Online research in philosophy

The common belief that the epistemic credentials of ethics are quite questionable, and therefore in need of special justification, is an illusion made possible by the logical gap between reason and belief. This gap manifests itself sometimes even outside ethics. In ethics its manifestations are common, because of the practical nature of ethics. The attempt to cover it up takes the form of exorbitant demands for justification and often leads to espousing noncognitivism.

Some philosophers have attempted to utilize the conceptual tools of ethics in order to understand epistemology. One instantiation of this understands justification in terms of having a certain kind of epistemic right, namely, a right to believe. In variations of this theme, some hold that justification involves having the authority to believe, or being entitled to believe. But by examining the putative analogies between different versions of rights and justification, I demonstrate that justification should not be understood as having a right to believe.

The paper investigates the implications of a nonaprioristic philosophy of science. It starts by developing a scheme of justification which draws its norms from the prevailing paradigm of rationality, which need not be universal or external. If the requirement for normativity is then abandoned we do not end up with a descriptive philosophy of science. The alternative to a prescriptive philosophy of science is a theoretical explanation of scientific decisions and acts. Explanation, rather than mere description, replaces justification; and the paradigm of rationality becomes a scientific paradigm. The implications of these results for the discovery-justification distinction are investigated. An explanatory philosophy of science deals with the generation, as well as with the selection of scientific conjectures: both contexts have an epistemic dimension. * This paper was written under the auspices of the Wolfson Chair Extrordinary of Theoretical Physics, Tel Aviv University.

Although explanation is widely regarded as an important concept in the study of rational inquiry, it remains largely unexplored outside the philosophy of science. This, I believe, is not due to oversight as much as to institutional resistance. In analytic philosophy it is basic that epistemic rationality is a function of justification and that justification is a function of argument. Explanation, however, is not argument nor is belief justification its function. I argue here that the task of incorporating explanation into the theory of rational inquiry poses a serious challenge to our basic concept of epistemic rationality as well as the a priori method of inquiry that still lies at the heart of analytic philosophy. Specifically, it pushes us toward a much stronger form of naturalism than is generally thought necessary, one in which argument and explanation are recognized as distinct and equally fundamental cognitive processes whose dynamic relationship is one of the central issues in the theory of rationality.

Suppose we are prepared to conceive the meaning of a sentence as a classification criterion which enables us to establish whether something is or is not a justification to believe that sentence. Which properties of the intuitive notion of justification are, from this point of view, essential for believing a sentence? And how might a theoretical notion of justification for a sentence be defined? In Sections 2-5 some properties are suggested as essential, in particular Intentionality (a justification is always a justification for a sentence), Defeasibility (a justification for a sentence A can cease to be a justification for A as new information is received), and Epistemic transparency (a justification for A is not a justification for A unless it is recognized as such by an idealized knowing subject). In Section 6 a sketch of definition is proposed, according to which a justification for a sentence A is a cognitive state in which the subject has at his disposal a certain amount of information, and the hypothesis that A is the best explanation of that information. Section 7 shows how the notion defined escapes a crucial objection to defeasible justifications recently stated by P. Casalegno.

Mylan Engel, Jr. has proposed a straightforward and attractive explanation of the internalism-externalism controversy (IEC) in contemporary epistemology. Engel's explanation posits that there are two distinct kinds of epistemic justification, and the IEC has arisen because epistemologists have inadvertently overlooked the fact that they are not all concerned with the same subject matter (internalists are concerned with one kind of epistemic justification while externalists are concerned with another kind). In this paper, I will explain two difficulties with Engel's proposed explanation. The first difficulty concerns the claim that there are two kinds of epistemic justification. The second difficulty concerns whether Engel's proposed explanation is adequate to explain internalist concerns.

This paper attempts to sort through some of the challenges facing those of us who look to empirical science for help in doing normative business ethics. I suggest that the distinction between explanation and justification, a distinction at the heart of the difference between descriptive social science and normative ethics, is often overlooked when social scientists attempt to draw ethical conclusions from their research.

A new approach to developing models of folk psychology is suggested, namely that different models exist for different folk psychological practices. This point is made through an example: the explanation and justification of morally heinous actions. Human folk psychology in this area is prone to a specific error of conflating an explanation for behaviour with a justification of it. An analysis of the error leads me to conclude that simulation is used to generate both explanations and justifications of heinous acts. It is needed in both these cases because most of us lack theoretical information about evil actors. I will argue that it is difficult to simulate such acts, and hence difficult to develop explanations for behaviour widely accepted as evil. This difficulty explains the judgements made against successful simulators by those who don't succeed, and so explains the common problem of conflating an explanation with a justification.