Analytic epistemologists agree that, whatever else is true of epistemic justification, it is distinct from knowledge. However, if recent work by Jonathan Sutton is correct, this view is deeply mistaken, for according to Sutton justification is knowledge. That is, a subject is justified in believing that p iff he knows that p. Sutton further claims that there is no concept of epistemic justification distinct from knowledge. Since knowledge is factive, a consequence of Sutton’s view is that there are no false (...) justified beliefs. <br> Following Sutton, I will begin by outlining kinds of beliefs that do not constitute knowledge but that seem to be justified. I will then be in a position to critically evaluate Sutton’s arguments for his position that justification is knowledge, concluding that he fails to establish his bold thesis. In the course of so doing, I will defend the following rule of assertion: (The JBK-rule) One must: assert p only if one has justification to believe that one knows that p.<br>. (shrink)

The epistemic-basing relation is the relation that holds between a reason, or one’s grounds, and one’s belief when the belief is held for that reason. As I will explain, understanding this relation is crucial for epistemology since basing a belief on a reason seems necessary for epistemic justification to obtain. But what is the nature of this relation? Is it, at least in part, causal as one might assume? Or, due to problems with causal accounts, are rival accounts of the (...) basing relation motivated? That depends whether causal theories are really subject to the standard objections made against them. I will discuss what I take to be the most fundamental objection here. (shrink)

The so-called internalism/externalism debate is of interest in epistemology since it addresses one of the most fundamental questions in the discipline: what is the basic nature of epistemic justification? What has been called epistemic internalism holds, as the label suggests, that all the relevant factors that determine positive epistemic status of a belief must be “internal”. A common way that the “internal” is understood is those things that are, or easily can be, available to the agent’s conscious awareness. However, there (...) is another, and increasingly popular, way of spelling out the epistemically “internal”. A view advocated by Feldman and Conee which they regard as a kind of epistemic internalism, called ‘Mentalism’, holds that epistemic justification strongly supervenes upon the mental. In this paper I will show that even many of those who claim to deny an awareness requirement implicitly appeal to it to motivate their accounts of justification. By considering the arguments for ‘Mentalism’ I will show that, unless an awareness requirement is presupposed, the cases that such arguments appeal to are of no intuitive force. Therefore, insofar as one wants to be an internalist about epistemic justification, one needs to motivate, articulate, and defend an access/awareness condition. Epistemic Internalism, properly construed, ought to stress the epistemic significance of consciousness and the first person perspective. (shrink)

I intend to defend the following as a necessary condition of a belief S being epistemically justified for a subject:Awareness Requirement: S is justified in believing that P only if i) there is something, X, that contributes to the justification of B; and ii) S is aware of X.This will be shown through drawing attention to our considered judgments about cases. That will then lay the groundwork for giving an account of the nature of this awareness in the second half (...) of this paper. In doing so I will examine and respond to an argument against the awareness requirement that we might call Bergmann‟s Dilemma. My solution invokes what I call “non-doxastic strong awareness” in a way that avoids the regresses that Bergmann advances. (shrink)