Foundationalism and Games

I understood (I think) most of what Elgin was saying about fundamentalism, but I had an issue with one of her points. She describes that we need to prevent infinite regress in our claims by not letting them extrapolate out too far, but I think in doing so, we're still back where we started with perfect procedural epistemology. It's true that at some point, which is also hard to determine, a truth cannot be used as evidence to justify claims that go on and on. However, determining where these end and which are justified seems so vague that I don't know where we would be able to start building. Making claims based on evidence isn't a terrible way to go about collecting truth, but that leads more toward imperfect epistemology. If we were able to determine the truth that humans have canine teeth, we could infer a few things. We could say that our teeth evolutionarily are like other animals that ate meat, so therefore, humans can also eat meat. For the most part, this is the case. But we can also use that evidence to say that humans have canine teeth, but since we also have molars, our canine teeth have evolved to simply tear at plant material. Some vegan extremists might like this idea, but evolution points to the first claim. However, unless examples are constructed to have an obvious answer, determining which claims are true and which aren't seems like an impossible task.

Although I liked the analogy of the game that Elgin uses throughout the beginning of the 3rd chapter, I was disheartened by one part of the analogy. Elgin describes one of the aspects of the game as playing to determine who is the better player of the game, not who is the better person. This is, of course, the reason we decide that "may the better person win" before we play a game, with the hope that the one with the most skill and abilities comes out on top. However, this isn't always the case, and sometimes we get a ball that takes a bad hop or keep getting lousy hands. If this is the case, we hope winners and losers will come out in the wash, but saying this seems to be a problem with the procedure if applied to truth. Elgin explained in chapter 2 that it is often the one who has the most convincing argument who wins, not the one who is defending the actual truth. In this case, the analogy seems to contradict her earlier statement (although it is possible that the analogy just works in most cases.)