coherentism that is compatible with other meta-epistemic views. In particular, Engel is keen to show that his view is compatible with the existence of basic beliefs grounded in sense experience and also compatible with a version of infinitism that holds that inference itself is justification enhancing.” (Ibid., 140-141)

by spinning out a long enough chain of inference from it reach a belief that has the degree

of justification required for knowledge.

These results are so counterintuitive that I hesitate to attribute them to Klein. But how

else are we to interpret the quoted remarks? (Ginet, 2005, 155)

Engel holds that transmission is possible but unnecessary for epistemic justification.

Returning to one of Engel’s arguments for this, the “Argument from Rational Commitment,” if

Engel revises his statements to include his belief that in order for S to be justified in believing q

for reason p, p must be an undefeated reason, some foundationalists might reply that Engel’s

positism is, in fact, foundationalism, as p would, on their view, have prima facie justification.

Furthermore, Engel later states that such a p could become “less arbitrary” and even

“cease to be arbitrary” because of a “primed-search-self-monitoring process” on which p “hasn’t

been purged due to countervailing considerations, despite S’s having been on the lookout for

such considerations” (Engel, 2014, 158). Engel, like most contemporary foundationalists,

believes that justification comes in degrees, and Engel, despite not specifying at what point p can

entirely cease to be arbitrary, analogously believes arbitrariness comes in degrees.

Engel’s purpose in addressing the transmission-only thesis is to refute an argument for

foundationalism. Whether or not Engel succeeds, as Michael Bergmann puts it in his case against

the unjustified foundations view of the structure of epistemic justification (i.e. positism):

...people can reject UF due to its implausibility without holding any view at all about

whether justification is transmitted or transferred from one belief or proposition to

another. What opponents of UF think is just that a belief can’t become justified by

inference from an unjustified belief. They might also think that a belief can become

justified by inference from a justified belief. But they needn’t have any views at all about

whether that involves justification being transferred from one belief or proposition to

another. (Bergmann, 2014, 47-48)

Engel seems to be the sort of foundationalist Bergmann has in mind. Indeed, Engel writes

that “a belief or experience is considered “basic” if a subject is “noninferential” and

“immediately justified” in having it” (Engel, 2014, 148). He makes a few arguments against a

purely foundationalist solution to the regress argument but later admits the “foundationalist is

right to think that there are basic beliefs” (Ibid., 157).

Thus, just as Engel distances himself from committing to an inference-only thesis, he

does not sufficiently distinguish himself from foundationalists who similarly distance themselves

from a transmission-only thesis. Engel may not consider the undefeated or non-arbitrary status of

a p to be sufficient for justification, but insofar as Engel accepts van Cleve’s definition of

positism in the context of epistemic justification simply connoting “a favorable epistemic status,”

it is difficult to understand why Engel would think that an undefeated and perhaps non-arbitrary

belief would not have a prima facie favorable epistemic status.

Moreover, if S has no reason to believe the contradictory of p, then it does not seem as

though S would necessarily be violating any regulative epistemic norms in coming to believe p.

If so, then given Engel’s position that “S is justified in coming to believe that p if and only if S

would not violate any regulative epistemic norms by coming to believe that p” (Ibid., 153), Engel

should conclude that p is justified for S..

Additionally, if S’s grounding belief p is undefeated yet unjustified, it seems implausible

to think that a reason q the content of which is merely “p is undefeated” would render p justified

for S.5 But allowing that Engel’s other conditions for positist justification also hold, this is

5 This is related to the following argument by Michael Bergmann (Bergmann, 2014, 47): Why is UF so widely viewed as implausible in the extreme? Suppose you have two beliefs, B1 and B2, both of which are not justified at all, because neither of them is based on any reasons or evidence at all.

precisely what would happen. This is not to suggest a transmission-only thesis is true after all,

only that “justification ex nihilo” thesis (Ibid., 152) is, in this case, false.

If this is right, then given that Engel rejects radical skepticism, traditional coherentism,

and doxastic infinitism, his PMC theory looks like a pure - albeit qualified - foundationalism.

“Being undefeated” can, for Engel, function as a foundational property that contributes to the

prima facie justification of S’s undefeated, unreasoned beliefs and to which S can have access.

B. Jeanne Peijnenburg and David Atkinson

While Jeanne Peijnenburg and David Atkinson do not actively seek to defend positism in

their article “The Need for Justification” (Peijnenburg and Atkinson, 2014a), they do suggest it

could be a legitimate structure of doxastic justification:

...a belief B1 can be doxastically justified by a long chain of other beliefs, B2, B3, to Bn,

such that:

1. each Bm is conditionally justified by Bm+1, where 2 ≤ m ≤ n-1;

2. Bn may be justified by another belief, or may justify itself, or may be

unjustified;

3. the effect of Bn on B1 becomes smaller as n becomes bigger and bigger. (Ibid.,

206)

If B1 can be doxastically justified by a long chain of other beliefs which terminates in an

unjustified belief Bn, then positism can be true. In another article published the same year,

Atkinson and Peijnenburg claim to have shown that “the starting point of the epistemic chain

may be completely unjustified, or even non-existent, or having zero probability: that does not

And suppose that B2 implies B1. Can B1 become justified to some degree solely in virtue of your later inferring it from the still unjustified belief B2, which implies it? It seems clear that the answer is “no.” Inference from reasons doesn’t yield any justification if those reasons have nothing going for them, epistemically speaking. or so most people think, which is why they reject UF.

prevent the target proposition q from being eminently plausible or even justified to the highest

degree” (Peijnenburg and Atkinson, 2014b, 163).

What leads Peijnenburg and Atkinson to conclude that a belief may be justified by an

unjustified belief is what they call the Decreasing Influence of the Ground (DIG). As this is

seemingly their sole argument for the potential legitimacy of positism, it is important to explain

what Peijnenburg and Atkinson mean by it. DIG states that “the further away a link is from S, the

less it contributes to that definitive degree [of justification]” (Peijnenburg and Atkinson, 2014a,

205). That is, if one considers a chain of reasons for some target belief, each of which informs

the probability of its preceding reason, Peijnenburg and Atkinson argue that “the justificatory

role [of conditional probabilities P(Xn-1|Xn) and P(Xn-1|¬Xn)] for A also diminishes as n becomes

bigger” (Ibid., 205). In fact, the belief at which our chain of reasoning terminates, B, may itself

be unjustified with respect to some contextually or pragmatically specified threshold, but A may

itself be justified if the reasons between A and B are sufficiently long and their conditional

probabilities are sufficiently high.

However, given the status of DIG within Peijnenburg and Atkinson’s epistemology, it is

far from obvious that positism may be legitimated by it. The most important fact in the article is

that Peijnenburg and Atkinson allow intuition to play a role in the formulation of their principle

of justification. This leads them to make the admission that “something else has to be added to

probabilistic support to turn it into justification” (Ibid., 209). Actually, probabilistic support for

A is not only an insufficient condition for justification, it may not even be a necessary condition:

“there might be justification even though the probabilistic support is quite low” (Ibid., 208).

If we retain the intuition that probabilistic support is a necessary condition, what further

justificatory condition[s] Peijnenburg and Atkinson would forward would presumably also be

intuitional or attempt to capture a common feature or features among intuitive examples of

justified beliefs. In that case, a common intuition among epistemologists for millennia is that

beliefs cannot be justified by unjustified beliefs. While the addition of this condition may not be

sufficient for an exhaustive understanding of epistemic justification, if it is a necessary condition,

that is all that suffices to discount positism.

An argument for the widespread intuition that positism is implausible could be that bad

reasoning cannot yield justification. Reasoning is certainly bad if one of one’s reasons transmits

its unjustified status to some target belief, but as was noted by Bergmann, one need not adopt a

transmission-only theory of justification to intuit the implausibility of positism or an unjustified

foundations view. Bad reasoning in an epistemological system which allows for emergent

justification might consist of citing a reason which is itself below some probabilistic threshold or

would otherwise detract from rather than contribute to the ability of one’s target belief to meet

that threshold, regardless of if that target belief nevertheless meets said probabilistic threshold.

Contrary to positism, reasoning from an unjustified belief would, then, lead to an unjustified

belief.

III. Positism in Contemporary Epistemology

Positism is a theory about the structure of epistemic justification that states a chain of

justifying reasons can terminate in a reason or reasons which are not justified themselves.

Theories about the specific nature of justification may vary among positists, but analysis of two

recent defenses of positism suggests positists must assume a few ideas about the nature of

justification for some x:

A. The justification for x cannot have been solely transmitted or contracted from an

unjustified belief, for then x would have inherited its reason’s unjustified status.

B. The justification for x must be probabilistic, graded, or come in degrees, for the

relation of x to its unjustified reason[s] would otherwise be one of absolute entailment

leading to a completely unjustified status for x.

A and B are necessary conditions for positist justification, but they are not conditions

exclusively available to positists. Infinitists and foundationalists, at least, can believe A and B

are possible in some contexts without admitting the legitimacy of positist justification.

On the other hand, bad reasoning, an epistemic demerit, appears to be intrinsic to

positism. If one is able to access a feature of his grounding belief by which he can in principle

distinguish between good and bad reasoning - if, for example, reasoning from a grounding belief

may be good if the belief is undefeated - then it seems one has given up any claim to have

reasoned from an unjustified belief. Contrarily, if reasoning from an in fact unjustified belief or

beliefs is not a case of bad reasoning, what else would a positist think qualifies? If bad reasoning

is not an epistemic demerit, what is? These are considerations that should trouble positists, as no

answer has been forthcoming to them.

Where does this leave contemporary epistemology? Much in the same position as before.

A rejection of positism need not be not an endorsement of radical skepticism. Klein, Engel,

Atkinson, and Peijnenburg each agree with or allow for the possibility that some beliefs are

justified apart from a process of reasoning. Foundationalism seems to have an intuitive appeal

that positism does not. But defending such intuitions is beyond the scope of this article.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Professor Michael Hoffmann for a recommended clarification on

Wittgenstein’s views and Luke Miner for his comments on an earlier draft of this article. Any

residual mistakes are my own.

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