Here were some of Jimmy Stephens thoughts about Pallmann’s views:

First, let’s grant that reasoning is never justificatory. Acts of reason only occasion things that lend justification and those acts never themselves lend justification. Even if that were the case, successfully reasoning depends on knowledge about the act.

For example, one would need to know how to reason. One would need to know some criterion of rationality that differentiates successful from unsuccessful reasoning. One would need to recognize reasoning from non-reasoning. One would need to know about onself that they possess cognitive faculties, and that they are not systemmically undermined from knowledge on the topic of reasoning.

If one does not know those things, one could not even begin to reason that acts of reason are procedural, not justificatory. It is these beliefs which are loosely in mind when someone asks, “How do you know your reasoning is valid?”

Second, as it turns out, Paulman is manifestly confused. Paulman makes use of arguments, formal or informal, on a regular basis. He behaves and speaks of these arguments as justificatory. That is, he believes that arguments can justify beliefs.

However, arguments can only lend justification for a belief, such as the conclusion, insofar as someone follows a sound argument, which is an act of reasoning. In other words, all arguments are patterns and forms which act like catalysts with our acts of reasoning about them to produce justification. Arguments are not and do not provide justification on their own. They do so in tandem with reasoning.

So perhaps Paulman wants to say that reasoning, by itself, is never justificatory. But it doesn’t follow that reasoning is not justificatory at all, just that it requires items like arguments.

Paulman is like someone who says that someone can’t walk across a gap at all, when actually, all that’s needed is to walk on a bridge.

at 1230, one of Paulman’s key errors is falsely charging the questioner with (keyword) “assuming” reliabilism (/externalism) because the questioner is asking what justifies belief in the reliability of reason.

This is faulty in a few ways.

First, he confuses reliabilism with a reliability condition. Reliabilism takes reliability, the epistemic concept, to be a sufficient condition of knowledge or, barring that, at least an adequate model.

Keywords! sufficient

adequate

That is not what the questioner has taken for granted.

Rather, the question about reason treats reliability as a necessary condition of justification, and so a component but not (necessarily) the whole of an adequate theory of knowledge.

Second and notwithstanding, he confuses providing a taxonomy for a view with provision of a substantive objection.

Imagine that an atheist disagreed with whatever Paulman employs as evidence of Christianity. The nature of the disagreement is that Paulman by trying to evidence Christianity is thinking like a Christian, and so begs the question against atheism.

That’s name-calling, not substantive rebuttal.

Finally – and this is the real substance of Paulman’s daiper wetting – he goes on to elucidate his evidentialism the whole while assuming that possession of evidence does not require knowledge that the processes involved in the procurement of that evidence are reliable.

However, Paulman seems readily aware that evidence isn’t some person-independent datum floating in the ether. I do not have evidence for beliefs I have 10 years in the future right now.

I do not have the same sensory evidence for their correlate beliefs that I had 10 years ago.

A sound argument Paulman has never heard of does not evidence his belief in the conclusion in any relevant way.

So there are many temporal, causal processes that must align in the right way to procur the relevant data as evidence for a given belief.

In this way, Paulman has shot himself in the foot twice. Once, because we have an argument to think evidence is very much contingent on whether or not our belief that the processes responsible for procuring the data are reliable to produce evidence is true! So on his internalism, his internalism is false.

Twice, because we didn’t need to capitulate to externalism, much less reliabilism, to make this objection.