He shows that the belief in the identity of matter is not a
defeasibly justifying belief.
We are saying, instead, that pain is
defeasibly bad-making; it has a default negative valence.[21] Where lying and pain lack this valence, as they sometimes or even often do, it is because they occupy a context defective by morality's own lights, or again because the cases in question are operating as variations that cannot be understood except by reference to a paradigm that carries the privileged valence.
First, it seems to fail to appreciate the full effect of a
defeasibly structured accommodation of plural values.
Bonevac claims that a defender of supervenience can invoke the plausibility of "faint-hearted conditionals" or "principles of
defeasibly sufficient reason" to support supervenience claims.
So it is indeed possible to represent lemmas in Default Logic, not as facts (as required by cumulativity) but rather as defaults, which appears more natural anyway, since it highlights the nature of a lemma as having been proven
defeasibly and thus as being open to disputation.
One comes away from these discussions feeling both that Swanton's own insights have been trapped in her efforts to unify so many disparate phenomena, and, more significantly, that one is likely to attain a deeper account of freedom (along with important connections among apparently diverse phenomena) by assuming (
defeasibly) that normative notions of freedom are fundamentally distinct from nonnormative conceptions, however they may be related.
As a result, when we encounter new beliefs that are formed in these ways, we can
defeasibly discredit them even before investigating their truth.
When such standards are satisfied, that will then suffice, other things being equal, (
defeasibly) to justify the claim that the content in question is true.
14) Haack acknowledges that there are many versions of foundationalism, including weak foundationalism which holds that basic beliefs are justified merely prima facie but
defeasibly, to some degree but not completely, by something other than a belief" (p.
According to weak moral foundationalism, an adequate understanding of P renders S
defeasibly justified in believing P.