On “Proper Basicality”

There is much to applaud in Evan Fales' penetrating discussion of the nature of basic belief and allied topics.1 He usefully begins by putting the whole topic in historical perspective; and his discussion of the epistemic status of such beliefs as that all crows are black is unusually sensitive to the actual complexities of belief formation. Fales intends "to examine the notion of proper basicality, and the criteria by means of which properly basic propositions are to be distinguished from nonbasic ones;" and he means to do so "with an eye directed in particular towards evaluating Plantinga's claim that what one might have thought were decidedly nonbasic beliefs can be basic, and, indeed, properly so" (375). The beliefs to which he refers are specifically Christian beliefs, such as that Jesus of Nazareth was in fact the divine son of God, that he suffered and died to redeem human beings from their sinful condition, that he rose from the dead, and the like. As Fales says, in Warranted Christian Belief I argued that such beliefs can indeed be properly basic; Fales aims to 'call this into question', as they say. Along the way, he makes trouble for nearly everyone in the neighborhood: classical foundationalist, internalist, externalist, and coherentist anyone, in short, who endorses and relies on the distinction between beliefs that are basic and those that are not. I won't try to defend all of these worthies; they can take care of themselves. What I aim to do instead is defend my claim about the possible proper basicality of Christian belief.