The Failure of Universal Epistemic Principles

In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding John Locke tells of a discussion with some friends over questions of morality and revealed religion in which they came to an impasse on how the truth of certain moral and theological propositions might be settled. End of story, one might think, except that some of these propositions were of vital importance and it would not be realistic simply to defer judgment on whether we should believe them or not.

Locke realized that what was needed was some way of determining  whether we should believe such claims even when we can’t definitively prove their truth. And so he suggested the idea of a universal epistemic principle (UEP) by which we can determine the belief-worthiness of any proposition regardless of its truth-value.

Let’s realize that Locke was being very ambitious here. He wasn’t looking for a handful of basic epistemic principles which would tell us simply whether we should accept a claim. His UEP would apply to every proposition so telling us whether it should be accepted or rejected.

And here is where Paul J. Griffiths’ article “How Epistemology Matters to Theology” (Journal of Religion 79, no. 1 (1999): 1-18) comes in.