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One thing all forms of foundationalism have in common is that they hold that a belief can be justified noninferenrially-i.e., that its justification need not depend on its being inferred from some other justified (or unjustified) belief. In some recent publications, Peter Klein argues that in virtue of having this feature, all forms of foundationalism are infected with an unacceptable arbitrariness that makes it irrational to be a practicing foundationalist. In this paper, I will explain why his objections to foundationalism fail.

Recently O'Grady aigued that Quine's “Two Dogmas” misses its mark when Carnap's use of the analyticity distinction is understood in the light of his deflationism. While in substantial agreement with the stress on Camap's deflationism, I argue that O'Grady is not sufficiently sensitive to the difference between using the analyticity distinction to support deflationism, and taking a deflationary attitude towards the distinction itself; the latter being much more controversial. Being sensitive to this difference, and viewing Quine as having reason to insist on a non-arbitrary analyticity distinction, we see that “Two Dogmas” makes direct contact with Carnap's deflationism. We must look beyond “Two Dogmas” to Quine's other critiques of analyticity to understand why the arbitrariness of the distinction threatens to undermine or overextend Carnap's deflationism, collapsing it into a view much like Quine's. Quine is then seen to achieve many of Carnap's ends, with the important exception of deflationism.

Reliabilism holds that knowledge is true belief reliably caused. Reliabilists should say something about individuating processes; critics deny that the right degree of generality can be specified without arbitrariness. It is argued that this criticism applies as well to processes mentioned in scientific explanations. The gratuitous puzzles created thereby show that the “generality problem” is illusory.

Eli Hirsch's attempt to reconstruct my "fundamental argument for the Denial" is a serious and careful piece of work. And yet it seems to me to get my views on ontology and language almost entirely wrong. How can this be? I think the explanation must in the end be philosophical: Hirsch and I have such different ideas about ontology and language that it is very hard for him to understand me. And, I would add, it is very hard for me to understand him. Let me assure any reader who detects a note of exasperation in what follows that this exasperation is directed at myself and my apparent inability to make my views clear to a philosopher I respect. I want to consider the numbered propositions that make up Hirsch's attempt to reconstruct my argument-especially the first three. These misrepresent my views, and the misrepresentation is not a simple one: there is not just one thing to get straightened out. There is a well-known joke whose punch line goes more or less as follows: "You have the story wrong. It isn't Moskovitz, it's Boskovitz; and it isn't timber, it's furs; and it isn't 20,000 rubles, it's 60,000 rubles; and he didn't make it, he lost it." In a similar vein, I want to say that Hirsch has the story wrong: it isn't existence, it's composition; and it isn't "concept of," it's "general theory about when it occurs"; and it isn't people engaged in the ordinary business of life, it's philosophers; and it isn't arbitrariness, it's inconsistency with the "ten constraints"-plus incapacity to withstand dialectical pressure. I will proceed to elaborate on these statements. (i) I employ the same concept of existence as most analytical philosophers: Quine's. That is, I take 'Fs exist' to be equivalent to 'the number of Fs is 1 or more'. And, like all Quineans, I believe this to be the ordinary concept of existence, the one employed in science and pure mathematics and everyday life; in short I believe this to be the concept of existence. In my view, those who say that tables and stars and apples exist and I, who deny the existence of these things, are employing exactly the same concept of existence-unless they happen to be Meinongians or something of that sort. We simply disagree about what exists. We disagree about what exists because

In this paper I argue that the rigidity of proper names can be explained by appealing to a more fundamental semantic feature which I refer to as their arbitrariness. I assume and do not try to show that proper names are rigid designators. My purpose, rather, is to establish a connection between their arbitrariness and rigidity which, even though contingent, shows that rigidity is a far less accidental feature of names than it might otherwise appear. Sections I and II of the paper are brief discussions of the notions of arbitrariness and rigidity respectively. In section III I begin by saying why it seems that these two features of names must be connected, and then proceed to identify the link between them by means of a fairly detailed argument. My final section, IV, is a response to the objection that my argument does not do justice to the important distinction between a name and a use of a name to denote a particular thing. I would like to stress at the outset that this paper does not aim to convert those who deny that proper names are rigid designators, or to answer their objections to this thesis. In my view these objections are answerable, but that is another topic. It is also worth emphasizing that the paper operates within the framework of the causal approach to name reference. Although my arguments for the arbitrariness of proper names go against many versions of descriptivism, there are no doubt some sophisticated versions of descriptivism which escape them. The diehard descriptivist will not accept my explanation of rigidity, but I hope that he will view it as a contribution towards the detailed articulation of the only significant rival to his approach. There is one further preliminary issue I would like to address: Isn't it just obvious to most people who accept the causal approach and who think that proper names are rigid designators that their rigidity is due to their arbitrariness? My answer is that it is prefectly natural to think this, and I claim no originality for the thought. But thinking a thought is one