Justification (epistemology)

Last updated August 02, 2024

Justification (also called epistemic justification) is the property of belief that qualifies it as knowledge rather than mere opinion. Epistemology is the study of reasons that someone holds a belief (although the term is also sometimes applied to other propositional attitudes such as doubt).^[1] Epistemologists are concerned with various features of belief, which include the ideas of warrant (a proper justification for holding a belief), knowledge, rationality, and probability, among others.

Debates surrounding epistemic justification often involve the structure of justification, including whether there are foundational justified beliefs or whether mere coherence is sufficient for a system of beliefs to qualify as justified. Another major subject of debate is the sources of justification, which might include perceptual experience (the evidence of the senses), reason, and authoritative testimony, among others.

Justification and knowledge

"Justification" involves the reasons why someone holds a belief that one should hold based on one's current evidence.^[1] Justification is a property of beliefs insofar as they are held blamelessly. In other words, a justified belief is a belief that a person is entitled to hold.

Many philosophers from Plato onward have treated "justified true belief" (JTB) as constituting knowledge. It is particularly associated with a theory discussed in his dialogues Meno and Theaetetus . While in fact Plato seems to disavow justified true belief as constituting knowledge at the end of Theaetetus, the claim that Plato unquestioningly accepted this view of knowledge stuck until the proposal of the Gettier problem.^[1]

The subject of justification has played a major role in the value of knowledge as "justified true belief".^{[ citation needed ]} Some contemporary epistemologists, such as Jonathan Kvanvig assert that justification isn't necessary in getting to the truth and avoiding errors. Kvanvig attempts to show that knowledge is no more valuable than true belief, and in the process dismissed the necessity of justification due to justification not being connected to the truth.^{[ citation needed ]}

Conceptions of justification

William P. Alston identifies two conceptions of justification.^[2]^: 15–16 One conception is "deontological" justification, which holds that justification evaluates the obligation and responsibility of a person having only true beliefs. This conception implies, for instance, that a person who has made his best effort but is incapable of concluding the correct belief from his evidence is still justified. The deontological conception of justification corresponds to epistemic internalism. Another conception is "truth-conducive" justification, which holds that justification is based on having sufficient evidence or reasons that entails that the belief is at least likely to be true. The truth-conductive conception of justification corresponds to epistemic externalism.

Theories of justification

There are several different views as to what entails justification, mostly focusing on the question "How sure do we need to be that our beliefs correspond to the actual world?" Different theories of justification require different conditions before a belief can be considered justified. Theories of justification generally include other aspects of epistemology, such as defining knowledge.

Notable theories of justification include:

Foundationalism –Basic beliefs justify other, non-basic beliefs.
Epistemic coherentism –Beliefs are justified if they cohere with other beliefs a person holds, each belief is justified if it coheres with the overall system of beliefs.
Infinitism –Beliefs are justified by infinite chains of reasons.
Foundherentism –Both fallible foundations and coherence are components of justification—proposed by Susan Haack.
Internalism and externalism –The believer must be able to justify a belief through internal knowledge (internalism), or outside sources of knowledge (externalism).
Reformed epistemology –Beliefs are warranted by proper cognitive function—proposed by Alvin Plantinga.
Evidentialism –Beliefs depend solely on the evidence for them.
Reliabilism –A belief is justified if it is the result of a reliable process.
Infallibilism –Knowledge is incompatible with the possibility of being wrong.
Fallibilism –Claims can be accepted even though they cannot be conclusively proven or justified.
Non-justificationism –Knowledge is produced by attacking claims and refuting them instead of justifying them.
Skepticism –Knowledge is impossible or undecidable.

Criticism of theories of justification

Robert Fogelin claims to detect a suspicious resemblance between the theories of justification and Agrippa's five modes leading to the suspension of belief. He concludes that the modern proponents have made no significant progress in responding to the ancient modes of Pyrrhonian skepticism.^[3]

William P. Alston criticizes the very idea of a theory of justification. He claims: "There isn't any unique, epistemically crucial property of beliefs picked out by 'justified'. Epistemologists who suppose the contrary have been chasing a will-o'-the-wisp. What has really been happening is this. Different epistemologists have been emphasizing, concentrating on, "pushing" different epistemic desiderata, different features of belief that are positively valuable from the standpoint of the aims of cognition."^[2]^: 22

Related Research Articles

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. It studies the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues. Debates in contemporary epistemology are generally clustered around four core areas:

Foundationalism concerns philosophical theories of knowledge resting upon non-inferential justified belief, or some secure foundation of certainty such as a conclusion inferred from a basis of sound premises. The main rival of the foundationalist theory of justification is the coherence theory of justification, whereby a body of knowledge, not requiring a secure foundation, can be established by the interlocking strength of its components, like a puzzle solved without prior certainty that each small region was solved correctly.

Reliabilism, a category of theories in the philosophical discipline of epistemology, has been advanced as a theory both of justification and of knowledge. Process reliabilism has been used as an argument against philosophical skepticism, such as the brain in a vat thought experiment. Process reliabilism is a form of epistemic externalism.

In epistemology, the regress argument is the argument that any proposition requires a justification. However, any justification itself requires support. This means that any proposition whatsoever can be endlessly (infinitely) questioned, resulting in infinite regress. It is a problem in epistemology and in any general situation where a statement has to be justified.

The Gettier problem, in the field of epistemology, is a landmark philosophical problem concerning the understanding of descriptive knowledge. Attributed to American philosopher Edmund Gettier, Gettier-type counterexamples challenge the long-held justified true belief (JTB) account of knowledge. The JTB account holds that knowledge is equivalent to justified true belief; if all three conditions are met of a given claim, then we have knowledge of that claim. In his 1963 three-page paper titled "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?", Gettier attempts to illustrate by means of two counterexamples that there are cases where individuals can have a justified, true belief regarding a claim but still fail to know it because the reasons for the belief, while justified, turn out to be false. Thus, Gettier claims to have shown that the JTB account is inadequate because it does not account for all of the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge.

In philosophical epistemology, there are two types of coherentism: the coherence theory of truth, and the coherence theory of justification.

Empirical evidence for a proposition is evidence, i.e. what supports or counters this proposition, that is constituted by or accessible to sense experience or experimental procedure. Empirical evidence is of central importance to the sciences and plays a role in various other fields, like epistemology and law.

Evidentialism is a thesis in epistemology which states that one is justified to believe something if and only if that person has evidence which supports said belief. Evidentialism is, therefore, a thesis about which beliefs are justified and which are not.

Virtue epistemology is a current philosophical approach to epistemology that stresses the importance of intellectual and specifically epistemic virtues. Virtue epistemology evaluates knowledge according to the properties of the persons who hold beliefs in addition to or instead of the properties of the propositions and beliefs. Some advocates of virtue epistemology also adhere to theories of virtue ethics, while others see only loose analogy between virtue in ethics and virtue in epistemology.

In the philosophy of religion, Reformed epistemology is a school of philosophical thought concerning the nature of knowledge (epistemology) as it applies to religious beliefs. The central proposition of Reformed epistemology is that beliefs can be justified by more than evidence alone, contrary to the positions of evidentialism, which argues that while non-evidential belief may be beneficial, it violates some epistemic duty. Central to Reformed epistemology is the proposition that belief in God may be "properly basic" and not need to be inferred from other truths to be rationally warranted. William Lane Craig describes Reformed epistemology as "One of the most significant developments in contemporary religious epistemology ... which directly assaults the evidentialist construal of rationality."

Naturalized epistemology is a collection of philosophic views about the theory of knowledge that emphasize the role of natural scientific methods. This shared emphasis on scientific methods of studying knowledge shifts the focus of epistemology away from many traditional philosophical questions, and towards the empirical processes of knowledge acquisition. There are noteworthy distinctions within naturalized epistemology. Replacement naturalism maintains that we should abandon traditional epistemology and replace it with the methodologies of the natural sciences. The general thesis of cooperative naturalism is that traditional epistemology can benefit in its inquiry by using the knowledge we have gained from cognitive sciences. Substantive naturalism focuses on an asserted equality of facts of knowledge and natural facts.

Laurence BonJour is an American philosopher and Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Washington.

Alvin Ira Goldman is an American philosopher who is emeritus Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a leading figure in epistemology.

Metaepistemology is the branch of epistemology and metaphilosophy that studies the underlying assumptions made in debates in epistemology, including those concerning the existence and authority of epistemic facts and reasons, the nature and aim of epistemology, and the methodology of epistemology.

Infallibilism is the epistemological view that propositional knowledge is incompatible with the possibility of being wrong.

Infinitism is the view that knowledge may be justified by an infinite chain of reasons. It belongs to epistemology, the branch of philosophy that considers the possibility, nature, and means of knowledge.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to epistemology:

Epistemology or theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge. It addresses the questions "What is knowledge?", "How is knowledge acquired?", "What do people know?", "How do we know what we know?", and "Why do we know what we know?". Much of the debate in this field has focused on analyzing the nature of knowledge and how it relates to similar notions such as truth, belief, and justification. It also deals with the means of production of knowledge, as well as skepticism about different knowledge claims.

Jennifer Lackey is an American academic; she is the Wayne and Elizabeth Jones Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. Lackey is known for her research in epistemology, especially on testimony, disagreement, memory, the norms of assertion, and virtue epistemology. She is the author of Learning from Words: Testimony as a Source of Knowledge and of numerous articles and book chapters. She is also co-editor of The Epistemology of Testimony and The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays.

Definitions of knowledge try to determine the essential features of knowledge. Closely related terms are conception of knowledge, theory of knowledge, and analysis of knowledge. Some general features of knowledge are widely accepted among philosophers, for example, that it constitutes a cognitive success or an epistemic contact with reality and that propositional knowledge involves true belief. Most definitions of knowledge in analytic philosophy focus on propositional knowledge or knowledge-that, as in knowing that Dave is at home, in contrast to knowledge-how (know-how) expressing practical competence. However, despite the intense study of knowledge in epistemology, the disagreements about its precise nature are still both numerous and deep. Some of those disagreements arise from the fact that different theorists have different goals in mind: some try to provide a practically useful definition by delineating its most salient feature or features, while others aim at a theoretically precise definition of its necessary and sufficient conditions. Further disputes are caused by methodological differences: some theorists start from abstract and general intuitions or hypotheses, others from concrete and specific cases, and still others from linguistic usage. Additional disagreements arise concerning the standards of knowledge: whether knowledge is something rare that demands very high standards, like infallibility, or whether it is something common that requires only the possession of some evidence.

References

1 2 3 "Epistemic Justification". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Archived from the original on 3 August 2020. Retrieved 6 July 2020.
1 2 William. P. Alston, Beyond "Justification": dimensions of epistemic evaluation, Cornell University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-8014-4291-5
↑ Robert J. Fogelin, Pyrrhonian Reflections on Knowledge and Justification, Oxford University Press, 1994, ISBN 978-0-19-508987-5

External links

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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[IEP_Just-1] 1 2 3 "Epistemic Justification". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Archived from the original on 3 August 2020. Retrieved 6 July 2020.

[Alston-2] 1 2 William. P. Alston, Beyond "Justification": dimensions of epistemic evaluation, Cornell University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-8014-4291-5

[3] Robert J. Fogelin, Pyrrhonian Reflections on Knowledge and Justification, Oxford University Press, 1994, ISBN 978-0-19-508987-5

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v t e Epistemology
Epistemologists	Thomas Aquinas Augustine of Hippo William Alston Robert Audi A. J. Ayer George Berkeley Laurence BonJour Gilles Deleuze Keith DeRose René Descartes John Dewey Fred Dretske Edmund Gettier Alvin Goldman Nelson Goodman Paul Grice Anil Gupta Susan Haack David Hume Immanuel Kant Søren Kierkegaard Peter Klein Saul Kripke Hilary Kornblith David Lewis John Locke G. E. Moore John McDowell Robert Nozick Alvin Plantinga Plato Duncan Pritchard James Pryor Hilary Putnam W. V. O. Quine Thomas Reid Bertrand Russell Gilbert Ryle Wilfrid Sellars Susanna Siegel Ernest Sosa P. F. Strawson Baruch Spinoza Timothy Williamson Ludwig Wittgenstein Nicholas Wolterstorff Vienna Circle more...
Theories	Coherentism Constructivism Contextualism Empiricism Evolutionary epistemology Fallibilism Feminist epistemology Fideism Foundationalism Holism Infinitism Innatism Naïve realism Naturalized epistemology Phenomenalism Positivism Rationalism Reductionism Reliabilism Representational realism Skepticism Transcendental idealism
Concepts	A priori knowledge A posteriori knowledge Analysis Analytic–synthetic distinction Belief Common sense Descriptive knowledge Exploratory thought Epistemic injustice Epistemic virtue Gettier problem Induction Internalism and externalism Justification Knowledge Objectivity Privileged access Problem of induction Problem of other minds Perception Procedural knowledge Proposition Regress argument Simplicity Truth more...
Related articles	Outline of epistemology Faith and rationality Formal epistemology Metaepistemology Philosophy of perception Philosophy of science Social epistemology Virtue epistemology
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