For the world is apparently imperfect, containing many inbuilt occasions of pain and suffering, and one cannot legitimately infer a greater perfection in the cause than is observed in the effect.
It should further be noted that the Black Sea, to which, as already mentioned, Pericles led a flamboyant expedition in the Great Gap period, was an area of colonial Megarian settlement; there too one can legitimately infer an Athenian desire to pressure Megara, albeit indirectly.
How can we legitimately infer anything about remote parts of the universe, much less the universe as a whole?
If all justification were inferential then for someone S to be justified in believing some proposition P, S must be in a position to legitimately infer it from some other proposition E1.
It is true, for example, in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings that Gollum hates the sun, from which we can legitimately infer that in the story there exists something that hates the sun.
Let us say that one has inferential or nonfoundational knowledge that p when one's knowledge that p depends on one's knowledge of some other proposition(s) from which one can legitimately infer p; and one has foundational or noninferential knowledge that p when one's knowledge that p does not depend on any other knowledge one has in this way.
A better explanation of the Mohists' discussion of mou is that they are addressing the nontrivial question of whether, for instance, their opponents can legitimately infer, from "robbers are people," that "killing robbers is killing people," and thus that capital punishment is murder.
Roughly, one has nonfoundational or inferential knowledge that p when one's knowledge that p depends on one's knowledge of some other proposition(s) from which one can legitimately infer p; and one has foundational or noninfrential knowledge that p when one's knowledge that p does not depend on any other knowledge one has.
While most share the intuition that we would need additional information in order to legitimately infer truths about the length of a person's life from knowledge of palm lines, all that really shows is that we wouldn't view the inference in question as legitimate in the first place.
Let us say that one has an inferentially justified belief that p when one's belief that p depends for its justification on justified belief in some other proposition(s) from which one can legitimately infer p; and one has a foundationally or noninferentially justified belief that p when one's belief that p is justified but does not depend on any other beliefs for its justification.
