Concluding Remarks

2021 ◽  
pp. 264-268
Author(s):  
Sven Rosenkranz

According to the account of epistemic justification developed in this book, one has propositional justification for p just in case one is in no position to know that one is in no position to know p; and one has doxastic justification for p just in case one is in no position to know that one does not know p. The account gives internalists much of what they want from a theory of justification—in particular, a notion of justification according to which propositional justification is non-factive and luminous, underwrites principles of positive and negative introspection, and remains available to the victims of systematic deception. All the while, that notion is explained in terms of other notions that clearly belong to the knowledge-firsters’ toolkit, and coheres with an externalist account of the grounds for justification.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Turri

I argue against the orthodox view of the relationship between propositional and doxastic justification. The view under criticism is: if p is propositionally justified for S in virtue of S’s having reason(s) R, and S believes p on the basis of R, then S’s belief that p is doxastically justified. I then propose and evaluate alternative accounts of the relationship between propositional and doxastic justification, and conclude that we should explain propositional justification in terms of doxastic justification. If correct, this proposal would constitute a significant advance in our understanding of the sources of epistemic justification.


2005 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Júlio César Burdzinski

Este artigo está organizado do seguinte modo: na primeira seção, apresento as raízes histórico-filosóficas dos problemas do conhecimento e da justificação; na segunda, traço a distinção entre verdade e justificação epistêmica; a terceira seção é dedicada ao problema da circularidade, problema tradicionalmente imputado ao coerentismo; na quarta seção, apresento uma noção heterodoxa de justificação, a justificação sistêmica; na quinta, apresento e critico uma outra noção heterodoxa de justificação, a justificação inferencial não-linear; na sexta seção, apresento mais algumas distinções importantes e destaco as formas proposicional e doxástica da justificação; o exame destas formas é desenvolvido subseqüentemente na sétima seção; concluo o artigo com uma reflexão acerca da natureza e dos limites de minha proposta. PALAVRAS-CHAVE – Conhecimento. Coerentismo. Circularidade. Justificação epistêmica. Justificação proposicional. Justificação doxástica. ABSTRACT This paper has the following structure: on the first section, I report on the historical and philosophical roots of the problems of knowledge and justification; on the second, I lay out the distinction between truth and epistemic justification; the third section is devoted to the problem of circularity, a problem often attributed to coherentism; on the fourth section, I introduce an unorthodox notion of justification, systemic justification; on the fifth, I present and criticize another unorthodox notion of justification, non-linear inferential justification; on the sixth, I discuss a few other distinctions and focus on the propositional and doxastic forms of justification; the examination of those forms is subsequently developed on the seventh section; I conclude with a reflection on the nature and limits of my proposal. KEY WORDS – Knowledge. Coherentism. Circularity. Epistemic justification. Propositional justification. Doxastic justification.


Author(s):  
Kurt Sylvan ◽  
Ernest Sosa

This chapter defends a middle ground between two extremes in the literature on the place of reasons in epistemology. Against members of the “reasons first” movement, we argue that reasons are not the sole grounds of epistemic normativity. We suggest that the virtue-theoretic property of competence is rather the key building block. To support this approach, we note that reasons must be possessed to ground central epistemic properties, and argue that possession is grounded in competence. But while we here diverge with reasons-firsters, we also distance ourselves from those who deem reasons unimportant. Indeed, we hold that having sufficient epistemic reasons is necessary and sufficient for propositional justification, and that proper basing on them yields doxastic justification. But since possession and proper basing are grounded in competence, reasons are not the end of the road: competence enables them to do their work, putting them—and us—in the middle.


2021 ◽  
pp. 107-137
Author(s):  
Sven Rosenkranz

Drawing on the results of previous chapters, the proposal is made to interpret the complex operator ⌜¬K¬K⌝ as encoding propositional justification and the complex operator ⌜¬K¬K⌝ as encoding doxastic justification—where in each case justification is understood to be justification all things considered. Accordingly, not only propositional but also doxastic justification is construed as a feature of one’s epistemic situation rather than a feature of one’s beliefs. On this view, both types of justification are non-factive. The proposed account is defended against a number of putative counterexamples, the allegation that it confuses epistemic permissibility with epistemic blamelessness, and the charge that it fails to heed plausible reliabilist constraints on justification. At crucial junctures this defence relies on the availability of theorems governing the aforementioned complex operators that were proved in chapter 5.


2021 ◽  
pp. 170-188
Author(s):  
Sven Rosenkranz

The present account, which construes justification as a kind of epistemic possibility of knowing, or of being in a position to know, competes with three recently advanced theories of justification. Of these competitors, the first two construe doxastic justification as the metaphysical possibility of knowing. While they differ in some details, these views share certain problematic features: they fail to yield a corresponding account of propositional justification, have trouble vindicating an intuitive principle of closure for justified belief, and fail to comply with the independently plausible principle that if one has a justified belief, one is in no position to rule out that one has knowledge. The present account does not have these problematic features. According to the third competitor, |φ‎| is propositionally justified in one’s situation just in case it would be abnormal—and so require explanation—if |φ‎| were to be false in the presence of the evidence that one possesses in that situation. This normic theory of justification validates the principle that propositional justification agglomerates over conjunction, and in so doing, violates the constraint that propositions of the form ⌜φ‎ & ¬Kφ‎⌝ never be justified. It likewise contradicts the independently plausible principle that whenever |φ‎| is propositionally justified all things considered, |¬Kφ‎| is not. The present account does not face these problems, since it rejects the relevant agglomeration principle and treats the condition encoded by ⌜¬K¬Kφ‎⌝ as luminous.


2021 ◽  
pp. 189-228
Author(s):  
Sven Rosenkranz

We must distinguish between the condition of a proposition’s being justified in one’s situation and the metaphysical grounds determining that this condition obtains. While the former is luminous, the latter need not be. It is argued that knowing is a strict full ground for doxastic justification, and being in a position to know is a strict full ground for propositional justification. It follows that facts about one’s evidence that serve as strict partial grounds for knowing are strict partial grounds for doxastic justification, and facts about one’s evidence that serve as strict partial grounds for being in a position to know are strict partial grounds for propositional justification. Even if only partial, such evidential grounds can only be assumed to be available in some, but not all, cases in which one has doxastic justification without knowing, and propositional justification without being in a position to know. A more comprehensive account identifies facts about evidential probabilities as facts that yield strict full grounds for justification. While one’s evidence is the totality of what one is in a position to know, the evidential probability of p equals the probability of p conditional on one’s evidence. The account requires taking the notion of evidential probability as primitive. It uniformly applies to all cases of justification, including the bad cases envisaged by radical scepticism. Degrees of strength of justification are explained in terms of facts about evidential probabilities. Just as their grounds, degrees of strength of justification are not luminous, even if justification is.


Episteme ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Egeland

Abstract A standard view in the epistemology of imagination is that imaginings can either provide justification for modal beliefs about what is possible (and perhaps counterfactual conditionals too), or no justification at all. However, in a couple of recent articles, Kind (2016; Forthcoming) argues that imaginings can justify empirical belief about what the world actually is like. In this article, I respond to her argument, showing that imagination doesn't provide the right sort of information to justify empirical belief. Nevertheless, it can help us take advantage of justification that we already have, thereby enabling us to form new doxastically justified beliefs. More specifically, according to the view I advocate, imagination can contribute to one's satisfaction of the proper basing condition – which turns propositional justification into doxastic justification – but without conferring any new justification that the subject isn't already in possession of upon their beliefs. Very little attention has been devoted to the distinction between propositional and doxastic justification in the literature on imagination, and the view I here argue for takes up a yet-to-be occupied position.


Author(s):  
Sven Rosenkranz

Core theses of the novel account of justification to be developed are first stated: one has propositional justification for p just in case one is in no position to know that one is in no position to know p; and one has doxastic justification for p just in case one is in no position to know that one does not know p. Unlike other theories that conceive of justification in terms of the metaphysical possibility of knowing, the present account thus construes it as a distinctive kind of epistemic possibility. It treats propositional justification as non-factive, both its presence and its absence as luminous conditions, and by assuming a weak non-normal modal logic for knowledge and being in a position to know, validates principles of positive and negative introspection for it. The account thereby attributes features to justification that internalists care about. But it does so without construing justification as an internal condition. The account allows one to systematically distinguish between the condition of being justified and the metaphysical grounds for its obtaining, thereby heeding externalist insights into the difference between the good cases and the bad cases envisaged by radical scepticism. Lines of argument that show the account’s potential, e.g. in dealing with the preface and lottery paradoxes, are previewed, and so are lines of defence against challenges and objections, including prominent anti-luminosity arguments.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hakwan Lau

I introduce an empirically-grounded version of a higher-order theory of conscious perception. Traditionally, theories of consciousness either focus on the global availability of conscious information, or take conscious phenomenology as a brute fact due to some biological or basic representational properties. Here I argue instead that the key to characterizing the consciousness lies in its connections to belief formation and epistemic justification on a subjective level.


GEOgraphia ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 10 (19) ◽  
pp. 103
Author(s):  
Alexandre Domingues Ribas ◽  
Antonio Carlos Vitte

Resumo: Há um relativo depauperamento no tocante ao nosso conhecimento a respeito da relação entre a filosofia kantiana e a constituição da geografia moderna e, conseqüentemente, científica. Esta relação, quando abordada, o é - vezes sem conta - de modo oblíquo ou tangencial, isto é, ela resta quase que exclusivamente confinada ao ato de noticiar que Kant ofereceu, por aproximadamente quatro décadas, cursos de Geografia Física em Königsberg, ou que ele foi o primeiro filósofo a inserir esta disciplina na Universidade, antes mesmo da criação da cátedra de Geografia em Berlim, em 1820, por Karl Ritter. Não ultrapassar a pueril divulgação deste ato em si mesma só nos faz jogar uma cortina sobre a ausência de um discernimento maior acerca do tributo de Kant àfundamentação epistêmica da geografia moderna e científica. Abrir umafrincha nesta cortina denota, necessariamente, elucidar o papel e o lugardo “Curso de Geografia Física” no corpus da filosofia transcendental kantiana. Assim sendo, partimos da conjectura de que a “Geografia Física” continuamente se mostrou, a Kant, como um conhecimento portador de um desmedido sentido filosófico, já que ela lhe denotava a própria possibilidade de empiricização de sua filosofia. Logo, a Geografia Física seria, para Kant, o embasamento empírico de suas reflexões filosóficas, pois ela lhe comunicava a empiricidade da invenção do mundo; ela lhe outorgava a construção metafísica da “superfície da Terra”. Destarte, da mesma maneira que a Geografia, em sua superfície geral, conferiu uma espécie de atributo científico à validação do empírico da Modernidade (desde os idos do século XVI), a Geografia Física apresentou-se como o sustentáculo empírico da reflexão filosófica kantiana acerca da “metafísica da natureza” e da “metafísica do mundo”.THE COURSE OF PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF IMMANUEL KANT(1724-1804): CONTRIBUTION FOR THE GEOGRAPHICALSCIENCE HISTORY AND EPISTEMOLOGYAbstract: There is a relative weakness about our knowledge concerningKant philosophy and the constitution of modern geography and,consequently, scientific geography. That relation, whenever studied,happens – several times – in an oblique or tangential way, what means thatit lies almost exclusively confined in the act of notifying that Kant offered,for approximately four decades, “Physical Geography” courses inKonigsberg, or that he was the first philosopher teaching the subject at anyCollege, even before the creation of Geography chair in Berlin, in 1820, byKarl Ritter. Not overcoming the early spread of that act itself only made usthrow a curtain over the absence of a major understanding about Kant’stribute to epistemic justification of modern and scientific geography. Toopen a breach in this curtain indicates, necessarily, to lighten the role andplace of Physical Geography Course inside Kantian transcendentalphilosophy. So, we began from the conjecture that Physical Geography hasalways shown, by Kant, as a knowledge carrier of an unmeasuredphilosophic sense, once it showed the possibility of empiricization of hisphilosophy. Therefore, a Physical Geography would be, for Kant, theempirics basis of his philosophic thoughts, because it communicates theempiria of the world invention; it has made him to build metaphysically the“Earth’s surface”. In the same way, Geography, in its general surface, hasgiven a particular tribute to the empiric validation of Modernity (since the16th century), Physical Geography introduced itself as an empiric basis toKantian philosophical reflection about “nature’s metaphysics” and the“world metaphysics” as well.Keywords: History and Epistemology of Geography, Physical Geography,Cosmology, Kantian Transcendental Philosophy, Nature.


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