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Justification and epistemic agency

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A Correction to this article was published on 08 May 2023

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Abstract

This paper presents a novel account of what motivates internalism about justification in light of recent attempts to undermine the intuitions long thought to favour it (Srinivasan in Philos Rev 129:395–431, 2020). On the account I propose, internalist intuitions are sensitive to epistemic agency. Internalist intuitions track a desire to acknowledge the epistemic agency one has in virtue of being in a position to meet the standards one is accountable to.

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Notes

  1. I should note that I intend my claims about “internalism about justification” to be neutral between particular internalist theories. Internalism, most broadly, may be understood as the view that justification supervenes on a believer’s internal states, with particular internalist theories differing on which states they take justification to supervene on and the sense in which those states are internal. It is common to sort internalist theories into two camps: mentalism, which holds that justification supervenes on a believer’s non-factive mental states, and accessibilism, which holds that justification supervenes on only those mental states which are introspectively accessible to the subject (see e.g. Madison (2010) for a detailed overview and guide through the internalist landscape).

  2. See Chisholm (1966, p. 48), Bonjour 1980, pp. 59–60; Pollock and Cruz (1999, p. 44), Pollock (1995, p. 41), Lasonen-Aarnio (2010, p. 1). Srinivasan notes that Classist College is most similar to Maria Lasonen-Aarnio’s Trick on Suzy (Srinivasan, 2021, p. 404 n.16).

  3. See Cohen (1984). “Justification and Truth.” Philosophical Studies, 46:3. 279–296.

  4. Richard Pettigrew makes a version of this point (2022, pp. 295–296). The purposes to which we put this point differ insofar as Pettigrew thinks that we ought to be pluralists about justification and I instead favour internalist theories of justification to externalist ones.

  5. See e.g. Conee and Feldman (2004) Evidentialism: Essays in Epistemology. Oxford University Press.

  6. See Toole (2020) for an argument that evidentialism is not consistent with standpoint theory.

  7. For a thorough defence of this point, see Wylie (2003).

  8. See Alston (1993, 2005), Greco (2015), Cohen (2015), and Ballantyne (2016).

  9. See e.g. Alcoff (2010), Anderson (2010, 2012a, 2012b), Ayala and Vasilyeva (2015), Banks and Ford (2009, 2011), Dixon et al (2012), Haslanger (2015, 2016), and Huebner (2016).

  10. Pryor (2002) and Simion et al. (2016).

  11. Some internalist views do seem to praise trying. See Plantinga (1990) p.61 for a discussion of such views.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa for his extensive feedback on multiple drafts of this paper, as well as Albert Cotugno, Jade Hadley, and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments. This work was supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

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  1. Department of Philosophy, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Phyllis Pearson

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Pearson, P. Justification and epistemic agency. Synthese 201, 127 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04115-4

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