The aim of this paper is to offer an account of epistemic justification suitable for the context of theory pursuit, that is, for the context in which new scientific ideas, possibly incompatible with the already established theories, emerge and are pursued by scientists. We will frame our account paradigmatically on the basis of one of the influential systems of epistemic justification: Laurence Bonjour’s coherence theory of justification. The idea underlying our approach is to develop a (...) set of criteria which indicate that the pursued system is promising of contributing to the epistemic goal of robustness of scientific knowledge and of developing into a candidate for acceptance. In order to realize this we will (a) adjust the scope of Bonjour’s standards—consistency, inferential density, and explanatory power, and (b) complement them by the requirement of a programmatic character. In this way we allow for the evaluation of the “potential coherence” of the given epistemic system. (shrink)

This book explores the concept of epistemic justification and our understanding of the problem of skepticism. Providing critical examination of key responses to the skeptical challenge, Hamid Vahid presents a theory which is shown to work alongside the internalism/externalism issue and the thesis of semantic externalism, with a deontological conception of justification at its core.

In this chapter, I argue for the thesis that phenomenal consciousness is the basis of epistemic justification. More precisely, I argue for the thesis of phenomenal mentalism, according to which epistemic facts about which doxastic attitudes one has justification to hold are determined by non-epistemic facts about one’s phenomenally individuated mental states. I begin by providing intuitive motivations for phenomenal mentalism and then proceed to sketch a more theoretical line of argument according to which phenomenal (...) mentalism provides the best explanation of the independently motivated thesis of access internalism. The result is a theory of epistemic justification that brings intuition and theory into reflective equilibrium. (shrink)

Introduction As the title indicates, the chief focus of this book is epistemic justification. But just what is epistemic justification and what is its place ...

Book Information Epistemic Justification. By Richard Swinburne. Clarendon Press. Oxford. 2001. Pp. vi + 262. Hardback, US$55.00.

Evidentialism is a popular theory of epistemic justification, yet, as early proponents of the theory Earl Conee and Richard Feldman admit, there are many elements that must be developed before Evidentialism can provide a full account of epistemic justification, or well-founded belief. It is the aim of this book to provide the details that are lacking; here McCain moves past Evidentialism as a mere schema by putting forward and defending a full-fledged theory of epistemic (...) class='Hi'>justification. In this book McCain offers novel approaches to several elements of well-founded belief. Key among these are an original account of what it takes to have information as evidence, an account of epistemic support in terms of explanation, and a causal account of the basing relation that is far superior to previous accounts. The result is a fully developed Evidentialist account of well-founded belief. (shrink)

This book proposes an original theory of epistemic justification that offers a new way to relate justification to the epistemic goal of truth-conducive belief.

Richard Swinburne offers an original treatment of a question at the heart of epistemology: what makes a belief rational, or justified in holding? He maps the rival accounts of philosophers on epistemic justification ("internalist" and "externalist"), arguing that they are really accounts of different concepts. He distinguishes between synchronic justification (justification at a time) and diachronic justification (synchronic justification resulting from adequate investigation)--both internalist and externalist. He also argues that most kinds of justification (...) are worth having because they are indicative of truth; however, it is only justification of internalist kinds that can guide a believer's actions. Swinburne goes on to show the usefulness of the probability calculus in elucidating how empirical evidence makes beliefs probably true. (shrink)

The article begins by developing a distinction between two sorts of epistemic justification--Namely, A proposition's being justified and a person's being justified in accepting a proposition. It concludes that the latter sort of justification is what is crucial for knowing. The article also makes various observations about the alleged foundation of knowledge and about chisholm's rules of evidence.

...In what follows I lay out Husserl's theory of epistemic justification as he sketches it in Part IV of 'Ideas 1', especially in the section he appropriately titles the "Phenomenology of Reason," understood here to present a phenomenological analysis of how reason is given, namely, how reason manifests itself in conscious life. My claim is that Husserl's "phenomenology of reason," by clarifying the ways in which the "legitimizations of reason" take place can be ultimately understood as a theory (...) of epistemic justification. The theory of epistemic justification discused here is a phenomenological account of the process whereby the thinking subject comes to regards particular beliefs as true and can give reasons to support this claim. (shrink)

Can we understand epistemic justification in terms of epistemic rights? In this paper, we consider two arguments for the claim that we cannot and in doing so, we provide two arguments for the claim that we can. First, if, as many think, William James is right that the epistemic aim is to believe all true propositions and not to believe any false propositions, then there are likely to be situations in which believing (or disbelieving) a proposition (...) serves one of these goals, whereas suspending judgement serves the other, equally important goal. Second, it is in principle always possible to have different epistemic standards for evaluating the evidence for the proposition in question, so that one can have a right to believe (or disbelieve) that proposition and a right to suspend judgement on it. Whereas the first consideration counts in favour of the idea that believing justifiedly is at least sometimes a matter of having an epistemic right, the latter consideration favours the view that believing justifiedly is always a matter of having an epistemic right. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to raise a new objection to externalist process reliabilism about epistemic justification. The objection is that epistemic justification is intensional—it does not permit the substitution of co-referring expressions—and reliabilism cannot accommodate that.

In this essay I argue that in order to secure some of his system’s key commitments, Fichte employs argumentation essentially patterned after the technique of practical postulation in Kant. This is a mode of reasoning that mobilizes a distinctly Kantian notion of nonepistemic justification, which itself is premised upon a broadly Kantian conception of the nature of reason. Succinctly stated, such argumentation proceeds essentially as follows. (1) By the basic nature and operations of rationality, every rational being is, as (...) such, committed to E as an ultimate end (final purpose, highest goal). (2) E can be understood as actually attainable only if descriptive proposition P is assented to. (3) We cannot, in principle, possess genuine evidence for or against P; therefore, (4) while we do not have (and never could have) good epistemic grounds for assenting to P, we do have (and always will have) perfectly sufficient rational grounds for doing so. While this assent has no basis in pertinent evidence, it nonetheless has an unshakeable foundation in the basic operations and requirements of rationality. This is so because this assent (a) sustains a commitment integral to rationality as such, and (b) affirms a proposition that no evidence could ever discredit. I proceed to discuss what I take to be two instances of this sort of argumentation in Fichte: first, The Vocation of Man's unusual argument for belief in the real existence of a world transcendent to human representations, and second, the same work's subsequent depiction of that world as strictly mentalistic (immaterial, intellectual, teleological) in its true constitution. VM portrays both positions as decisive determinants of the overall upshot of the Wissenschaftslehre (WL), and explicitly casts them as articles of “faith” or “belief” (Glaube), grounded in unshakeable ethical conviction, by contrast with items of “knowledge” (Wissen). (shrink)

This paper describes a formal measure of epistemic justification motivated by the dual goal of cognition, which is to increase true beliefs and reduce false beliefs. From this perspective the degree of epistemic justification should not be the conditional probability of the proposition given the evidence, as it is commonly thought. It should be determined instead by the combination of the conditional probability and the prior probability. This is also true of the degree of incremental confirmation, (...) and I argue that any measure of epistemic justification is also a measure of incremental confirmation. However, the degree of epistemic justification must meet an additional condition, and all known measures of incremental confirmation fail to meet it. I describe this additional condition as well as a measure that meets it. The paper then applies the measure to the conjunction fallacy and proposes an explanation of the fallacy. (shrink)

Recent experimental epistemology has devoted increasing attention to folk attributions of epistemic justification. Empirical studies have tested whether lay people ascribe epistemic justification in specific lottery-style vignettes (Friedman and Turri 2014, Turri and Friedman 2015, Ebert et al. 2018) and also to more ordinary beliefs (Nolte et al. 2021). In this paper, I highlight three crucial but hitherto uncritically accepted assumptions of these studies, and I argue that they are untenable. Central to my criticism is the (...) observation that epistemic justification is a philosophical term of art mostly foreign to lay people: as such, it is not suitable for direct empirical testing without being previously introduced. This point reveals a folk conceptual gap between the subject matter of these experimental studies and the conceptual repertoire we can reasonably expect lay people to possess. I elaborate on this worry, and I end on a cautiously optimistic note: after suggesting better strategies to survey folk attributions of epistemic justification, I conclude that the challenge raised by the folk conceptual gap remains difficult but can in principle be addressed. (shrink)

Among epistemologists, it is not uncommon to relate various forms of epistemic luck to the vexed debate between internalists and externalists. But there are many internalism/externalism debates in epistemology, and it is not always clear how these debates relate to each other. In the present paper I investigate the relation between epistemic luck and prominent internalist and externalist accounts of epistemic justification. I argue that the dichotomy between internalist and externalist concepts of justification can be (...) characterized in terms of epistemic luck. Whereas externalist theories of justification are incompatible with veritic luck but not with reflective luck, the converse is true for internalist theories of justification. These results are found to explain and cohere with some recent findings from elsewhere in epistemology, and support a surprising picture of justification, on which internalism and externalism are complementary rather than contradictory positions. (shrink)

Perceptual experience is one of our fundamental sources of epistemic justification—roughly, justification for believing that a proposition is true. The ability of perceptual experience to justify beliefs can nevertheless be questioned. This article focuses on an important challenge that arises from countenancing that perceptual experience is cognitively penetrable. -/- The thesis of cognitive penetrability of perception states that the content of perceptual experience can be influenced by prior or concurrent psychological factors, such as beliefs, fears and desires. (...) Advocates of this thesis could for instance claim that your desire of having a tall daughter might influence your perception, so that she appears to you to be taller than she is. Although cognitive penetrability of perception is a controversial empirical hypothesis, it does not appear implausible. The possibility of its veracity has been adduced to challenge positions that maintain that perceptual experience has inherent justifying power. -/- This article presents some of the most influential positions in contemporary literature about whether cognitive penetration would undermine perceptual justification and why it would or would not do so. -/- Some sections of this article focus on phenomenal conservatism, a popular conception of epistemic justification that more than any other has been targeted with objections that adduce the cognitive penetrability of experience. (shrink)

Among epistemologists, it is not uncommon to relate various forms of epistemic luck to the vexed debate between internalists and externalists. But there are many internalism/externalism debates in epistemology, and it is not always clear how these debates relate to each other. In the present paper I investigate the relation between epistemic luck and prominent internalist and externalist accounts of epistemic justification. I argue that the dichotomy between internalist and externalist concepts of justification can be (...) characterized in terms of epistemic luck. Whereas externalist theories of justification are incompatible with veritic luck but not with reflective luck, the converse is true for internalist theories of justification. These results are found to explain and cohere with some recent findings from elsewhere in epistemology, and support a surprising picture of justification, on which internalism and externalism are complementary rather than contradictory positions. (shrink)

The lottery paradox can be solved if epistemic justification is assumed to be a species of permissibility. Given this assumption, the starting point of the paradox can be formulated as the claim that, for each lottery ticket, I am permitted to believe that it will lose. This claim is ambiguous between two readings, depending on the scope of ‘permitted’. On one reading, the claim is false; on another, it is true, but, owing to the general failure of permissibility (...) to agglomerate, does not generate the paradox. The solution generalizes to formulations of the paradox in terms of rational acceptability and doxastic rationality. (shrink)

Against various detractors , this book develops a foundationalist theory of epistemic justification. In contrast with Laurence BonJour and borrowing from John McDowell, the essential argument is that conceptualized perpetual experience provides a non-doxastic foundation for perceptual beliefs about physical objects.

For decades, philosophers have displayed an interest in what it is to have an epistemically justified belief. Recently, we also find among philosophers a renewed interest in the so-called ethics of belief: what is it to believe responsibly and when is one’s belief blameworthy? This paper explores how epistemically justified belief and responsible belief are related to each other. On the so-called ‘deontological conception of epistemic justification’, they are identical: to believe epistemically responsibly is to believe epistemically justifiedly. (...) I argue that William Alston’s criticism of a deontological conception of epistemic justification in terms of our influence on our beliefs is unconvincing. Moreover, such a conception meets three criteria that one might put forward in order for an account of epistemic justification to be plausible: it shows a concern with the Jamesian goal of having true rather than false beliefs, it is relevantly similar to accounts of justification in non-doxastic realms, such as action, and there is good reason to think that, if spelled out in sufficient detail, it may well provide a necessary condition for knowledge. I conclude that the deontological conception of epistemic justification is stronger than is often thought: it is worth exploring whether epistemically justified belief is epistemically responsible belief. (shrink)

I present a recent historical case from cosmology—the story of inflationary cosmology—and on its basis argue that solving explanatory problems is a reliable method for making progress in science. In particular, I claim that the success of inflationary theory at solving its predecessor’s explanatory problems justified the theory epistemically, even in advance of the development of novel predictions from the theory and the later confirmation of those predictions.

This volume gathers eleven new and three previously unpublished essays that take on questions of epistemic justification, responsibility, and virtue. It contains the best recent work in this area by major figures such as Ernest Sosa, Robert Audi, Alvin Goldman, and Susan Haak.

This paper undertakes two projects: Firstly, it offers a new account of the so-called deontological conception of epistemic justification (DCEJ). Secondly, it brings out the basic weaknesses of DCEJ, thus accounted for. It concludes that strong reasons speak against its acceptance. The new account takes it departure from William Alston’s influential work. Section 1 argues that a fair account of DCEJ is only achieved by modifying Alston’s account and brings out the crucial difference between DCEJ and the less (...) radical position of epistemic deontologism. Section 2 starts by setting up two fundamental problems for proponents of DCEJ to solve. It argues further that proponents of DCEJ may not convincingly solve those problems by appeal to a notion of permissible belief. Section 3 investigates, whether an appeal to the notion of blameless belief may help DCEJ overcome its central problems. It argues that, even if an appeal to the notion of blameless belief has advantages over an appeal to the notion of permissible belief, DCEJ cannot convincingly overcome the problems set up for it. Further, it is brought out that DCEJ commits its proponents to a problematic non-standard view regarding the intrinsic value of epistemic justification. Section 4 concludes that DCEJ is not the natural conception of epistemic justification, that Alston takes it to be. However, its problems do not leave a scratch on epistemic deontologism, properly conceived. (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.

It has recently been argued that beliefs formed on the basis of implicit biases pose a challenge for accessibilism, since implicit biases are consciously inaccessible, yet they seem to be relevant to epistemic justification. Recent empirical evidence suggests, however, that while we may typically lack conscious access to the source of implicit attitudes and their impact on our beliefs and behaviour, we do have access to their content. In this paper, I discuss the notion of accessibility required for (...) this argument to work vis-à-vis these empirical results and offer two ways in which the accessibilist could meet the challenge posed by implicit biases. Ultimately both strategies fail, but the way in which they do, I conclude, reveals something general and important about our epistemic obligations and about the intuitions that inform the role of implicit biases in accessibilist justification. (shrink)

The main thesis of this paper is that it is not possible to determine the nature of epistemic justification apart from scientific psychological investigation. I call this view the strong thesis of methodological psychologism. Two sub-theses provide the primary support for this claim. The first sub-thesis is that no account of epistemic justification is correct which requires for the possession of at least one justified belief a psychological capacity which humans do not have. That is, the (...) correct account of epistemic justification must be psychologically realistic. The second sub-thesis is that it is not possible to determine whether an account of epistemic justification is psychologically realistic apart from scientific psychological investigation. After defending these subtheses, I point out some interesting consequences of the overall thesis which present a challenge to traditional epistemology. (shrink)

The thesis explores the semantics of epistemic justification discourse, a very important part of overall epistemic discourse. It embarks from a critical examination of referentialist theories to arrive at a certain nonreferential, expressivist approach to the semantics of epistemic justification discourse. That is, it criticizes the main referentialist theories and then goes on to argue for an expressivist approach on the basis of its theoretical capacity to outflank the problems referentialist theories meet. In the end, (...) I also identify some problems for a prominent expressivist theory and, as a response to these problems, propose a novel norm-expressivist approach that seems to evade these problems. In particular, in Ch.1 I introduce what I call ‘the epistemic justification puzzle’ and then in Chs.2-4 criticize naturalistic referential theories: analytic naturalistic reductionism, synthetic naturalistic reductionism and epistemic kinds realism. In Ch.5 I criticize nonnaturalist referential theories: what I call ‘naïve’ nonnaturalism and J.McDowell’s more sophisticated quietist version of nonnaturalism. Next, in Ch.6 I introduce the semantic programme of expressivism and go on to construct a simple version of epistemic norm-expressivism ) in order to explain how expressivism can easily outflank the identified problems of referentialist theories. This simple norm-expressivist theory, however, is only used as a theoretical ‘toy’ for the mere sake of motivating the possibility of expressivism, as in Ch.7 I go on to argue for a more sophisticated version of norm-expressivism: habitsendorsement expressivism. In Ch.7 I introduce a prominent expressivist theory of moral and knowledge discourses, namely, plan-reliance expressivism ) and extend it cover the epistemic justification discourse. I then identify some problems for plan-reliance expressivism as extended to cover justification discourse and in response to these problems propose habits-endorsement expressivism. Habits-endorsement expressivism builds on the intuition that belief-fixation is habitual and exploits the theoretical flexibility of the notion of habits in order to overcome the identified problems of plan-reliance expressivism. (shrink)

"Evidentialism" is the view that a person's epistemic justification for a doxastic attitude is determined entirely by his or her evidence for the content of that attitude. This paper has two goals. The first is to argue that values and circumstances properly influence epistemic justification, and that evidentialism is therefore untenable, even as an epistemic ideal. The second is to outline a nonevidentialist theory of epistemic justification that avoids the common objection that nonevidentialist (...) theories fail to preserve important distinctions between epistemic justification, on the one hand, and moral and prudential justification, on the other hand. (shrink)

The adjective ‘is justified’ has all the hallmarks of a gradable adjective. But the relationship between gradable uses and straightforward predications of the form ‘x is justified’ has been underexplored by epistemologists. In this paper we undertake to do some ground clearing as a prelude to better understanding this relationship.

This paper puts forward a novel pluralist theory of epistemic justification that brings together two competing views in the literature—probabilistic and non-probabilistic accounts of justification. The first part of the paper motivates the new theory by arguing that neither probabilistic nor non-probabilistic accounts alone are wholly satisfactory. The second part puts forward what I call the Functional Theory of Justification. The key merit of the new theory is that it combines the most attractive features of both (...) probabilistic and non-probabilistic accounts of justification while avoiding their most serious shortcomings. The paper also provides a blueprint for future pluralist projects in epistemology. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Experience and Fact Problems of Common Cause Epistemology Modes of Justification The Role of Presumption Principles of Presumption The Validation of Presumption as a General Policy The Evolutionary Aspect of Sensory Epistemology Rational versus Natural Selection Against “Pure” Intellectualism Conclusion.

RESUMO O artigo de E. Gettier, "É Conhecimento Crença Verdadeira Justificada?" mudou o curso da epistemologia ao analisar a questão da verdade justificada pertinente ao conhecimento proposicional e detectar uma falha na definição tradicional de conhecimento, dando origem a diferentes comentários. Várias teorias sobre o assunto são discutidas, sendo as mais utilizadas aquelas que enfatizam o fundacionismo e o coerentismo em seu caráter internalista. ABSTRACT E. Gettier's article "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" changed the course of epistemology by analyzing the (...) issue of justified truth regarding propositional knowledge and detecting a problem with the traditional definition of knowledge. The paper discusses various theories on this matter, especially those that highlight foundationalism and coherentism in its internalist aspect. (shrink)

One of the most common excuses is ignorance. Ignorance does not always excuse, however, for sometimes ignorance is culpable. One of the most natural ways to think of the difference between exculpating and culpable ignorance is in terms of justification; that is, one’s ignorance is exculpating only if it is justified and one’s ignorance is culpable only if it not justified. Rosen :591–610, 2008) explores this idea by first offering a brief account of justification, and then two cases (...) that he claims are counter examples to the justification thesis. The aim of this paper is to defend the justification thesis against Rosen’s two cases. The argument will proceed in the following way. First, I clarify a few things about the nature of culpable ignorance generally and why the justification thesis is so intuitive. I then present Rosen’s purported counterexamples. Once this is done, I argue that Rosen misses an important view of justification in the epistemology literature that I call the pragmatic view. I present a general picture of the pragmatic view, and explain how it fits naturally with our practices of criticizing people’s beliefs, including claims of culpable ignorance. Finally, I address Rosen’s cases arguing that, if the pragmatic view is right, then Rosen’s cases are not counterexamples to the justification thesis. (shrink)

In his Beyond Justification, Bill Alston argued that there is no single property picked out by ‘epistemic justification,’ and that instead epistemological theory should investigate the range of epistemic desiderata that beliefs may enjoy (as well as the nature of and interconnections among the various epistemic good-making properties). In this paper I argue that none of his arguments taken singly, nor the collection as a group, gives us a reason to abandon the traditional idea that (...) there is a property of epistemic justification. I conclude by suggesting how Alston’s proposal to investigate the variety of epistemic desiderata bears on the questions at the heart of the theory of epistemic justification. Here I suggest that, despite his attempts at neutrality with respect to debates about epistemic justification, Alston might well have taken sides on one of the main issues of substance. (shrink)

Robust metanormative realists think that there are irreducibly normative, metaphysically heavy normative facts. One might wonder how we could be epistemically justified in believing that such facts exist. In this paper, I offer an answer to this question: one’s belief in the existence of robustly real normative facts is epistemically justified because so believing is indispensable to being a successful inquirer for creatures like us. The argument builds on Enoch's (2007, 2011) deliberative indispensability argument for Robust Realism but avoids relying (...) on an overly pragmatic account of the sources of basic epistemic justification. Instead, I suggest that the sources of basic epistemic justification are those belief-forming methods which are indispensable for zetetically indispensable projects, that is, projects which are constitutive of being a successful inquirer for embodied, agential creatures like ourselves. (shrink)

I discuss Alston's theory of religious experience and maintain that his argument to the effect that it is rational to suppose that the 'mystical doxastic practice' is epistemically reliable does not stand up to scrutiny. While Alston's transitions from practical to epistemic rationality don't work here, his arguments may be taken to show that, under certain conditions, it is not epistemically irresponsible to trust one's religious experiences.

Through both a conceptual analysis of historical evidence in general, and a specific study of Thucydides' evidence on the Peloponnesian war, the structure of justification of historical knowledge is described and evaluated. The justification is internal in the sense of being done entirely within a network of evidential and descriptive claims about the past. This forces a coherence form of justification in which the telling epistemic standards are eliminative, indicators of what is not likely to be (...) true rather than what is. The epistemological contrast is between justification by coherence among historical claims, or by appeal to epistemic foundations. Any evidential claim in history that is informative and credible must itself be justified in the context of other things known about the past. Thus, the evidence used to support historical claims is neither foundational nor a direct report on the facts of the past, and an appeal to evidence is itself an appeal to coherence. (shrink)

Theories of epistemic justification are commonly assessed by exploring their predictions about particular hypothetical cases – predictions as to whether justification is present or absent in this or that case. With a few exceptions, it is much less common for theories of epistemic justification to be assessed by exploring their predictions about logical principles. The exceptions are a handful of ‘closure’ principles, which have received a lot of attention, and which certain theories of justification (...) are well known to invalidate. But these closure principles are only a small sample of the logical principles that we might consider. In this paper, I will outline four further logical principles that plausibly hold for justification and two which plausibly do not. While my primary aim is just to put these principles forward, I will use them to evaluate some different approaches to justification and (tentatively) conclude that a ‘normic’ theory of justification best captures its logic. (shrink)