Alvin Plantinga needs to read some Wittgenstein, as well as Urban, Suber, Boyle, Bartlett, Kordig, and Peels.
1) Treating reason as foundational is necessary in order to argue against it.
2) Belief in God is not as logically basic as the assumptions used to get out of bed in the morning, i.e. there is no parity, God needs reason logically, but not vice versa.
3) Using the assumptions necessary to analyze the issue are foundationalism in action.
4) The notions of epistemic rights, duties, "allowing", and "permitting" are obscure and question-begging.
5) Rights and duties about belief is an atheistic morality used to specify legitimacy of belief in God without having to argue for it.
6) Logically basic beliefs are not self-evident, but they are incorrigible.
7) Who is even talking about self-evidence in the last 20 years anyway? Much less vamping it as some kind of defense of a view. Plantinga's the only person I've ever heard of that talks about that.
8) Logically basic standards cannot be affirmed, denied, doubted, entertained, etc. without assuming them in the process. That's both the sense in which they are basic, and that's why they're basic.
9) The reasons why they are basic and invincible is precisely that set of reasons themselves as standards of all possible thought.
10) The fact that they are already logically basic exempts them from having to themselves be logically justified, precisely because they are necessarily basic both to themselves and any attempt to question them.
11) In fact, any attempt to criticize or falsify them or their basic status is itself the using of them as basic.
12) It's the invisible gardener problem in reverse. No matter what is appealed to, the same system must be used to try to refute that system itself, even in the process of denying that system by means of that same system.
13) At some point the question can no longer be evaded: how does Plantinga's own argumentation itself differ from foundationalism, if he apes it all the way to the bank in spite of his rejection of it?
14) Just how would intellectual hypocrisy be different from what he himself is doing?
15) Plantinga's own attempted refutation assumes my position, but he doesn't mention that analysis itself or its own assumptions---which are treated as incorrigible, in order to try to refute the incorrigibility of foundationalism.
16) No there are not always *other*---in the anti-foundationalist sense of always other different as-yet-unmentioned---beliefs for the logically basic system of reason itself.
17) The statements that make up general reason are foundational in the sense that they are logically basic to all else, certainly not always different as-yet-unmentioned claims.
18) The fact that they themselves do not need further "more basic" beliefs to justify them is due to how they are defined in the first place---as basic. To mark them off as logically basic for any thought whatsoever, thereby excludes them from the need for logically more-basic justification of themselves. In fact, to call them out about not being justified themselves by further propositional sources of logically-deeper propositions contradicts their already up-front-claimed status as basic in the first place, as well as assumes them as the sole instrument of finding fault with them.
19) Plantinga's, Bonjour's or anyone else's criticism of this form of foundationalism assumes that same foundationalism which it denies or argues against, in that very same process of argumentation or denial. Notice that Plantinga's argument against foundationalism assumes the same analytic system I'm talking about---but (surprise, surprise) doesn't talk about it.
20) So the self-referential burden is on Plantinga and company to wake up to what they are both assuming and doing, in arguing against rationalistic foundationalism as I have described it.
21) And the fact that anti-foundationalist don't talk about their own assumptions and their own analysis itself tells me they either have too much credentialist and publishing skin in the game already to admit the lapse, or else really can't think in a thoroughgoing self-aware non-self-exempting way. Any one or combination of the above is a sad state of affairs.
22) Quine and company are just as oblivious and/or dishonest, of course, as I've demonstrated in the essay "Denaturing Quine's Naturalized Epistemology".
23) But the pretended muckrakers of theistic philosophy are actually themselves insulated from the very possibility of any accurate mapping of how people outside of crumbling academia actually think to what they address in their books and lectures. It's a scam---as well as an intellectual scandal.
