Well, in that case the intuitive answer would be that the Foundationalists have successfully argued themselves into a spectacularly convincing corner, and meanwhile I'll just be over here using all this "unverifiable" "knowledge" to figure out how to deal with the "real" "world".
And in any case, if you're invoking an Evil Demon you're lost regardless, it's the epistemologic equivalent of "but what if all your arguments are actually wrong and you just can't see it", to which the answer would be "In that case I am quite hopelessly lost but it doesn't look that way to me, and what more do you expect me to say?"
I suppose an argument could be made that "if such a thing as evolution exists it seems implausible for it to create a brain that expends an awful lot of food intake on being irrepairably wrong about the things it knows, and if not even evolution exists our view of the cosmos is so lost as to be irrepairable regardless".
Sometimes I wonder if philosophy should be taught in a largely noun-free environment. (Points for correct answers, points deducted for Noun Usage?) Get people's minds off the what, and on the how and why. Obsession with describing states will be the death of philosophy...
Firstly, you're getting mixed up. The Foundationalist side are trying to downplay the Evil Demon Argument as much as possible whilst the Coherentist side claims it refutes Foundationalism as it means nothing can be known.
Both sides plus myself plus practically everybody agrees that just because intuition states X doesn't mean X is true. So how can you invoke it with any plausibility in a debate?
IF evolution works as suspected, there are still other ways that humans could survive other than correlation of beliefs with reality depending on how everything else works.
I have naturally read the material here, but am still not sure how to act on two questions.
1: I've been arguing out the question of Foundationalism v.s Coherentism v.s other similiarly basic methods of justifying knowledge (e.g. infinitism, pragmatism). The discussion left off with two problems for Foundationalism.
a: The Evil Demon argument, particularly the problem of memory. When following any piece of reason, an Evil Demon could theoretically fool my reason into thinking that it had reasoned correctly when it hadn't, or fool my memory into thinking I'd reasoned properly before with reasoning I'd never done. Since a Foundationalist either is a weak Foundationalist (and runs into severe problems) or must discard all but self-evident and incorrigible assumptions (of which memory is not one), I'm stuffed.
(Then again, it has been argued, if a Coherentist were decieved by an evil demon they could be decieved into thinking data coheres when it doesn't. Since their belief rests upon the assumption that their beliefs cohere, should they not discard if they can't know if it coheres or not? The seems to cohere formulation has it's own problem)
b: Even if that's discarded, there is still the problem of how Strong Foundationalist beliefs are justified within a Strong Foundationalist system. Strong Foundationalism is neither self-evident nor incorrigible, after all.
I know myself well enough to know I have an unusually strong (even for a non-rationalist) irrational emotive bias in favour of Foundationalism, and even I begin to suspect I've lost the argument (though some people arguing on my side would disagree). Just to confirm, though- have I lost? What should I do now, either way?
2: What to say on the question of skepticism (on which so far I've technically said nothing)? If I remember correctly Elizier has spoken of philosophy as how to act in the world, but I'm arguing with somebody who maintains as an axiom that the purpose of Philosophy is to find truth, whether useful or useless, in whatever area is under discussion.
3: Finally, how do I speak intelligently on the Contextualist v.s Invariantist problem? I can see in basic that it is an empirical problem and therefore not part of abstract philosophy, but that isn't the same thing as having an answer. It would be good to know where to look up enough neuroscience to at least make an intelligent contribution to the discussion.