Evidence and Its Limits

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clayton Littlejohn
Keyword(s):  
Epistemic Justification ◽  
Normative Reasons ◽  
Justified Belief ◽  
Evidential Support ◽  
Way Of Thinking

On a standard way of thinking about the relationships between evidence, reasons, and epistemic justification, a subject’s evidence consists of her potential reasons for her beliefs, these reasons constitute the normative reasons that bear on whether to believe, and justification is taken to result from relations between a subject’s potential reasons for her beliefs and those beliefs. This chapter argues that this view makes a number of mistakes about the rational roles of reasons and evidence and explores some parallels between practical and theoretical reasons. Just as justified action is unobjectionable action, justified belief is unobjectionable belief. Just as you cannot object to someone deciding to do something simply on the grounds that their reasons for acting didn’t give them strong reason to act, you cannot object to someone believing something simply on the grounds that they didn’t believe for reasons that gave their beliefs strong evidential support.

Mystical Experience and Non–Basically Justified Belief

1989 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-345 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. Levine
Keyword(s):  
Mystical Experience ◽  
Basic Belief ◽  
Empirical Knowledge ◽  
Epistemic Warrant ◽  
Justified Belief ◽  
Evidential Support ◽  
Basic Beliefs

Two theses are central to foundationalism. First, the foundationalist claims that there is a class of propositions, a class of empirical contingent beliefs, that are ‘immediately justified’. Alternatively, one can describe these beliefs as ‘self–evident’, ‘non–inferentially justified’, or ‘self–warranted’, though these are not always regarded as entailing one another. The justification or epistemic warrant for these beliefs is not derived from other justified beliefs through inductive evidential support or deductive methods of inference. These ‘basic beliefs’ constitute the foundations of empirical knowledge. One can give a reason for the justification of a basic belief even though the justification for that belief is not based on other beliefs. Thus, according to Chisholm, if asked what one's justification was for thinking that one knew, presently, that one is thinking about a city one takes to be Albuquerque, one could simply say ‘what justifies me…is simply the fact that I am thinking about a city I take to be Albuquerque’.

scholarly journals Two externalist accounts of epistemic justification

2011 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-23
Author(s):  
Zivan Lazovic
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Process ◽  
Epistemic Justification ◽  
The State ◽  
Process Theory ◽  
Causal History ◽  
Justified Belief ◽  
Reliable Indication ◽  
History Of ◽  
State Of Affairs

This article deals with two prominent versions of externalist account of epistemic justification, the reliable indication theory and the reliable process theory. According to the reliable indication theory, a belief is justified if it provides a reliable indication of the occurence of the state of affairs which makes it true. The reliable process theory holds that a belief is justified if it has been formed by a reliable cognitive process. The main contentions of this two accounts are analyzed and compared in the light of three more general and fundamental externalist ideas: (1) justification need not be cognitive available to the person whose belief is in question; (2) justification should be connected to the truth of the belief in such a way that it makes the case that one?s epistemically justified belief is likely to be true; and (3) justification of one?s belief depends on the causal history of the belief.

scholarly journals Justificação, Probabilidade e Independência

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-230
Author(s):  
André Neiva ◽  
Tatiane Marks
Keyword(s):  
Epistemic Justification ◽  
Bayesian Framework ◽  
Epistemic Probability ◽  
Underlying Assumption ◽  
Restricted Version ◽  
Evidential Support ◽  
Qualitative Confirmation

Epistemic justification has been widely accepted as both a gradational and relational notion. Given those properties, a natural thought is to take degrees of epistemic justification to be probabilities. In this paper, we present a simple Bayesian framework for justification. In the first part, after putting the model in an evidentialist form, we distinguish different senses of “being evidence for” and “confirming”. Next, we argue that this conception should accommodate the two relevant kinds of qualitative confirmation or evidential support. In the second part of the paper, we discuss the claim that this view is unable to satisfy the modified version of the conjunction closure for beliefs in probabilistically independent propositions. We defend that the underlying assumption on which this objection depends leads to an improper reading of the concept of epistemic probability. After providing a better interpretation of it, we put forward a rationale, which is based on the notion of conditional uncertainty, in support of a more plausible and restricted version of the closure of justification under conjunction.

Deductive Justification

Dialogue ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine M. Canary ◽  
Douglas Odegard
Keyword(s):  
Epistemic Justification ◽  
Reflection Principle ◽  
Valid Argument ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Justified Belief ◽  
Critical Attention

The principle that epistemic justification is necessarily transmitted to all the known logical consequences of a justified belief continues to attract critical attention. That attention is not misplaced. If the Transmission Principle is valid, anyone who thinks that a given belief is justified must defend the view that every known consequence of the belief is also justification of the conclusion in an obviously valid argument. Once created, the gap is hard to fill, whatever the circumstances. Reflection principle is modified, the possibility of deductive justification is threatened. If some known consequence fails to be justified, the failure may extend to every known consequence. To reject Transmission is to insert a logical gap between the justification of a premise and the justification of the conclusion in an obviously valid argument. Once created, the gap is hard to fill, whatever the circumstances. Reflection on the Transmission Principle therefore usefully brings us face to face with the following dilemma: accept the principle and hand Cartesian scepticism a powerful weapon, or modify the principle and risk undermining deductive justification.

Appearance and Explanation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin McCain ◽  
Luca Moretti
Keyword(s):  
Epistemic Justification ◽  
Total Evidence ◽  
Complete Theory ◽  
Phenomenal Conservatism ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Evidential Support ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

McCain and Moretti develop a new appearance/seemings-based theory of epistemic justification. This theory, Phenomenal Explanationism, takes as a reasonable starting point the idea that how things appear provides evidence about how the world is. However, unlike other appearance-based theories, Phenomenal Explanationism does not rely on an overly simplistic account of evidential support where things appearing a particular way is sufficient for rationally believing they are that way. Instead, Phenomenal Explanationism takes the insight that appearances are evidence and imbeds it into a broader explanationist framework. In this broader framework the world appearing a particular way provides sufficient justification for believing the world is that way just in case the world being the way it appears best explains the total evidence. Although Phenomenal Explanationism draws inspiration from Phenomenal Conservatism and explanationist theories, it is superior to both in that it offers a satisfying, complete theory of epistemic justification.

scholarly journals Reasons for Belief and Normativity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathrin Glüer ◽  
Åsa Wikforss
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Epistemic Justification ◽  
Normative Reasons ◽  
Reasons For Belief ◽  
Internal Connection

In this chapter, we critically examine the most important extant ways of understanding and motivating the idea that reasons for belief are normative. First, we examine the proposal that the distinction between explanatory and so-called normative reasons that is commonly drawn in moral philosophy can be rather straightforwardly applied to reasons for belief, and that reasons for belief are essentially normative precisely when they are normative reasons. In the course of this investigation, we explore the very nature of the reasons-for-belief relation, as well as the ontology of such reasons. Second, we examine the idea that the normativity derives from the internal connection between reasons for belief and epistemic justification, distinguishing between two distinct normativist accounts of justification, a weaker and a stronger one. We argue that neither line of argument is compelling. Pending further arguments, we conclude that normativism about reasons for belief is not supported.

scholarly journals Internalism and the problem of an isolated epistemic community

2008 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Zivan Lazovic
Keyword(s):  
Epistemic Justification ◽  
Epistemic Community ◽  
Justified Belief ◽  
Internalist Account

In this paper the author deals with one form of relativism which stems from the internalist account of epistemic justification. In the recent epistemological literature this form of relativism is usually indicated as the problem of an isolated epistemic community. By way of an example concerning an isolated epistemic community, it is shown that internalism is unable to provide a consistent account of epistemic justification due to the fact that internalist justification cannot secure the objective connection between beliefs and truth making it the case that one's epistemically justified belief is likely to be true. That means that in explaining epistemic justification we have to resort to some externalist requirements.

scholarly journals Reasons and Theoretical Rationality

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clayton Littlejohn
Keyword(s):  
Epistemic Rationality ◽  
Normative Reasons ◽  
Evidential Support ◽  
Support Relations ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores the relationship between reasons and epistemic rationality. In recent debates about rationality and evidence, internalist evidentialism is quite popular. Using this theory as our stalking horse, we examine debates about the ontology of evidence and reasons, a puzzle about rationality and evidential support relations, work on the relationship between reasons and rationality, and some underexplored issues concerning the relationship between knowledge, evidence, and normative reasons. We shall see that there are good grounds for thinking that the normative reasons that matter in epistemology are not always pieces of evidence, that there is no simple story about the relationship between believing rationally and responding correctly to the evidence or the reasons, that there are problems with formal accounts of evidential support, and that attractive views about the ontology of reasons suggest that it can be rational to believe without having a belief based on reasons.

Reasoning

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Epistemic Justification ◽  
Practical Reasoning ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Volume Flow ◽  
Justified Belief ◽  
Central Topic ◽  
New Directions ◽  
Normative Requirements

Reasoning is just beginning to emerge as a central topic in its own right in analytic philosophy. One reason for this is the growing interest in the epistemology of inference. What justifies us in making some inferences and not others, and under what conditions does inference lead to justified belief? This growing interest coincides with a “cognitive turn” in epistemology more generally, an increasing awareness that epistemological theorizing should be informed by what we know from psychology and the philosophy of mind. At the same time, analytic philosophers are also beginning to investigate ways in which notions from epistemology relate to normative notions from the theory of rationality—for example, by looking at how one’s evidence relates to what one ought to believe, or whether reasoning that obeys normative requirements preserves epistemic justification. And finally, there is a growing recognition that many of the central questions about reasoning and rationality are best addressed by setting aside the traditional separation between theoretical and practical reasoning; reasoning has a nature and significance that we should strive to understand independently of whether it is reasoning about what to believe or about how to act. The essays on reasoning in this volume flow from all of these important developments and take them in provocative new directions.

Justified Belief, Reasons, and Evidence

2019 ◽  
pp. 23-42
Author(s):  
Alan Millar
Keyword(s):  
Normative Reasons ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Reasons For Belief ◽  
Justified Belief ◽  
Motivating Reasons ◽  
The Subject

Normative reasons for belief—reasons to believe something—are constituted by truths or facts. Such reasons are distinguished from motivating reasons for belief, that is, reasons for which a subject believes something. These are constituted by considerations that the subject treats as reasons to believe. One has a justified belief, in the sense of a well-founded belief, only if the considerations that constitute one’s motivating reason are truths that one knows. Evidence-based knowledge that P is explicated in terms truths or facts that provide an adequate reason to believe that P. It is argued that not all knowledge is evidence-based, and suggested that we need to make sense of the idea that evidence adequate for knowledge is clinching evidence. The discussion addresses a problem raised by Jennifer Hornsby about the distinction between normative and motivating reasons.

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