Justified Belief from Unjustified Belief

Under what conditions is a belief inferentially justified? A partial answer is found in Justification from Justification (JFJ): a belief is inferentially justified only if all of the beliefs from which it is essentially inferred are justified. After reviewing some important features of JFJ, I offer a counterexample to it. Then I outline a positive suggestion for how to think about inferentially justified beliefs while still retaining a basing condition. I end by concluding that epistemologists need a model of inferentially justified belief that is more permissive and more complex than JFJ.     

Truly Justified Belief

I defend the view that justified belief is preferable to plain belief only because the former enhances the likelihood that the belief is true: call that sort of justification truth-linked. A collection of philosophical theories either state outright that this is not so, imply it via other doctrines, or adopt a notion of truth that renders the link innocuous. The discussion proceeds as follows. Issues and various positions are outlined, and needed qualifications are entered (parts I-III). We then note general shortcomings of all views rejecting the truth-link, and critically examine a powerful thought experiment underlying the rejection (part IV). In the final sections we explore two other challenges to the truth-link. First (part V), we consider forms of idealized justification theory that would imply the independence of justification from the relevant sort of truth conduciveness; next (part VI) we investigate a view, Pragmatism, which maintains that epistemic justification is sanctioned by ends other than a tendency towards truth.     

Skepticism and the Vagaries of Justified Belief

Philosophical Studies -     

Appearances,Rationality, and Justified Belief

One might think that its seeming to you that p makes you justified in believing that p. After all, when you have no defeating beliefs, it would be irrational to have it seem to you that p but not believe it. That view is plausible for perceptual justification, problematic in the case of memory, and clearly wrong for inferential justification. I propose a view of rationality and justified belief that deals happily with inference and memory. Appearances are to be evaluated as ‘sound’ or ‘unsound.’ Only a sound appearance can give rise to a justified belief, yet even an unsound appearance can ‘rationally require’ the subject to form the belief. Some of our intuitions mistake that rational requirement for the belief’s being justified. The resulting picture makes it plausible that there are also unsound perceptual appearances. I suggest that to have a sound perceptually basic appearance that p, one must see that p.     

Justified Belief: Knowledge First‐Style

Recent knowledge first epistemology features a number of different accounts of justified belief, including a knowledge first reductionism according to which to believe justifiably is to know Sutton ( 2005, 2007 ), Littlejohn (Forthcoming a, b), Williamson ( 2000 , 2010 ), a knowledge first version of accessibilism Millar ( 2010 ) and a knowledge first version of mentalism Bird ( 2007 ). This paper offers a knowledge first version of virtue epistemology and argues that it is preferable to its knowledge first epistemological rivals: only knowledge first virtue epistemology manages to steer clear of a number of problems that its competition encounters.     

Justified vs. Warranted Perceptual Belief: Resisting Disjunctivism

In this paper I argue that McDowell's brand of disjunctivism about perceptual knowledge is ill-motivated. First, I present a reconstruction of one main motivation for disjunctivism, in the form of an argument that theories that posit a "highest common factor" between veridical and non-veridical experiences must be wrong. Then I show that the argument owes its plausibility to a failure to distinguish between justification and warrant (where "warrant" is understood as whatever has to be added to true belief to yield knowledge).     

Humean dispositionalism

Humean metaphysics is characterized by a rejection of necessary connections between distinct existences. Dispositionalists claim that there are basic causal powers. The existence of such properties is widely held to be incompatible with the Humean rejection of necessary connections. In this paper I present a novel theory of causal powers that vindicates the dispositionalist claim that causal powers are basic, without embracing brute necessary connections. The key assumptions of the theory are that there are natural types of causal processes, and that manifestations of powers are identified with certain kinds of causal processes. From these assumptions, the modal features of powers are explained in terms of internal relations between powers themselves and the process-types in which powers are manifested.     

Humean nomic essentialism

Humeanism – the idea that there are no necessary connections between distinct existences – and Nomic Essentialism – the idea that properties essentially play the nomic roles that they do – are two of the most important and influential positions in the metaphysics of science. Traditionally, it has been thought that these positions were incompatible competitors. We disagree. We argue that there is an attractive version of Humeanism that captures the idea that, for example, mass essentially plays the role that it actually does in the laws of nature. In this paper we consider the arguments that have lead many to conclude that Humeanism cannot be combined with Nomic Essentialism; we identify the weaknesses in these arguments; and we argue in detail that a version of Humeanism based on a variant of the Best System account of laws captures the key intuitions behind nomic essentialism.     

Humean and Anti‐Humean Internalism About Moral Judgements1

Motivational internalism about moral judgements is the plausible view that accepting a moral judgement is necessarily connected to motivation motivation. However, it conflicts with the Humean theory that motives must be constituted by desires. Simple versions of internalism run into problems with people who do not desire to do what they believe right. This has long been urged by David Brink. Hence, many internalists have adopted more subtle defeasible views, on which only rational agents will have a desire to act. I will argue that more complex versions run into problems with self‐effacing values of the sort Parfit highlights in another context. Such values can only be attained indirectly. After proposing a general account of motivation suited to the internalist thesis, I argue that Anti‐Humeanism is better suited to accommodating the internalist insight.     

Justified Judging

Traditional approaches to epistemology have sought, unsuccessfully, to define knowledge in terms of justification. I follow Timothy Williamson in arguing that this is misconceived and that we should take knowledge as our fundamental epistemological notion. We can then characterise justification as a certain sort of approximation to knowledge. A judgement is justified if and only if the reason (if there is one) for a failure to know is to be found outside the subject's mental states; that is, justified judging is possible knowing (where one world accessible from another if and only if they are identical with regard to a subject's antecedent mental states and judgement forming processes). This view is explained and defended.     

Humean Moral Knowledge

I develop resources from Hume to account for moral knowledge in the qualified sense developed by Bernard Williams, according to which the proper application of thick ethical terms constitutes moral knowledge. By applying to moral discernment the criteria of the good aesthetic critic, as explained in Hume's “Of the Standard of Taste”, we can see how Humean moral knowledge might be possible. For each of these criteria, an analogous trait would contribute to moral discernment. These traits would enable moral judges to distinguish valid from invalid uses of thick moral terms. The deliverances of such judgments constitute mitigated moral knowledge, as opposed to knowledge in the stricter sense that Hume clearly says cannot be had of moral distinctions. This account has the potential to explain how moral judgments may be valid or invalid without appealing to unique operations of the understanding and how moral knowledge might escape the threat, identified by Williams, of reflective destruction.     

Justified inference

This paper proposes a general account of the epistemological significance of inference. This account rests on the assumption that the concept of a ??justified?? belief or inference is a normative concept. It also rests on a conception of belief that distinguishes both (a) between conditional and unconditional beliefs and (b) between enduring belief states and mental events of forming or reaffirming a belief, and interprets all of these different kinds of belief as coming in degrees. Conceptions of ??rational coherence?? and ??competent inference?? are then formulated, in terms of the undefeated instances of certain rules of inference. It is proposed that (non-accidental) rational coherence is a necessary and sufficient condition of justified enduring belief states, while competent inference always results in a justified mental event of some kind. This proposal turns out to tell against the view that there are any non-trivial cases of ??warrant transmission failure??. Finally, it is explained how these proposals can answer the objections that philosophers have raised against the idea that justified belief is ??closed?? under competent inference.     

Humean supervenience and best-system laws

David Lewis has proposed an analysis of lawhood in terms of membership of a system of regularities optimizing simplicity and strength in information content. This article studies his proposal against the broader background of the project of Humean supervenience. In particular, I claim that, in Lewis's account of lawhood, his intuition about small deviations from a given law in nearby worlds (in order to avoid backtracking and epiphenomena) leads to the conclusion that laws do not support (certain) counterfactuals and do not bestow nomic necessity on (certain) facts induced by these laws. Support of counterfactuals and nomic necessity, however, are widely held to be important aspects of the concept of lawhood. In my view, therefore, it is not possible to abandon these criteria in any satisfactory analysis of the notion of laws of nature. In a final section, I suggest that the whole project of Humean supervenience is misleading. It does not sufficiently take notice of the important role that reasoning about contrary-to-fact situations plays in modern scientific practice.     

Intrinsic Causation in Humean Supervenience

The paper investigates whether causation is extrinsic in Humean Supervenience (HS) in the sense that being caused by is an intrinsic relation between token causes and effects. The underlying goal is to test whether causality is extrinsic for Humeans and intrinsic for anti‐Humeans in this sense. I argue that causation is typically extrinsic in HS, but it is intrinsic to event pairs that collectively exhaust almost the whole of history. 1