Turtles All the Way Down: A critique of Infinitism and Coherentism

Epistemic Justification is an important factor in regards to the possibility of knowledge and to whether one has proper grounds for believing in some proposition of knowledge. This paper is concerned with the necessity of Epistemic Justification theories to have some sort of non-inferential clause, and seeks to make it clear that Coherentist and Infinitist theories of Epistemic Justification fail to provide a level of sufficient justification necessary to exempt Coherentism and Infitnism from epistemic skepticism. Furthermore, this paper will argue that only if a theory has some inerrant and foundational non-inferential clause within it, is the theory properly offering sufficient and necessary Epistemic Justification. For the ease of clarifying a convoluted and easily ambiguously understood topic this paper will flow in the following manner. Starting with a clarification of the terms Epistemic Justification as well as introducing a sub-nomer term called “Dependent Justification”. I will then outline the use of epistemic regress within the justification rationality behind the theories of Coherentism and Infinitism. The latter half of the paper will be concerned with applying the epistemic regress to the aforementioned Cohrentist and Infinitist theories, responding to a presumed rebuttal on behalf of the same theories, and finishing up with the closing arguments for the necessity of some sort of foundational approach to epistemic justification in order to escape being trapped within epistemic skepticism. Before going further it is important to identify just what is meant by Epistemic Justification in this paper. For the sake of this paper Epistemic Justification will be focused on what I like to call lateral or “Dependent Justification”, though the importance of doxastic justification does play an important role; in this paper I will address doxastic justification as essentially being “warranted justification”. To clarify the distinction between Warrant and

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