Justification

Scientific claims can be assessed epistemically in either of two ways: according to scientific standards, or by means of philosophical arguments such as the no-miracle argument in favor of scientific realism. This paper investigates the basis of this duality of epistemic assessments. It is claimed that the duality rests on two different notions of epistemic justification that are well-known from the debate on internalism and externalism in general epistemology: a deontological and an alethic notion. By discussing the conditions for the (...) scientific acceptability of empirical results, it is argued that intrascientific justification employs the deontological notion. Philosophical disputes such as those on scientific realism can by contrast be shown to rest on the alethic notion. The implications of these findings both for the nature of the respective epistemic projects and for their interrelation are explored. (shrink)

Assume that epistemic justification has a cognitive function and that a belief's being justified is not just its being caused by the appropriate information (for this property of the belief may be cognitively impenetrable). What is the function of epistemic justification? it cannot be to actualize knowledge-The belief's being caused by appropriate information alone does that! so what is its function? I suggest it is to cause us to believe and/or take action.

A number of philosophers have recently claimed that unjustified beliefs can be defeaters. However these claims have been made in passing, occurring in the context of defenses of other theses. As a result, the claim that unjustified beliefs can be defeaters has been neither vigorously defended nor thoroughly explained. This paper fills that gap. It begins by identifying problems with the two most in-depth accounts of the possibility of unjustified defeaters due to Bergmann and Pryor. It then offers a revised (...) version of Pryor’s account. On this proposal, an unjustified belief can be a defeater if it is rational, all things considered. If a belief is rational, all things considered, it can require one to abandon other beliefs with which it conflicts—even if it is unjustified. Finally, this paper shows that the proposed account of unjustified defeaters is one that can and should be embraced by leading accounts of justified belief as diverse as reliabilism and evidentialism. (shrink)

Among other things, Odegard urged that a person can be completely justified in believing a false proposition because the truth condition can be shown to be satisfied independently of the satisfaction of the evidence condition for human knowledge. I respond to his argument and other arguments attacking the arguments I previously offered for the view that a person cannot be completely justified in believing a false proposition.

This book is a massive study of epistemology and its connections with cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and philosophy of science. Its aim is to redirect the field of epistemology, which “should be a multidisciplinary affair, not the province of pure, a priori philosophy.”.

Epistemic Justification We often believe what we are told by our parents, friends, doctors, and news reporters. We often believe what we see, taste, and smell. We hold beliefs about the past, the present, and the future. Do we have a right to hold any of these beliefs? Are any supported by evidence? Should we … Continue reading Justification, Epistemic →.

My dissertation develops and defends a theory of how experience justifies perceptual beliefs. First, I situate the opposition, the coherentists, in the contemporary debate, and I do this partly by reference to their readings of Kant. According to the coherentists, perceptual beliefs can be justified only by other beliefs. They consider Kant as a predecessor who, in one way or another, did not quite succeed in freeing himself from the notion that perceptual beliefs are justified by our experience of the (...) world. I argue that Kant's refusal to "free" himself from this notion is legitimate, and that we ought to return to Kant's work to diagnose and overcome the excesses of coherentism. I try to make the Kantian view more convincing by bringing out a central problem with coherentism. Taking my bearings from Wittgenstein's later philosophy, I argue that the coherentist thesis is problematic, since it either leads to a troubling regress or fails to preserve the commonsense intuition that perceptual beliefs are justified by our experience of the world. I argue that the Kantian view can be saved from the most common coherentist criticisms, and that it is worth saving precisely because it avoids the regress while preserving the aforementioned intuition. (shrink)

A significant and interesting part of the post-Gettier literature regarding the analysis of propositional knowledge is the attempt to supplement the traditional tripartite analysis by employing a fourth condition regarding the defeasibility of evidence and thus to preclude the counterexamples displayed in Gettier’s original article. My aim in this paper is to critically examine the sort of externalism that accompanies the most promising of the proposed fourth conditions, due to Pollock, in order to offer some fresh insights on this old (...) epistemological issue. I argue that Pollock’s paradigmatic treatment of the matter gives rise to a critical problem with regard to the exact role of the fourth condition and its relation with the onto-semantic or alethic condition of propositional knowledge, to wit, truth. In the light of this discussion, I draw certain conclusions about epistemic externalism and point out some of its theoretical shortcomings. (shrink)

This dissertation is an investigation into the nature of justification and rational belief. In Chapter I, four theories of the justification of belief are presented and criticized. These theories--classical foundationalism, modest foundationalism, coherentism, and the causal theory--are found to be similar in a certain respect. They each embody or are consistent with a certain conception of rationality, one in which beliefs are rational just in case they are backed by adequate justifications, and in which adequate justifications are thought to be (...) mental entities composed of beliefs and inferences. It is argued that this conception of rationality and justification does not naturally generate an account of the social functions of justifications, of their role as the rational means for securing intrasubjective agreement. Motivated by this shortcoming, a fifth theory of justification, contextualism, is introduced. By conceiving of justifications as arguments--as structured sets of statements which one person offers to another--the contextualist proposes to give a theory of the adequacy of justification which will account for the social functions of justifications. In Chapter II, a contextual theory of justification is formulated. This theory consists, in part, of a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the adequacy of justifications. According to the theory, a justification's adequacy is relative to the context in which it is given. And on this view, a particular justification is adequate relative to a certain context just in case it is adequate to fulfill two social goals: to convince the people to whom it is given that the person giving it is justified in accepting its conclusion and to convince them that they would be justified in accepting the conclusion. In Chapter III, the final chapter, a contextual theory of rational belief is developed and defended against the charge that its relativism renders rationality arbitrary. In this chapter, the conditions under which people are justified in believing particular statements are formulated. It is argued that all justified, rational beliefs rest ultimately on unjustified, arational ones. And a general theory of the nature of arational belief is offered. (shrink)

The claim that the epistemic status of a belief corresponds to the reliability of the process by which it was formed is developed and defended. In the course of this, a variety of conceptual and methodological matters are addressed. Notably, the role of the sciences, particularly experimental psychology and cognitive science, in epistemology is explored, and the claim that factual disciplines can have no bearing upon a normative project is considered and rejected. Also, the suggestion that psychology should entirely replace (...) epistemology is considered and rejected. Although an internalist element is present in our concept of justification, it is argued that this should be dropped; it does not fit well with the general character of epistemic justification, it is linked with an unacceptable notion of justification, and empirical data reveal that placing internalist constraints on justification would draw the justified/unjustified line in a place at odds with the general character of Internalism. A variety of externalist forms of Reliabilism are examined, and Process Reliabilism is found to be the leading candidate. A position of this sort is developed, using recent work from cognitive science in working out an account of belief-forming, -maintaining, and -revising processes. Serious difficulties with standard approaches to determining reliability are pointed out, and novel approaches are explored. Finally, this theory is defended against traditional anti-reliabilist arguments and applied to traditionally difficult cases. It is shown that the usual arguments have no force against this formulation, and that visual, deductive, inferential, and mathematical beliefs can be handled quite well. (shrink)

In this essay we argue that reasoning can sometimes generate epistemic justification, rather than merely transmitting justification that the subject already possesses to new beliefs. We also suggest a way to account for it in terms of the relationship between epistemic normative requirements, justification and cognitive capacities.

According to Roderick Chisholm, every proposition one is justified in believing is justified, at least in part, by some relation that it bears to propositions which are epistemologically privileged. There are two categories of such "basic" of self-justifying propositions--the self-presenting and the directly evident. Justification is a matter of degree, and Chisholm establishes a five-fold ranking of epistemic privilege in terms of which the two concepts of the self-presenting and the directly evident are defined and in terms of which the (...) "reconstruction" of belief can proceed. ;In this study I first attempt to clarify the five terms of epistemic appraisal which define degrees of justification and to relate them first to probability then, failing in that, to Shackle's potential surprise. I suggest there that the key concept of being evident is suspect. Next we turn to the concept of the self-presenting, where we find that few of the states Chisholm takes to be self-presenting satisfy the definition he provides. When we turn to the concept of being directly evident, we find that if what is directly evident is what is entailed by the self-presenting, the directly evident is not a suitable terminus for chains of justification, as Chisholm maintains. ;The only hint of an argument Chisholm provides for thinking that privileged propositions are necessary for being justified is a version of the regress argument. Here we try to show that the regress argument is defective, an instance of the fallacy of false dilemma. ;Since Chisholm suggests that no belief would be justified if there were no privileged propositions, the failure of his enterprise would have as consequence a radical skepticism. If the threat posed by skeptical arguments were defused, the Chisholmian enterprise would seem to lack a point. If we look at foundationalism as a response to skeptical arguments , then if we can provide a more satisfactory response to skeptical arguments we have some reason for refusing to embrace foundationalism. ;If we distinguish between local and global justification, where, roughly, this is analagous to part/whole justification, and distinguish between justification of coming to believe and of continuing to believe, we can formulate a plausible set of criteria of being justified which does not require privileged propositions. Passages from Chisholm himself suggest such a theory. ;In brief, the suggestion is that A person is justified in coming to accept a proposition p at t if that person's set of prior beliefs at t confirms p to a degree high enough to satisfy his degree of caution. A person is justified in continuing to accept a proposition p at t if nothing he believes at t tends to disconfirm p. A person is justified in continuing to accept at t the non-skeptical second order belief , that most of the propositions he believes are true, if nothing he believes at t tends to disconfirm . The third is a proposal for circumventing global skepticism. A global skeptic might insist that his skeptical hypothesis, e.g., of a malign demon, is incompatible with , and unless one can disprove his hypothesis, one is not justified in continuing to accept . This I reject. ;If, as I hope, we have a satisfactory response to the challenge of skeptical arguments and a plausible set of criteria of being justified, motivation for pursuing foundationalism evaporates. (shrink)

The distinction between justifications and excuses is a familiar one to most of us who work either in moral philosophy or legal philosophy. But exactly how it should be understood is a matter of considerable disagreement. My aim in this paper is, first, to sort out the differences and try to figure out what underlying disagreements account for them. I give particular attention to the following question: Does a person who acts on a reasonable but mistaken belief have a justification, (...) or only an excuse? One disagreement I highlight concerns the extent to which justification is primarily about agents rather than about actions. Those who think, as I do, of “His action, X, was justified” as “He was justified in doing X” are far more likely to allow that justification requires reasonable belief and does not require truth, than are those who think of “His action, X, was justified” as “Although actions of this type usually are prohibited, X is in these circumstances in fact permissible.” In addition to sorting out the differences and tracing them to some underlying disagreements, I defend the reasonable belief view of justification against some objections, and argue that, whether or not we continue to use the term “justified” in a way that does not require truth, we need the concept. Contrary to the claims of some who reject the reasonable belief view of justification, justification thus understood does not reduce to excuse. (shrink)

The target of much work in recent epistemology is the specification, in terms of non-normative properties, of the nature of epistemic norms like justification. I'll call this the target-problem of epistemology. The target-problem is the problem of giving normative epistemic properties purely descriptive, or naturalistic, accounts. The target-problem itself gives rise to a deeper problem and one I think needs to be answered prior to any solution to the target-problem: What methods are appropriate in constructing solutions to the target-problem? I'll (...) call this the meta-problem of epistemology. A solution to the meta-problem requires us to decide what methodology is best-suited to solve the target-problem. I will elaborate one negative and one positive answer to this meta-problem. ;First, a negative answer. The method of reflective equilibrium looms large in epistemology much as it does in ethical theory. Put simply, this approach tells us that the nature of epistemic justification is to be specified by stating, in purely non-normative terms, a set of general principles that accord with our common intuitive classifications of individual cases of justified and unjustified belief. I argue, however, that this method underdetermines a choice between the main theories of justification being defended in the literature today. That is, our shared epistemological intuitions do not justify one theory of justification over its contemporary rivals. Moreover, I consider two ways to try to overcome this underdetermination problem and I show that neither is effective. ;Second, a positive answer. I propose and elaborate a pragmatic-functionalist methodology for epistemology. Put simply, this approach tells us that the nature of epistemic justification is to be specified by picking out that property or set of properties that best promotes our cognitive goals . We want to find out which non-normative property does what epistemic justification does, which one plays the justification-role. When we find it, we will have found epistemic justification, we will have found what makes our justified beliefs justified. This approach is pragmatic because it gives considerable weight to what cognitive aims are being satisfied by epistemically justified beliefs. The approach is functionalist because it tells us that epistemic justification is identified by its causal role. Just to show that the pragmatic methodology gets results, I show that on certain empirical assumptions it will settle on a reliabilist account of epistemic justification. (shrink)

Review of Littlejohn, "Justification and the Truth Connection".

One attractive feature of process reliabilism is its reductive potential: it promises to explain justification in entirely non-epistemic terms. In this paper, I argue that the phenomenon of epistemic defeat poses a serious challenge for process reliabilism’s reductive ambitions. The standard process reliabilist analysis of defeat is the ‘Alternative Reliable Process Account’ (ARP). According to ARP, whether S’s belief is defeated depends on whether S has certain reliable processes available to her which, if they had been used, would have resulted (...) in S not holding the belief in question. Unfortunately, ARP proves untenable. I show, by way of counterexample, that ARP fails to articulate either necessary or sufficient conditions on defeat. Process reliabilists must either provide an alternative reductive account of defeat or renounce their reductive aspirations. (shrink)

What distinguishes Reidian externalism from other versions of epistemic externalism about justification is its proper functionalism and its commonsensism, both of which are inspired by the 18th century Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid. Its proper functionalism is a particular analysis of justification; its commonsensism is a certain thesis about what we are noninferentially justified in believing.