Justification

During the last twenty years or so a number of philosophers have proposed theories that attempt to naturalize epistemology. One especially thinks of Quine, Goldman and Dretske in this context. Working in this tradition, I provide an externalist, reliable process analysis of epistemic justification and knowledge. In particular, I attempt to develop and improve upon the Goldman-Kornblith-Schmitt reliable process account of epistemic justification and show how it can be extended to provide an account of knowledge. ;First I defend the idea (...) that we cannot choose our beliefs, i.e., I argue that doxastic voluntarism is false, and that, since this is so, externalist approaches to epistemic justification are more plausible than internalist accounts. For, given that we cannot choose our beliefs, the internalist requirement that we be able to give reasons for our beliefs as a condition of our being epistemically justified is simply an impossible standard of rationality to impose on any cognizer. ;Later I consider a problem due to Stuart Cohen. Cohen has argued that there is an ineliminably normative aspect to justification that reliabilists fail to mark. In order to dissolve Cohen's case against reliabilism, I draw a distinction between objective and subjective justification. The former is needed for knowledge, the latter for justifiable public assertions among our peers. While developing this bifurcated account of epistemic justification I provide an account of the term "process" , contrast my reliable process account with the reliable indicator accounts of Dretske and Nozick, and argue that the objects of belief are propositional allomorphs and not, as it has been traditionally thought, propositions. (shrink)

Deductive and inductive logic confront this skeptical challenge: we can justify any logical principle only by means of an argument but we can acquire justification by means of an argument only if we are already justified in believing some logical principle. We could solve this problem if probative arguments do not require justified belief in their corresponding conditionals. For if not, then inferential justification would not require justified belief in any logical principle. So even arguments whose corresponding conditionals are epistemically (...) dependent upon their conclusions--epistemically self-supporting arguments--need not be viciously circular. R. B. Braithwaite and James Van Cleve use internalist and externalist versions of this strategy in their proposed solutions to the problem of induction. Unfortunately, their arguments for self-support are unsound and any theory of inferential justification that does not require justified belief in the corresponding conditionals of justification-affording arguments is unacceptably arbitrary. So self-supporting arguments cannot be justification-creating. (shrink)

The Orthodox View (OV) of the relation between epistemic justification and knowledge has it that justification is conceptually prior to knowledge—and so, can be used to provide a noncircular account of knowledge. OV has come under threat from the increasingly popular “Knowledge First” movement (KFM) in epistemology. I assess several anti-OV arguments due to three of KFM’s most prominent members: Timothy Williamson, Jonathan Sutton, and Alexander Bird. I argue that OV emerges from these attacks unscathed.

In the past empiricist philosophy has urged one or other or both of two interconnected, and sometimes interconfused, theses. The first has been a thesis about the causal origins of certain beliefs, the second a thesis about the proper criteria for appraising these beliefs. The causal thesis is that all beliefs about the structure and contents of the natural world are the end-product of a process that originates wholly in individual experiences of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, or touching. The criterial (...) thesis is that all these beliefs are ultimately to be appraised for their truth, soundness or acceptability in terms of the data afforded by such perceptual acts. Of recent years the causal version of empiricism has been much attacked, primarily in regard to its implications about language-learning. The language in terms of which our beliefs are constructed is heavily conditioned, we are told, by certain congenital features of the human brain. But, whenever Chomsky and his followers have assailed the causal version of empiricism, they have always been careful to claim for their doctrines the warrant of empirical evidence. They have never questioned the correctness of the criterial version of empiricism. (shrink)

Jonah Lehrer: How We Decide Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2009, 302 pp.

This is an excerpt of a report that highlights and explores five questions that arose from the Network for Sensory Research workshop on perceptual learning and perceptual recognition at the University of York in March, 2012. This portion of the report explores the question: Can perceptual experience be modified by reason?

This is an excerpt of a report that highlights and explores five questions that arose from the Network for Sensory Research workshop on perceptual learning and perceptual recognition at the University of York in March, 2012. This portion of the report explores the question: How does perceptual learning alter perceptual phenomenology?

This dissertation argues that there can be unjustified perceptual and testimonial knowledge. By "justification," I mean an internalist conception according to which a belief's justification is some relation that the belief bears to another belief. ;The first chapter characterizes the theory of proper functions that underlies my epistemic theory. ;The second chapter discusses the reasons for thinking that there is unjustified knowledge. My argument proceeds indirectly by first critiquing the two major theories that require all knowledge to be justified: coherentism (...) and infinitism. I argue that these theories fail, because they cannot explain the essential connection between the system of justified beliefs and experience. ;The third chapter analyzes foundationalism, which I characterize as any theory that takes empirical knowledge to rest upon basic beliefs, each of which is based entirely upon experience. After a discursion on why strong foundationalism's insistence upon the incorrigibility of basic beliefs is unrealistic, I examine a modest variety of foundationalism whose basic beliefs are revisable. Although the fallibilism of modest foundationalism is an improvement over strong foundationalism, I provide some examples to show that many empirical pieces of knowledge based upon experience also are based upon background beliefs. If I am correct in this assessment, all varieties of foundationalism are flawed. ;I next try to provide a theory of noninferential perceptual and testimonial knowledge, of knowledge without justification. Chapters Four and Six focus upon unjustified perceptual knowledge and upon the role that sensation plays in helping us cope with the world through subdoxastic mechanisms. This discussion assumes the correctness of faculty psychology, which I outline in Chapter Four. ;Chapter Five defends a teleosemantic theory of concepts against holistic conceptual theories that are antagonistic to faculty psychology. ;The final chapter provides an account of unjustified testimonial knowledge that in important respects parallels my account of unjustified perceptual knowledge. I conclude that understanding the world through perception and understanding the world through testimony are not as different as they sometimes are portrayed. (shrink)

In this essay I construct a theory of epistemic justification. Specifially, I utilize and modify techniques adopted from cognitive decision theory to develop an account of the conditions under which an agent is justified in believing some proposition. Thus, my principal interest is in an internalist analysis of justified belief. That is, the conditions of justified belief are a function of the agent's subjective conception of his cognitive situation and his assessments of the relationships between the various parameters of justification. (...) The proposed theory focuses on two aspects of justification, the relationship between evidence and belief, and the relationship between what an agent takes to be his evidence for some belief and his other beliefs. These two aspects I refer to as the methodological and cognitive components, respectively. ;Chapter I considers and rejects some alternative internalist analyses of justification. I suggest these analyses are inadequate principally because they do not provide adequate specification of the methodological components. ;Chapter II considers Levi's account of inductive acceptance. While I take Levi's analysis to be a significant advance, I reject it since the methodological component is too idealized and the cognitive component is insufficiently specified. ;In Chapter III I present my analysis of the methodological component. I develop a notion of epistemic probability and show how the methodological component may be analyzed utilizing only comparative probabilities. A significant feature of this approach is that it reflects the limitations of ordinary epistemic agents. ;Chapter IV presents my analysis of the cognitive component. Utilizing a notion of a reliable characterization of the evidence, which specifies the relationship between what an agent takes to be his evidence for some belief and his other beliefs, and the results of Chapter III, I then present an analysis of justified belief. ;In Chapter V I first reject externalism as an adequate approach to justification. After arguing that an adequate analysis of knowledge must be externalist, I claim that the conditions of epistemic rationality are to be sought in a theory of epistemic justification and not in an analysis of knowledge. (shrink)

We are all familiar with the phenomenon of a proposition seeming true. Many think that these seeming states can yield justified beliefs. Very few have seriously explored what these seeming states are. I argue that seeming states are not plausibly analyzed in terms of beliefs, partial beliefs, attractions to believe, or inclinations to believe. Given that the main candidates for analyzing seeming states are unsatisfactory, I argue for a brute view of seemings that treats seeming states as irreducible propositional attitudes.

Sinnott-Armstrong has attacked the epistemology of moral intuitionism on the grounds that it is not justified to have some moral beliefs without needing them to be inferred from other beliefs. He believes that our moral judgments are inferentially justified because the “framing effects” which are mostly discussed in the empirical psychology cast doubt on any non-inferential justification. In this paper, I argue that Sinnott-Armstrong’s argument is question begging against intuitionists and his description of epistemological intuitionism is a diluted version that (...) most of intuitionists do not believe, therefore he is not attacking the epistemological intuitionism in its strongest form. I then propose my alternative modest account of epistemological intuitionism. I also reconsider the concept of “non-inferentiality”, as one of the key elements of intuitionist epistemology, and propose a modest account of non-inferentiality. (shrink)

Justification is a basic component of reasoning because it provides us with the warrant which should ground the acceptability of the whole argument. Indeed, justifying an argument consists in providing some principle which is seen as reasonable. In t his perspective, the set of possible justifications may be regarded as the set of those commonplaces that are admitted by a human community and are grounded on the values that are commonly endorsed by the community. I will try to show how (...) the lack of dis cussion about those values that are regarded as obvious may lead to paradoxical conclusions. (shrink)

The study of ancient religion, partly in response to anthropology, moved in recent decades away from thinking in terms of ‘belief’ to studying ‘ritual’: this has a fundamental effect on how we treat the evidence. This chapter argues that the transition is incomplete and explores some of the deeper implications of thinking in terms of ‘belief’. It argues that these continue to hamper our perspective on ancient religion. The ‘otherness’ of ancient religion does not reside in the ‘rationality’ of their (...) thinking, rather, it is axiomatic. (shrink)

Colin Cheyne has argued that under certain circumstances an internalist or deontological theory of epistemic justification will give rise to a paradox. The paradox, he argues, arises when a principle of epistemic justification is both justifiably believed (in terms of the theory) and false. To avoid this paradox, Cheyne recommends abandoning the principle of justification-transference, which states that acts of believing made on the basis of a justifiably-believed principle are themselves justified. Since such a principle seems essential to any internalist (...) theory of justified believing, internalist theories may also need to be abandoned. I argue that while some theories of epistemic justification may indeed give rise to this paradox, an internalist or deontological theory of subjective justification will avoid it. The reason for this is that a false principle of justified believing does not render acts of believing subjectively unjustified, provided that the agent does not realize that the principle is false. (shrink)

This paper takes up again the perennial issue of the foundations of empirical knowledge. the general issue is seen to have three distinct though interrelated facets: those of "meaning", "justification", and "truth". first, how is it that our statements about the world acquire meaning; secondly, how is it that our beliefs about the world are justified; and thirdly, in what precisely consists the truth or falsity of the propositional content of our beliefs? answers to these questions are invariably interdependent, and (...) both classically and on the contemporary scene "the foundationalist" and "the coherentist" pictures of knowledge have been the dominant alternatives. after discussing each of these clear though stark views in some detail, i endeavor to construct and defend what i characterize as a mitigated foundational account of knowledge. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Are there justified emotions? Can they justify evaluative judgements? We first explain the need for an account of justified emotions by emphasizing that emotions are states for which we have or lack reasons. We then observe that emotions are explained by their cognitive and motivational bases. Considering cognitive bases first, we argue that an emotion is justified if and only if the properties the subject is aware of constitute an instance of the relevant evaluative property. We then investigate the (...) roles of motivational bases. Finally, we argue that justified emotions are sufficient for justified evaluative judgements. (shrink)