The paper is concerned with the epistemological status of testimony and the question of what may confer justification on true testimonial beliefs and enable us to call such beliefs knowledge. In particular, it addresses certain anti-reductionist arguments in the epistemology of testimony and their incompatibility with the grammatical categories of egophoricity (conjunct/disjunct marking) and evidentiality (information source marking) present in the architecture of natural languages. First, the tradition of epistemological individualism and its rationale are discussed, as well as certain (...) attempts within this tradition to include testimony-based beliefs in the body of legitimate and rational beliefs. The next section is concerned with the anti-reductionist approach to testimonial beliefs and some arguments supporting ‘the credulity principle’ grounded in Thomas Reid's philosophy of common sense. The last two sections show how the anti-reductionist argumentation is threatened with an insoluble dilemma when considered in the context of languages with the grammatical categories of egophoricity (conjunct/disjunct marking) and evidentiality (information source marking). Special attention is paid to the justificatory role of egophoric and evidential marking; how these grammatical categories may influence the process of belief formation, and consequently, how this bears upon the nature of justification for testimonial beliefs. The final conclusion of the paper is that the anti-reductionist claim concerning the directness and non-inferential nature of testimonial knowledge is bound to meet objections grounded in the structure of many natural languages. This leads to a paradox: in discussion with reductionism, anti-reductionists do seek support for their arguments in common sense beliefs reflected in everyday language, and, on the other hand, their claims are incompatible with the linguistic data found in a number of natural languages. (shrink)

NOTE: This paper is a reworking of some aspects of an earlier paper – ‘What else justification could be’ and also an early draft of chapter 2 of Between Probability and Certainty. I'm leaving it online as it has a couple of citations and there is some material here which didn't make it into the book (and which I may yet try to develop elsewhere). My concern in this paper is with a certain, pervasive picture of epistemic justification. (...) On this picture, acquiring justification for believing something is essentially a matter of minimising one’s risk of error – so one is justified in believing something just in case it is sufficiently likely, given one’s evidence, to be true. This view is motivated by an admittedly natural thought: If we want to be fallibilists about justification then we shouldn’t demand that something be certain – that we completely eliminate error risk – before we can be justified in believing it. But if justification does not require the complete elimination of error risk, then what could it possibly require if not its minimisation? If justification does not require epistemic certainty then what could it possibly require if not epistemic likelihood? When all is said and done, I’m not sure that I can offer satisfactory answers to these questions – but I will attempt to trace out some possible answers here. The alternative picture that I’ll outline makes use of a notion of normalcy that I take to be irreducible to notions of statistical frequency or predominance. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue that Evidential Pluralism ought to be used to evaluate the impact of online fake news. To support this, I show how an application of Evidential Pluralism can overcome difficulties in assessing the impact of online fake news. The significance of this is twofold. Firstly, the application of Evidential Pluralism enables an evidence-based justification for legal interventions aimed at tackling online fake news. Secondly, the application of Evidential Pluralism (...) to the problem of online fake news provides a case study example to motivate a new methodology for evidence-based law, called EBL+. (shrink)

Evidentialist views in epistemology, like that of Earl Conee and Richard Feldman, define epistemic justification at least partially in terms of evidential support. According to these views, a person is justified in believing a proposition p just when her evidence supports p. The subject of this dissertation is the evidential support relation at the heart of these views—viz., the relation which obtains between a person’s evidence e and a proposition p just when e supports p in the (...) sense required by these views. I engage three initially tempting accounts of this relation in terms of meta-attitudes, explanatory relations, and probabilistic relations, finding all three accounts wanting. I then propose a fourth, causal account. My thesis is that evidentialists like Conee and Feldman should find this causal account of the evidential support relation more attractive than the other three kinds of account. (shrink)

As a general rule, whenever a hearer is justified in forming the belief that p on the basis of a speaker’s testimony, she will also be justified in assuming that the speaker has formed her belief appropriately in light of a relevantly large and representative sample of the evidence that bears on p. In simpler terms, a justification for taking someone’s testimony entails a justification for trusting her assessment of the evidence. This introduces the possibility of what I (...) will call “evidential preemption.” Evidential preemption occurs when a speaker, in addition to offering testimony that p, also warns the hearer of the likelihood that she will subsequently be confronted with apparently contrary evidence: this is done, however, not so as to encourage the hearer to temper her confidence in p in anticipation of that evidence, but rather to suggest that the (apparently) contrary evidence is in fact misleading evidence or evidence that has already been taken into account. Either way, the speaker is signalling to the hearer that the subsequent disclosure of this evidence will not require her to significantly revise her belief that p. Such preemption can effectively inoculate an audience against future contrary evidence, and thereby creates an opening for a form of exploitative manipulation that I will call “epistemic grooming.” Nonetheless, I argue, not all uses of evidential preemption are nefarious; it can also serve as an important tool for guiding epistemically limited agents though complex evidential scenarios. (shrink)

Evidence-based law seeks to make best use of evidence to assess the effectiveness of laws and regulations. The question arises as to how exactly to make best use of evidence. This paper argues that Evidential Pluralism provides an answer to this question and can thus provide philosophical foundations for evidence-based law. Evidential Pluralism is a theory of causal enquiry which maintains that one needs to scrutinise mechanistic studies alongside the experimental and observational studies that are the focus of (...) present-day evidence-based medicine and evidence-based policy. The paper develops a new approach to evidence-based law, called EBL+, based on the principles of Evidential Pluralism. Three examples show how the proposed methods work: banning hand-held mobile phone use while driving, sugar tax, and face-mask mandates for controlling Covid-19. (shrink)

Evidentials and Modals offers an in-depth account of the meaning of grammatical elements representing evidentiality in connection to modality, focusing on theoretical/formal perspectives by eminent pioneers in the field and on recently discovered phenomena in Korean evidential markers by native scholars in particular. Evidentiality became a hot topic in semantics and pragmatics, trying to see what kind of evidential justification is provided by evidentials to support or be related to the 'at-issue' prejacent propositions. This book aims to (...) provide a deeper understanding of such evidentiality in discourse contexts in a broad range of languages such as American Indian, Korean and Japanese, Turkish and African languages over the world. In addition, an introduction to the concept of evidentiality and theoretical perspectives and recent issues is also provided. Contributors are Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, Robert Botne, Kyung-Sook Chung, Martina Faller, Ezra Keshet, Iksoo Kwon, Chungmin Lee, Ji-Young Lee, Jungmee Lee, Dongsik Lim, Lisa Matthewson, William McClure, Elin McCready, Sarah E. Murray, Marisa Nagano, Jinho Park, Mary Shin Kim, Jaemog Song, Thomas Willett, and Kei Yoshimoto. (shrink)

The setting of evidential standards is a core practice of scientific assessment for policy. Persuaded by considerations of inductive risk, philosophers generally agree that the justification of evidential standards must appeal to non-epistemic values but debate whether the balance of non-epistemic reasons favours varying evidential standards versus maintaining fixed high evidential standards in assessment, as both sets of standards promote different and important political virtues of advisory institutions. In this paper, I adjudicate the evidential (...) standards debate by developing a novel argument from justice, drawing on the IPCC’s assessment of climate impacts as a case study. I argue that in assessments marked by background evidential inequality, maintaining fixed high evidential standards results in an unequal distribution of ‘epistemic power’ among stakeholders, producing a ‘powerful assessment’ for the data-rich (a high rate of findings) and a ‘weak assessment’ for the data-poor (a low rate of findings). Where such inequalities of epistemic power disadvantage those in data-poor regions with respect to fundamental interests, such as basic human rights, we have decisive reasons of justice to vary evidential standards. (shrink)

Most internalist views hold that experience provides evidential justification for perceptual belief, although there are different ideas about how experience is able to provide this justification. Evidentialism holds that experiences can act as evidence for belief without having propositional content, while dogmatism holds that only an experience with the content that p can provide prima facie justification for the belief that p. I argue that both views succumb to a version of the well-known Sellarsian dilemma: it’s (...) entirely unclear how an experience could act as evidence for belief without having propositional content, and it is ad hoc to claim that experiences with propositional content can act as evidence for belief without explaining why these experiences need not be justified themselves. The way out of the dilemma lies in accepting the non-evidential nature of perceptual experience. (shrink)

The essay seeks the best combination of internal and external factors in the evidential support that we can have for a proposition. After identifying the combination, the essay criticizes views according to which our evidence supports propositions in virtue of the propositions explaining the evidence to us.

Evidence-based law seeks to make best use of evidence to assess the effectiveness of laws and regulations. The question arises as to how exactly to make best use of evidence. This paper argues that Evidential Pluralism provides an answer to this question and can thus provide philosophical foundations for evidence-based law. Evidential Pluralism is a theory of causal enquiry which maintains that one needs to scrutinise mechanistic studies alongside the experimental and observational studies that are the focus of (...) present-day evidence-based medicine and evidence-based policy. The paper develops a new approach to evidence-based law, called EBL+, based on the principles of Evidential Pluralism. Three examples show how the proposed methods work: banning hand-held mobile phone use while driving, sugar tax, and face-mask mandates for controlling Covid-19. (shrink)

Edmund Gettier (1963) argued that there can be justified true belief (JTB) that is not knowledge. I question the correctness of his argument by showing that Smith of Gettier’s famous examples does not earn justification for his incidentally true beliefs, while a doxastically more conscientious person S would come to hold justified but false beliefs. So, Gettier’s (and analogous) cases do not result in justified _and_ true belief. This is due to a tension between deductive closure of justification (...) and evidential support. For being justified, any believing, disbelieving, or withholding of deductively inferred propositions must be distributed proportionally to given evidential support. This proportionality principle has primacy over deductive closure in case of conflict. My argument does not save the JTB-account. But, instead of merely referring to an intuition, it explains why subjects in Gettier situations do not earn knowledge. (shrink)

Suppose that an informant (test, expert, device, perceptual system, etc.) is unlikely to err when pronouncing on a particular subject matter. When this is so, it might be tempting to defer to that informant when forming beliefs about that subject matter. How is such an inferential process expected to fare in terms of truth (leading to true beliefs) and evidential fit (leading to beliefs that fit one’s total evidence)? Using a medical diagnostic test as an example, we set out (...) a formal framework to investigate this question. We establish seven results and make one conjecture. The first four results show that when the test’s error probabilities are low, the process of deferring to the test can score well in terms of (i) both truth and evidential fit, (ii) truth but not evidential fit, (iii) evidential fit but not truth, or (iv) neither truth nor evidential fit. Anything is possible. The remaining results and conjecture generalize these results in certain ways. These results are interesting in themselves—especially given that the diagnostic test is not sensitive to the target disease’s base rate—but also have broader implications for the more general process of deferring to an informant. Additionally, our framework and diagnostic example can be used to create test cases for various reliabilist theories of inferential justification. We show, for example, that they can be used to motivate evidentialist process reliabilism over process reliabilism. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer two counterexamples to the so-called ‘Uniqueness Thesis.’ As one of these examples rely on the thesis that it is possible for a justified belief to be based on an inconsistent body of evidence, I also offer reasons for this further thesis. On the assumption that doxastic justification entails propositional justification, the counterexamples seem to work.

My thesis, which I call the phenomenal basing thesis, is that the evidential basing relation obtains between someone’s belief and evidence E only if the mental state associated with E has phenomenal character. In §2, I explain the thesis and provide background. In §3–§6, I show that the phenomenal basing thesis holds for simple basic beliefs, inferential beliefs, and complex basic beliefs, both when the beliefs are being formed and when they are being sustained.

Necessity holds that, if a proposition A supports another B, then it must support B. John Greco contends that one can resolve Hume's Problem of Induction only if she rejects Necessity in favor of reliabilism. If Greco's contention is correct, we would have good reason to reject Necessity and endorse reliabilism about inferential justification. Unfortunately, Greco's contention is mistaken. I argue that there is a plausible reply to Hume's Problem that both endorses Necessity and is at least as good (...) as Greco's alternative. Hence, Greco provides a good reason for neither rejecting Necessity nor endorsing inferential reliabilism. (shrink)

According to a captivating picture, epistemic justification is essentially a matter of epistemic or evidential likelihood. While certain problems for this view are well known, it is motivated by a very natural thought—if justification can fall short of epistemic certainty, then what else could it possibly be? In this paper I shall develop an alternative way of thinking about epistemic justification. On this conception, the difference between justification and likelihood turns out to be akin to (...) the more widely recognised difference between ceteris paribus laws and brute statistical generalisations. I go on to discuss, in light of this suggestion, issues such as classical and lottery-driven scepticism as well as the lottery and preface paradoxes. (shrink)

In light of the failure of attempts to analyse knowledge as a species of justified belief, a number of epistemologists have suggested that we should instead understand justification in terms of knowledge. This paper focuses on accounts of justification as a kind of ‘would-be’ knowledge. According to such accounts a belief is justified just in case any failure to know is due to uncooperative external circumstances. I argue against two recent accounts of this sort due to Alexander Bird (...) and Martin Smith. A further aim is to defend a more traditional conception, according to which justification is a matter of sufficiently high evidential likelihood. In particular, I suggest that this conception of justification offers a plausible account of lottery cases: cases in which one believes a true proposition – for example that one's lottery ticket will lose – on the basis of probabilistic evidence.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.JUSTIFICATION AS ‘WOULD-BE’ KNOWLEDGEVolume 9, Issue 4Aidan McGlynnDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.22Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle email.@free.kindle.com@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. JUSTIFICATION AS ‘WOULD-BE’ KNOWLEDGEVolume 9, Issue 4Aidan McGlynnDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.22Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. JUSTIFICATION AS ‘WOULD-BE’ KNOWLEDGEVolume 9, Issue 4Aidan McGlynnDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.22Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

Certain plausible evidential requirements and coherence requirements on rationality seem to yield dilemmas of rationality (in a specific, objectionable sense) when put together with the possibility of misleading higher-order evidence. Epistemologists have often taken such dilemmas to be evidence that we’re working with some false principle. In what follows I show how one can jointly endorse an evidential requirement, a coherence requirement, and the possibility of misleading higher-order evidence without running afoul of dilemmas of rationality. The trick lies (...) in observing the difference between attitudes it is rational to hold (= propositional justification) and rationally holding those attitudes (= doxastic justification). (shrink)

Evidential atheism, as espoused by various philosophical atheists, recommends belief that God does not exist on the basis of not just the evidence of which we are aware, but also our overall available evidence. This article identifies a widely neglected problem from potential surprise evidence that undermines an attempt to give a cogent justification of such evidential atheism. In addition, it contends that evidential agnosticism fares better than evidential atheism relative to this neglected problem, and (...) that traditional monotheism has evidential resources, unavailable to evidential atheism, which promise to save it from the fate of evidential atheism. (shrink)

Interpersonalist theories of testimony have the theoretical virtue of giving room to the characteristic interpersonal features of testimonial exchange among persons. Nonetheless, it has been argued that they are at a serious disadvantage when it comes to accounting for the way in which testimonial beliefs may be epistemically justified. In this paper, we defend the epistemological credentials of interpersonalism, emphasizing that it is inseparable from the acceptance of non-evidential epistemic reasons to believe, which demands proper conceptual elaborations on the (...) notions of epistemic reasons and of epistemic justification. We offer a proper reading of epistemic reason, and we defend non-purism on justification as the adequate way to conceive the epistemic proposal of interpersonalism on testimony, realizing that only this combination is capable of apprehending certain cases in which there seems to be no way to rule out the idea that the assurance offered by the testifier offers an epistemic reason to believe that it is not evidential. (shrink)

In the light of the evidence we have, is atheism a justified position? This question has not received the same amount of attention as the justification of theism. This chapter considers evidential objections to atheism, specifically global atheism – the view that there are no gods. I will consider common consent and religious experience as two forms of evidence against global atheism.

David Lewis is associated with the controversial thesis that some properties are more eligible than others to be the referents of our predicates solely in virtue of those properties’ being more natural; independently, that is, of anything to do with our patterns of usage of the relevant predicates. On such a view, the natural properties act as ‘reference magnets’. In this paper I explore (though I do not endorse) a related thesis in epistemology: that some propositions are ‘justification magnets’. (...) According to the doctrine of justification magnetism, we have better justification for some propositions than for others solely in virtue of certain features of those propositions; independently, that is, of anything to do with evidential support or cognitive accomplishment. In the course of discussing an objection to justification magnetism I describe (though I do not endorse) a novel approach to epistemology akin to interpretationism in the theory of reference. (shrink)

The question of trusting introspective reports is a question about evidential warrant or justification. It is therefore a question of epistemology, and it behoves us to approach it within the framework of epistemology, which addresses evidential warrant across a broad spectrum of topics and sources. This paper examines the scientific status of introspective reports from the vantage point of general epistemological theorizing.

William Rowe has offered one of the most simple and convincing evidential arguments from evil by arguing that the existence of gratuitous evil in our world serves as strong evidence against the claim that God exists. Stephen J. Wykstra attempts to defeat this evidential argument from evil by denying the plausibility of Rowe’s claim that there are gratuitous evils in the world. Wykstra sets up an epistemological test that he refers to as CORNEA, and he proceeds to demonstrate (...) that Rowe’s inference to his existential claim is unjustified in light of our particular epistemic situation. Specifically, this inference is unjustified because compensating goods that would be “connected to” any given evil lack what Wykstra calls ‘seeability.’ Without seeability, it is illicit to infer the nonexistence of an object simply from the fact that we cannot detect it, and thus Rowe is denied justification for his first premise. Wysktra’s principle defense of the non-seeability of compensating goods rests on an analogy comparing children and parents to humans and God. I will show that Wykstra’s conclusion regarding the seeability of compensating goods is unjustified given this analogy. Without justification for the claim that some compensating goods lack seeability, Wykstra’s defeater crumbles. (shrink)

This paper critically examines currently influential transparency accounts of our knowledge of our own beliefs that say that self-ascriptions of belief typically are arrived at by “looking outward” onto the world. For example, one version of the transparency account says that one self-ascribes beliefs via an inference from a premise to the conclusion that one believes that premise. This rule of inference reliably yields accurate self-ascriptions because you cannot infer a conclusion from a premise without believing the premise, and so (...) you cannot infer from a premise that you believe the premise unless you do believe it. I argue that this procedure cannot be a source of justification, however, because one can be justified in inferring from p that q only if p amounts to strong evidence that q is true. This is incompatible with the transparency account because p often is not very strong evidence that you believe that p. For example, unless you are a weather expert, the fact that it will rain is not very strong evidence that you believe it will rain. After showing how this intuitive problem can be made precise, I conclude with a broader lesson about the nature of inferential justification: that beliefs, when justified, must be underwritten by beliefs, when justified, must be underwritten by evidential relationships between the facts or propositions which those beliefs represent. (shrink)

Earl Conee and Richard Feldman have recently argued that the evidential support relation should be understood in terms of explanatory coherence: roughly, one's evidence supports a proposition if and only if that proposition is part of the best available explanation of the evidence. Their thesis has been criticized through alleged counterexamples, perhaps the most important of which are cases where a subject has a justified belief about the future. Kevin McCain has defended the thesis against Byerly's counterexample. I argue (...) that McCain's defense is inadequate before pointing toward a more promising solution for explanationism. The Byerly–McCain exchange is important because it casts light on the difficult issues of the standards for justification and the nature of epistemic support. Furthermore, McCain's defense of explanationism about epistemic support represents an important recent development of the burgeoning explanationist program in epistemology and philosophy of science. (shrink)

Say that two goals are normatively coincident just in case one cannot aim for one goal without automatically aiming for the other. While knowledge and justification are distinct epistemic goals, with distinct achievement conditions, this paper begins from the suggestion that they are nevertheless normatively coincident—aiming for knowledge and aiming for justification are one and the same activity. A number of surprising consequences follow from this—both specific consequences about how we can ascribe knowledge and justification in lottery (...) cases and more general consequences about the nature of justification and the relationship between justification and evidential probability. Many of these consequences turn out to be at variance with conventional, prevailing views. (shrink)

Propositional justification pertains to propositions: it is the sort of justification that a proposition enjoys for an agent when the agent is epistemically justified to believe it. By contrast, doxastic justification is justification of beliefs, i.e., of doxastic states actually instantiated by an agent. The ‘orthodox’ view of the relationship between propositional and doxastic justification is that the latter should be explained in terms of the former, so that an agent’s belief is (doxastically) justified just (...) in case (i) it is a belief in a proposition that is (propositionally) justified for the agent and (ii) it is held on the basis of that which (propositionally) justifies its content. This view has been challenged by John Turri in his paper ‘On the Relationship between Propositional and Doxastic Justification’ (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 80, 2010, pp. 312–326). There he offers two putative counterexamples to the orthodoxy and goes on to argue that the order of explanation should be reversed: it is propositional justification that should be explained in terms of doxastic justification, and not vice versa. Though I share Turri’s feeling that there is something amiss with the way a number of contemporary epistemologists talk of propositional and doxastic justification, I do not believe he has managed to put his finger on the real trouble. So the first point I make is that his counterexamples fall short of refuting the orthodox view, which I argue should be maintained. Then I try to diagnose the real source of the trouble. It lies, I suggest, in the way a number of recent epistemologists talk of propositional justification, a way which commits them to the questionable view that the basis upon which facts concerning propositional justification supervene does not include facts concerning the doxastic states of agents, but only facts concerning the evidence to which agents have access. So I observe that there are different degrees of idealisation involved in judgments of ‘propositional justification’, propose to distinguish what an agent is propositionally justified to believe given his overall doxastic state from what an agent is propositionally justified to believe irrespective of his overall doxastic state, and argue that, whenever it is the former relation that is at stake, an agent can be propositionally justified to believe a proposition p at time t only if it is reasonably easy for him to form a doxastically justified belief in p at t. It is most likely an awareness of this fact - or of some fact in the vicinity - that encourages the belief that propositional justification should be explained in terms of doxastic justification. But I suggest that this fact, far from being evidence that the notion of doxastic justification is in any sense more fundamental than that of propositional justification, can be accounted for by paying attention to the relationship that links the relevant sort of (epistemic) justification to (epistemic) responsibility. So I conclude that there is an important sense in which facts concerning epistemic justification supervene not merely on facts concerning the evidential states of agents, but on facts concerning their overall doxastic states. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that the notion of doxastic justification should be explained in terms of the more fundamental notion of propositional justification, a notion which itself explains evidential support relations as a priori knowable. It is argued here, following Goldman, that this is a mistake. Doxastic justification is the more fundamental notion, and once one sees this, one must recognize that evidential support relations have an ineliminable psychological dimension which undermines the claim that they (...) are knowable a priori. (shrink)

Evidentialism is the thesis that epistemic justification for belief supervenes on evidential support. However, we claim there are cases in which, even though two subjects have the same evidential support for a proposition, only one of them is justified. What make the difference are pragmatic factors, factors having to do with our cares and concerns. Our argument against evidentialism is not based on intuitions about particular cases. Rather, we aim to provide a theoretical basis for rejecting evidentialism (...) by defending a “pragmatic” necessary condition on epistemic justification. We argue for the following necessary condition for justification: S is justified in believing that p only if S is rational to prefer (and, hence, act) as if p. In light of this necessary condition, the price of evidentialism is skepticism, or something close to it. (shrink)

This book provides an accessible and up-to-date discussion of contemporary theories of perceptual justification that each highlight different factors related to perception, i.e., conscious experience, higher-order beliefs, and reliable processes. The book’s discussion starts from the viewpoint that perception is not only one of our fundamental sources of knowledge and justification, but also plays this role for many less sophisticated animals. It proposes a scientifically informed reliabilist theory which can accommodate this fact without denying that some of our (...) epistemic abilities as human perceivers are special. This allows it to combine many of our intuitions about the importance of conscious experience and higher-order belief with the controversial thesis that perceptual justification is fundamentally non-evidential in character. (shrink)

Linguistic intuitive judgements are the de facto data source of choice within generative linguistics. But why we are justified in relying on intuitive judgements as evidence for grammars? In the philosophy of linguistics, this question has been hotly debated. I argue that the three most prominent views of that debate all have their problems. Devitt’s Modest Explanation accounts for the wrong kind of intuitive judgements. The Voice of Competence view and Rey’s account both lack independent evidence. I introduce and defend (...) a novel proposal that accounts for the evidential role of linguistic intuitive judgements and avoids these shortcomings. On this account, linguistic intuitive judgements are reports of the speaker’s immediate experience of trying to comprehend the sentence. This experience is due to the speaker’s linguistic competence, at least in part, and so the justification for the evidential use of linguistic intuitions ultimately comes from the speaker’s competence. However, the account does not rely on any special input from the speaker’s competence being available as the basis for linguistic intuitive judgements. (shrink)

The distinction between propositional and doxastic justification is normally applied to belief. The goal of this paper is to apply the distinction to faith and hope. Before doing so, I discuss the nature of faith and hope, and how they contrast with belief—belief has no essential conative component, whereas faith and hope essentially involve the conative. I discuss implications this has for evaluating faith and hope, and apply this to the propositional/doxastic distinction. There are two key upshots. One, bringing (...) in faith and hope makes salient additional normative categories, including the way the distinction between epistemic and practical justification interacts with the distinction between propositional and doxastic justification. Two, a paradigm example of propositional without doxastic justification is a belief that is evidentially supported but based on wishful thinking. Surprisingly, parallel cases of faith and hope may actually enjoy both propositional and doxastic justification. I conclude by exploring what it might look like for faith and hope to have propositional justification without doxastic justification. (shrink)

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)

Some of the most interesting recent work in formal epistemology has focused on developing accuracy-based approaches to justifying Bayesian norms. These approaches are interesting not only because they offer new ways to justify these norms, but because they potentially offer a way to justify all of these norms by appeal to a single, attractive epistemic goal: having accurate beliefs. Recently, Easwaran & Fitelson (2012) have raised worries regarding whether such “all-accuracy” or “purely alethic” approaches can accommodate and justify evidential (...) Bayesian norms. In response, proponents of purely alethic approaches, such as Pettigrew (2013b) and Joyce (2016), have argued that scoring rule arguments provide us with compatible and purely alethic justifications for the traditional Bayesian norms, including evidential norms. In this paper I raise several challenges to this claim. First, I argue that many of the justifications these scoring rule arguments provide are not compatible. Second, I raise worries for the claim that these scoring rule arguments provide purely alethic justifications. Third, I turn to assess the more general question of whether purely alethic justifications for evidential norms are even possible, and argue that, without making some contentious assumptions, they are not. Fourth, I raise some further worries for the possibility of providing purely alethic justifications for content-sensitive evidential norms, like the Principal Principle. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhat conditions must be satisfied if a group is to count as having a justified belief? Jennifer Lackey has recently argued that any adequate account of group justification must be sensitive to both the evidence actually possessed by enough of a group's operative members as well as the evidence those members should have possessed. I first draw attention to a range of objections to Lackey's specific view of group justification and a range of concrete case intuitions any plausible (...) view of group justification must explain. I then offer an alternative view of group justification where the basic idea is that group justification is a matter of groups responsibly responding to their total evidence. This view both avoids the problems facing Lackey's account and also explains the relevant concrete case intuitions. (shrink)

Some series can go on indefinitely, others cannot, and epistemologists want to know in which class to place epistemic chains. Is it sensible or nonsensical to speak of a proposition or belief that is justified by another proposition or belief, ad infinitum? In large part the answer depends on what we mean by “justification.” Epistemologists have failed to find a definition on which everybody agrees, and some have even advised us to stop looking altogether. In spite of this, the (...) present essay submits a few candidate definitions. It argues that, although not giving the final word, these candidates tell us something about the possibility of infinite epistemic chains. And it shows that they can short-circuit a debate about doxastic justification. (shrink)

Beliefs can be evaluated from a number of perspectives. Epistemic evaluation involves epistemic standards and appropriate epistemic goals. On a truthconducive account of epistemic justification, a justified belief is one that serves the goal of believing truths and avoiding falsehoods. Beliefs are also prompted by nonepistemic reasons. This raises the question of whether, say, the pragmatic benefits of a belief are able to rationalize it. In this paper, after criticizing certain responses to this question, I shall argue that, as (...) far as beliefs are concerned, justification has an essentially epistemic character. This conclusion is then qualified by considering the conditions under which pragmatic consequences of a belief can be epistemically relevant. (shrink)

This is a response to a paper by N.M.L. Nathan in which he argues that the attempt to provide a global justification of our entire set of beliefs necessarily leads to an infinite regress, in contrast with cases of local uncertainty, which he thinks can be resolved without regress. I argue that if he is right about the local uncertainty case, then he should not fear a regress in the global case, as the two situations are more similar than (...) he supposes. (shrink)

Crispin Wright has advanced a number of arguments to show that, in addition to evidential warrant, we have a species of non-evidential warrant, namely, “entitlement”, which forms the basis of a particular view of the architecture of perceptual justification known as “epistemic conservatism”. It is widely known, however, that Wright's conservative view is beset by a number of problems. In this article, I shall argue that the kind of warrant that emerges from Wright's account is not the (...) standard truth-conducive justification, but what is known as the deontological conception of justification. It will be argued that the deontological justification has features that make it a better candidate for representing a conservative architecture. These results will be reinforced by showing how the deontological framework can make better sense of a recent theory of justified belief that takes its inspiration from Wright's conservative account. Thus understood, we may see the liberalism–conservatism controversy as actually an extension of the older debate over which conception of justification, truth-conducive or deontological, can best represent the epistemic status of our belief-forming practices. (shrink)

The rhetoric-analytic critique of experimental psychology owes its apparent attractiveness to (a) some erroneous ideas about cognitive psychology and the rationale of experimentation, (b) the failure to distinguish between prior data and evidential data vis-à-vis the to-be-corroborated explanatory theory, and (c) evidential data owes their identity to a theory that is independent of the theory being tested. Theories in cognitive psychology are accepted because they can withstand concerted efforts to falsify them.

Although research on epistemic injustice has focused on the effects of prejudice in epistemic exchanges, the account of prejudice that emerges in Fricker’s (2007) view is not completely clear. In particular, I claim that the epistemic role of prejudice in the structure of testimonial justification is still in need of a satisfactory explanation. What special epistemic power does prejudice exercise that prevents the speaker’s words from constituting evidence for the hearer’s belief? By clarifying this point, it will be possible (...) to address two more general issues concerning the nature of prejudice: its resistance to counterevidence and the steps involved in overcoming prejudice. I propose a hinge account of prejudice, based on the recent perspective of hinge epistemology, to help clarify these aspects. According to the hinge account, prejudices share a fundamental feature with hinges: they work as norms of evidential significance, and as such, they determine what can and cannot count as evidence for belief. (shrink)

While it is commonly accepted that justified beliefs must be strongly supported by evidence and that support comes in degrees, the question of how much evidential support one needs in order to have a justified belief remains. In this paper, I consider how the question about degrees of evidential support connects with recent debates between consequentialist and deontological explanations of epistemic norms. I argue that explaining why strong, but not conclusive, evidential support is required for justification (...) should be one explanandum that such theories seek to explain. Furthermore, I argue that foundational theories that appeal to the promotion of epistemic value (especially consequentialism, but perhaps also some versions of epistemic deontology) are better suited to provide such an explanation. (shrink)

Kevin McCain’s Evidentialism and Epistemic Justification is the most thorough defense of evidentialism to date. In this work, McCain proposes insightful new theses to fill in underdeveloped parts of evidentialism. One of these new theses is an explanationist account of evidential fit that appeals to dispositional properties. We argue that this explanationist account faces counterexamples, and that, more generally, explanationists should not understand evidential fit in terms of dispositional properties.

Criticizing psychologism about logic in the Foreword of Grundgesetze, Frege examines an answer to the question of how we can justify our acknowledgment of logical axioms as true—the logical laws that cannot be proved from other laws. The answer he entertains states that we cannot reject logical axioms if we do not want to give up our judgment altogether. Suspending his judgment about this answer, Frege points out that it is still compatible with his anti-psychologist conception of logic. There are (...) two issues with this paragraph. First, it is difficult to read this paragraph consistently. Second, it is not clear why Frege brings up this particular view regarding the justification for logical axioms in the middle of his criticism of psychologism. This paper develops a consistent interpretation of this paragraph. The view on the justification for logical axioms, which Frege is dealing with, is neo-Kantian. In the paragraph, Frege is criticizing a psychologistic misunderstanding of the neo-Kantian justification for logical axioms. The way Frege explains away this misunderstanding shows that he takes the neo-Kantian justification for logical axioms to be a non-evidential epistemic warrant if it is an epistemic warrant. It is this notion of non-evidential epistemic warrant that Frege suspends his judgment about. Thus, the paragraph shows that Frege has a reason to have reservations about neo-Kantianism. Furthermore, it turns out that the sole issue between Frege and psychological logicians is whether truth is objective, which provides a different way to explain away a much-discussed tension between Begriffsschrift and Frege's anti-psychologism. (shrink)

When does a group justifiedly believe that p? One answer to this question has been developed first by Schmitt and then by Hakli: when the group members jointly accept a reason for the belief. Call this the joint acceptance account of group justification. Their answer has great explanatory power, providing us with a way to account for cases in which the group's justification can diverge from the justification individual members have. Unfortunately, Jennifer Lackey developed a powerful argument (...) against joint acceptance accounts. She argues that these accounts lead to epistemically arbitrary reasons and therefore justification at will. Group justification loses the necessary connection to the world to be truth-conducive. In this paper I develop a new form of a joint acceptance account that can deal with Lackey's examples: the anchored joint acceptance account of group justification. I argue that properly understanding the role of epistemic expectations can help us form the best version of a joint acceptance account. While justification is only generated by joint acceptance of evidence, the evidential expectations towards a group are anchored in the group members. This anchoring guarantees that groups cannot manipulate their ultima facie justification illegitimately. (shrink)

In this paper I critically discuss and, in the end, reject Morgan’s Canon, a popular principle in comparative psychology. According to this principle we should always prefer explanations of animal behavior in terms of lower psychological processes over explanations in terms of higher psychological processes, when alternative explanations are possible. The validity of the principle depends on two things, a clear understanding of what it means for psychological processes to be higher or lower relative to each other and a (...) class='Hi'>justification of a general preference for explanations that refer to lower psychological abilities. However, I argue that we cannot spell out the idea of a psychological scale in a way that claim is satisfied. I start with the discussion of different interpretations of the notion of a psychological scale. In Sect. 3, I discuss different possible strategies to justify any of those interpretations and argue that all of them fail. Finally, in Sect. 4, I generalize the argument for all possible interpretations of Morgan’s Canon and propose an alternative strategy: We should base our interpretations of animal behavior on more general principles such as evidential support and explanatory power, as followed in other scientific domains. (shrink)

In his recent book Albert Casullo rejects the claim that if a belief is defeasible by non-experiential evidence then it is defeasible by experiential evidence. This claim is a crucial premise in a simple argument for the experiential defeasibility of a priori justification. I defend the premise against Casullo's objection, the main problem with which is that he does not take into account the evidential role of multiple corroborating sources of testimony. I conclude that the crucial premise is (...) true and that the simple argument is sound; thus many of our a priori justified beliefs are experientially defeasible. (shrink)