Immediate justification, bootstrapping and cognitive penetrability

Berit Brogaard (St. Louis) gives a talk at the MCMP workshop "New Perspectives on External World Scepticism" (9-10 July, 2013) titled "Immediate justification, bootstrapping and cognitive penetrability". Abstract: I argue that dogmatism offers an adequate reply to the skeptic and then consider the bootstrapping and cognitive penetrability problems that appear to inflict immediate justification theories. I argue that the cognitive penetrability problem can be avoided by ensuring that only properly grounded seemings provide immediate justification. This move, however, comes at a cost. It introduces a potentially undesirable form of externalism into the theory of immediate justification. I then show that the bootstrapping and cognitive penetrability problems don’t arise on a version of dogmatism that takes perceptual seemings to provide immediate justification for belief. Though this move requires an apparently inaccessible notion of rationality, I argue that the resultant view is nonetheless a form of internalism.