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Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and
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METAPHILOSOPHY
Vol. 34, No. 5, October 2003
0026-1068

CHISHOLMS EPISTEMIC PRINCIPLES

ERNEST SOSA

Abstract: An exposition and discussion of Chisholms epistemic principles.

These are compared with relevant views of Wilfrid Sellars and Richard Foley.
A further comparison, with the approach favored by Descartes, is argued to
throw light on the status of such principles.
Keywords: epistemic justication, epistemic principles, truth, belief, knowledge.

In the third edition of his masterly Theory of Knowledge, Roderick

Chisholm lays out a conception of epistemology according to which our
aim is to improve ourselves epistemically, to discard epistemically
unjustied or irrational beliefs, while acquiring ones that are justied.1
This leads us to ask such questions as: What can I know? How can I tell
what I am justied in believing, and how can I tell when I am more
justied in believing a certain thing than some other thing? In pursuing
such questions we must presuppose that we understand the terms in
which they are posed, including such epistemic terms as knowledge,
belief , and justication. And we must remain at least open minded on
a certain faith in ourselves, the faith that we can improve our beliefs
epistemically through our own rational, reective efforts.
According to Chisholm, if that faith is not to be dashed we must have
immediate reective access to certain of our (subjective, mental)
properties. In addition, he thinks we can also discern reectively, and
immediately, the justication of some of our beliefs. This concept of
justication is hence also itself applicable justiably to a belief. And,
nally, Chisholm was always committed to particularism, to a
methodology according to which philosophical theorizing must be
properly responsive to our considered judgments about examples,
1
As soon as I got to Brown in 1964 I began to take Rod Chisholms seminars, and we
fell into frequent philosophical conversation, a pattern that was to extend for decades, which
gave me quite an education. Here my main focus will be on a much discussed feature of
Chisholms epistemology, his epistemic principles, an early and lasting feature of his
seminars and writings, as he moved beyond the problem of the criterion through his
persistent effort to develop a set of such principles while clarifying their own metaphysical
and epistemological status.

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whether these be actual or hypothetical. This methodology he put into

practice through his effective use of counterexamples, which came to him
effortlessly.
Far from being idiosyncratic to Chisholm, that view of epistemology
ts the founder of modern epistemology impressively well. Descartes was
indeed out to improve himself epistemically as he sat down to his
meditations, and to do so by reection. And he did take himself to have
reective access to certain of his (subjective, mental) properties. And he
did think that we can tell reectively, and also immediately or directly,
that some of our beliefs are thus justied. Consider this passage, among
the most famous in all philosophy, from the second paragraph of the
Third Meditation.
I am certain that I am a thinking thing. Do I not therefore also know what is
required for my being certain about anything? In this rst item of knowledge
there is simply a clear and distinct perception of what I am asserting; this
would not be enough to make me certain of the truth of the matter if it could
ever turn out that something which I perceived with such clarity and
distinctness was false. So I now seem to be able to lay it down as a general rule
that whatever I perceive very clearly and distinctly is true. (Descartes 1984, 24)

Descartes is here applying an openly particularistic methodology. He rst

can tell that he is certain of the cogito, from which he then draws his
epistemic principle of clarity and distinctness.
His commonsense particularism also puts Chisholm in a tradition that
includes his most admired predecessors, Moore and Reid. All three shun
antecedently postulated standards to which our beliefs can then be held,
without recourse. Most especially do they reject any argument from such
standards to the conclusion that we neither do nor can know the external
world around us. All three also reason on the pattern of Descartess move
from the observation that nothing but its clarity and distinctness makes
the cogito certain, to his principle of clarity and distinctness. Commonsense philosophy thus importantly resembles Descartess particularist
advocacy of intuition and deduction as sources of epistemic status. But
commonsense philosophers go beyond such rationalism to principles that
will more generally t our everyday knowledge.
Moore advocates inductive (or analogical) inference as the way to
understand our knowledge of the external world. He believes that we do
not know immediately any such proposition as that this is a hand. On the
contrary, we can acquire such knowledge only through inductive
inference from what we do know immediately: that is to say, we can
know it only through inference from how it is, relevantly, in our current
state of consciousness, and in our recent states of consciousness, which,
according to Moore, we can also know immediately, through direct
memory. Interestingly, this indirect realist approach has recently been
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defended afresh by Laurence BonJour in a series of articles and a

forthcoming monograph.2
Unlike Moore, both Reid and Chisholm are direct realists. On their
view, if we can know the world around us, it is not by reasoning either
deductively or inductively from what we know about our own present or
directly recalled states of consciousness.
In fact there is reason to think that Descartes himself would not have
objected to the work of Reid, Moore, or Chisholm. Consider, for
example, the following two passages.
My habitual opinions . . . [are] highly probable opinionsFopinions which,
despite the fact that they are in a sense doubtful, . . . it is still much more
reasonable to believe than to deny. (First Meditation, 1984, 15)
[When] . . . it is a question of organizing our life, it would, of course, be
foolish not to trust the senses, and the sceptics who neglected human affairs to
the point where friends had to stop them falling off precipices deserved to be
laughed at. Hence I pointed out in one passage that no sane person ever
seriously doubts such things. (Fifth Set of Replies, 1984, 243)

Evidently, Descartes is far from believing that the only normative

epistemic status that we can properly assign to our beliefs is that of
certainty. So it seems clear that he would perfectly well understand the
project of trying to explain what such lesser status might derive from.
And this would require appeal to epistemic principles, the principles in
terms of which we would understand how beliefs get to be much more
probable than their opposites, or why a certain epistemic course of
action would be foolish or is one that no sane person would ever
seriously take.
Since we can and do know the external world, if unlike Descartes we
conclude that we do not know it by reasoning from the given in
accordance with principles of deductive reasoning, there must be other
principles that detail how we can know through longer-term memory and
through perception. Much of Chisholms work in epistemology is aimed
at uncovering such principles. And he is led in this endeavor to principles
that show the probative force of conscious experience, of memory, of
coherence, and of belief itself. His explanation and defense of these
principles, and of their own metaphysical and epistemological status,
2
See his Toward a Defense of Empirical Foundationalism, in Resurrecting OldFashioned Foundationalism, ed. M. DePaul (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littleeld, 2001).
And compare the defense of classical foundationalism by Richard Fumerton in his
Classical Foundationalism, as well as the critical pieces by John Pollock and Alvin
Plantinga, and the replies by Fumerton and BonJour, all in that same volume. The
forthcoming monograph by BonJour is his main position paper for a debate on
epistemology between the two of us published in the Blackwell Great Debates series,
Epistemic Justication (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).

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display Chisholms legendary subtlety and powers of patient analysis, as

in his reections on the ancient problem of the criterion. Since the
detailed principles have been discussed perceptively in the literature, I
shall not try to do so here. Instead I shall sketch simpler and more
abstract versions and discuss how Chisholm would defend them,
contrasting his stance with two alternatives: one taken by Wilfrid Sellars,
and one by Richard Foley.3
Commonsense philosophers aim to uncover what justies our beliefs,
making them candidates for knowledge. In one way or another, they
end up highlighting ostensible introspections, perceptions, and memories
as sources of justied data from which we can reason to further
conclusions.
So we can think of Chisholms epistemic principles as more subtle and
detailed versions of the following:
J-I Ostensibly introspective judgments (I judgments) are (thereby)
justied.
J-P Ostensibly perceptual judgments (P judgments) are justied.
J-M Ostensibly memorial judgments (M judgments) are justied.
From J-I, J-P, and J-M we may of course derive:
J-IPM Ostensibly introspective, perceptual, or memorial judgments
are justied.
These are best viewed as principles of prima facie justication (epistemic
justication), which I mention only to put it aside, since what follows will
not turn crucially on the distinction between the prima facie and the
ultima facie.
What makes it reasonable for us to accept any such principles? In his
most recent relevant discussion, Chisholm denies that they are justied
a priori. But he also declares a faith important to epistemology: namely,
the faith (F) that we can improve our epistemic situation by making our
body of beliefs better justied. And he argues that the J principles can
enjoy a sort of a priori status, at least indirectly. Consider, for each of
them, the conditional having F as antecedent and that principle as
consequent. For Chisholm such conditionals are justied a priori. Thus
3
See: Sellars 1973, Foley 1997. Compare James Van Cleve, Foundationalism,
Epistemic Principles, and the Cartesian Circle, Philosophical Review 88 (1979): 5591;
also, my discussion of Reids epistemic principles in the entry on Thomas Reid by James
Van Cleve and myself in Steven Emmanuel, ed., The Blackwell Guide to the Modern
Philosophers from Descartes to Nietzsche (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

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the following conditional (or some variant) would be one we can know
a priori: that if we can improve our epistemic situation then ostensibly
perceptual judgments are justied.
By Chisholms own account of a priori justication, however, neither
the J principles nor even the conditionals of the form F-J-X can
possibly be justied a priori.4 According to that account, in its two parts:
(a) what is necessarily true and cannot be accepted without being
certain is axiomatic, and (b) one knows a proposition a priori if and
only if one accepts it and sees it to follow axiomatically from
something axiomatic.
This is a high standard. Not surprisingly, little can be known thus
a priori. None of the Chisholmian J principles will qualify, nor will the
conditionals of the form F-J-X. The charitable way out requires some
other sense of a priori justication. What Chisholm must mean in the
present context is, I suggest, justication by unaided reection, where
reection covers not only rational intuition and reason but also
armchair thought more generally, including what one can know about
ones own mind, past, present, and future, unaided by perception-based
empirical beliefs.
This understanding of what is a priori helps make sense of how
Chisholm defends his epistemic principles, given only a certain twist on
the faith F, a twist implicit in much of his work in epistemology. We need
to understand the epistemologists faith as not just F but F0 : that we can
improve our epistemic situation by reection. But what might possibly lie
behind Chisholms interest in this particular way of improving our
epistemic situation? Plausibly, he wants to avoid two things: (a)
circularity, to the greatest possible extent, and (b) any reliance on the
epistemic luck of circumstances bearing true beliefs as gifts not
sufciently attributable to our cognitive accomplishment. How does his
requirement of reection help to avoid both (a) and (b)?
Avoiding circularity would seem to require that in explaining what
justies our perceptual beliefs we avoid appeal to facts knowable only
through perception. You might appeal instead, with Moore, to
introspection and reason so as to justify perceptual beliefs on that
epistemically prior basis. But what if you despair of reasoning with
inductive validity, from how things stand in your subjective experience to
how they stand in your objective surroundings? In that case, and if you
still wish to avoid or at least postpone circularity, you might then appeal
to other factors as ones that yield the justication of our perceptual
beliefs: factors, however, that will not circularly specify how it is in our
4
This has been shown convincingly by Noah Lemos in his Chisholm, the A Priori, and
Epistemic Principles, in Hahn 1997, 60929.

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surroundings knowable only through perception. Much of the character

of Chisholms principles derives, I am suggesting, from his desire to
specify such factors.
If we wish to avoid epistemic luck, moreover, we would naturally prefer
factors whose presence would derive from our deliberate control, or at least
ones whose presence or absence we could detect with minimal dependence
on how it happens to be in the external world. Ideally, we would be guided
by the full set of factors that determine the justication of our beliefs, and
ideally we would be wholly free to believe or disbelieve in the light of
what we could see about the presence or absence of those factors.
In any case, whatever might in fact lie behind his faith F0 , Chisholm
can then argue that F0 is sustainable only through something like J-IPM;
we can thus reectively reach the conditional whose antecedent is F0 and
whose consequent is J-IPM. And our reasoning would now assume that if
we are to reach justied beliefs by unaided reection, it would have to be
through reective knowledge of what we ostensibly introspect, perceive,
and remember.
So Chisholm is led to conclude that unless ostensible introspection,
perception, and memory yield justication, it is hard to see how, through
unaided reection, we could ever improve our epistemic situation, how we
could ever reectively guide our belief formation toward better justied
beliefs (in a way that would be most deeply attributable to us as our doing).
In his detailed discussions of Chisholms epistemic principles, something to which he returned again and again in his classes and in his
writings on epistemology, Sellars identied judgments of ostensible
introspection, perception, or memory as IPM judgments. His Chisholminspired principles are formulated as follows:
T-I Ostensibly introspective judgments (I judgments) are likely true.
T-P Ostensibly perceptual judgments (P judgments) are likely true.
T-M Ostensibly memorial judgments (M judgments) are likely true.
From T-I, T-P, and T-M we may of course derive:
T-IPM Ostensibly introspective, perceptual, or memorial judgments
are likely true.5
5
Such epistemic principles are the focus of Sellars 1973, and he discusses them in depth
also in several other publications; for example, in one of his three Matchette Lectures at the
University of Texas, published as The Structure of Knowledge, in Hector-Neri
Castaneda, ed., Action, Knowledge, and Reality: Studies in Honor of Wilfrid Sellars
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975); and also in his Metaphysics of Epistemology, ed. Pedro
Amaral (Northridge, Calif.: Ridgeview Press, 1989).

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These Sellarsian formulations are useful in considering Richard

Foleys distinction between subjective and objective justication, which
leads him to say this about Chisholms principles:
Although I have qualms about the exact formulations of some of his
principles, I also think that most of them have a general aura of plausibility.
After all, most roughly expressed, what the principles imply is that in general it
is rational for us to trust memory, perception, introspection, and the like, and
of course most of us think that this is sound intellectual advice. (Foley 1997,
26162)
In one important sense of rationality, it is rational toFif we have a goal X and
if on suitably careful reection we would think thatFis an effective way to
satisfy X. This applies to our epistemic goals as well as our other goals. Thus,
it is in general rational for us to have beliefs that conform to Chisholms
principles, because in general Chisholms principles, or at least something
similar to them, reect our own deep epistemic standards. They reect our own
deep views about how best to reach our primary intellectual endFthat is,
truth. (Foley 1997, 263)

Foleys distinction helps us to discern an interesting relationship between

Chisholms J principles and Sellarss T principles. According to Foley the
J principles reect our deep commitment to the T principles. And now we
have three interestingly different stances on the J principles.
First, one might with Chisholm take them to be wholly independent of
the T principles.6 Second, one might with Foley take them to be
independent of the truth of the T principles but dependent on our deep
enough acceptance of them. Or, third, one might propose some further
explanation of them, as does Sellars with his practical, vindicational
justication of the T principles.
I shall be unable here to explore those options in depth. So I shall just
suggest some doubts about each of them, and shall conclude by presenting,
again only sketchily, the further alternative that I nd preferable.
About Chisholms stance, one main problem is that it is very hard to
see how a notion of justication or rationality or reasonability
could matter in epistemology, in connection with knowledge, while
wholly independent of truth. In addition, it is not evident that Chisholms
is the only way in which we could guide our belief formation with
appropriate reective access to the guiding factors. For example, we
could perhaps believe in a counter-Chisholmian way, so that, when we
ostensibly perceived that p, we would believe that not-p. Or we could add
6
Consider his statement in his 1989, 7677: According to [Chisholms] . . . traditional
conception of internal epistemic justication, there is no logical connection between
epistemic justication and truth. A belief may be internally justied and yet be false. This
consequence is not acceptable to the externalist. He feels that an adequate account of
epistemic justication should exhibit some logical connection between epistemic justication
and truth.

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principles like the following: Ostensible deliverances of astrological charts

are justied. And so on. It is not easy to see how such principles could be
ruled out by reection, and in any case this threat to the faith-dependent
approach does need to be ruled out. Finally, assuming the preceding
problems could be surmounted, there would remain this further problem:
that the principles will seem motley unless they are unied by some
overall account of what they have in common, of what gives them their
common point.
About Foleys stance, it does provide a unifying connection to truth, if
only via the requirement of a deep commitment to the T principles, which
speak of truth and not only of justication. This sense of justication,
which has come to be known as Foley-rationality, is plausibly epistemic.
It amounts to conforming to ones own deep epistemic standards. But
people can have standards that are epistemically quite deplorable no
matter how deep. Consider someone with commitment of maximum
depth to the dicta of astrology. Accordingly, there must be some further
sense of justication that matters in epistemology. And it remains to be
seen what principles might govern such further justication, and how
these principles are to be defended.
Sellars argues that our reasons for accepting the T principles cannot be
inductive, on pain of vicious circularity. The T principles cannot have a
nonvicious defense through being part of a theory T whose support is
ultimately that it coheres with IPM judgments. So he turns to a practical
justication of the T principles, claiming that . . . it is reasonable to
accept . . . [T-IPM] IPM judgments are likely to be true simply on the
grounds that unless they are likely to be true, the concept of effective
agency has no application (1973, 190).
However, how could this explain our epistemic justication for
accepting the T principles? What essentially distinguishes such justication from the following justication available to any theorist who accepts
the T principles?
That unless IPM judgments are likely to be true, our theorists
cherished T principles will not be right.
We want effective agency, true enough, and we also want to be right. So it
might be suggested that these considerations somehow give us reason to
accept the T principles. Even if they do provide some such reason,
however, it surely will not be what we want as epistemologists. Thus, if a
foundation offers a big prize to those who can get themselves to believe
the T principles, this gives a reason of a sort for doing so, but that would
not help us with the traditional epistemic problematic. We would not
thereby really have found the right sort of reason, an epistemic reason,
for accepting the T principles.

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An improved account of epistemic principles will need to nd a proper

connection between epistemic justication and truth, without abandoning what is plausible in the requirement that one satisfy ones own deepest
standards. We need to discriminate among standards, however, at least
by requiring that the standards be true if they are to do the full epistemic
job. It is not enough that the standards be simply true; even for the
deepest standards, we need to distinguish between those that have and
those that lack proper epistemic standing. But how might our basic
epistemic T principles acquire such standing? Not through ordinary
simple induction; Sellars does seem right about that. But we also need to
go beyond Sellarss own practical vindication, which fails to give
epistemic standing, and even beyond Chisholms declaration of epistemic
faith. Even if we share Chisholms faith, we shall want to go beyond faith
to something epistemically more rewarding.
It is here that Descartes holds the key. Recall his commitment already
in the second paragraph of the Third Meditation to the requirement that
nothing as clear and distinct as is the cogito could possibly be false, if that
degree of clarity and distinctness is to be what gives the cogito its status
of certain knowledge. And recall his observation that an atheist
mathematician does not need to block the skeptical doubts of the
Meditations in order to have a kind of knowledge of his mathematics,
with a status that Descartes calls cognitio. Nevertheless, beyond the
cognitio that one might enjoy as an atheist even absent a coherent
metaperspective, he suggests, there lies a higher scientia that does require
such reective standing. What could possibly provide such standing?
Answer (Cartesian answer): The ability to defend ones commitments in
the arena of reective reason. Yes, but through what standards, under
what epistemic principles? And how do these standards or principles
themselves acquire proper standing?
Even the deepest epistemic standards must not only t coherently in
ones overall body of beliefs and commitments but must also connect
properly with the reality to which they pertain. To connect thus properly,
they must at least be true, as is the principle that the clear and distinct is
infallibly true. What is more, our present commitment to them must not
be right just by accident. When and how do we relevantly avoid such
accident in our deep standards or principles? A good answer to this
question should help explain just how it is that belief in Chisholms
epistemic principles can itself acquire epistemic standing.
According to an insight of Thomas Reids, which I believe impressed
Chisholm, it is not only through Sellarss ordinary inductive inference
that one could possibly hope to provide epistemic grounding for
epistemic T principles. It is not only thus that one could relevantly
escape damaging luck in ones commitment to the principles. However, if
one is systematically and stably enough the beneciary of a powerful and
benign enough Creator (or a provident enough Mother Nature), this may
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sufce, and both Descartes and Reid exploit this possibility. The
epistemic benets will compound, moreover, if, compatibly with our
epistemic predicament, we manage to ascend to an adequate perspective
on its true nature.7
Department of Philosophy
Brown University
Providence, RI 02912
USA
Ernest_Sosa@Brown.edu

References
Chisholm, Roderick M. 1989. Theory of Knowledge. Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice Hall.
Descartes, Rene. 1984. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, volume 2,
translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald
Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Foley, Richard. 1997. Chisholms Epistemic Principles. In Hahn 1997,
24165.
Hahn, Lewis Edwin, ed. 1997. The Philosophy of Roderick M. Chisholm.
Chicago: Open Court.
Sellars, Wilfrid. 1973. Givenness and Explanatory Coherence. Journal
of Philosophy 70 (1973): 61224.

7
An earlier version of this essay was presented in the Chisholm memorial symposium at
the Central Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in April 2000.

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