Justification under uncertainty

Belief formation and justification of belief is the subject of epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of action. In this article we are mostly interested in the application of analytic techniques for the explication of belief justification under uncertainty. We need to explicate this phenomenon in order to answer, at least in part, the question of what are the features of reasoning made in conditions that cause doubts, how people make decisions in such conditions. Arguments used for the justification of such decisions have the status of plausible arguments. The crucial issues related to the analysis and evaluation of plausible arguments are of the acceptability of the premises and the transmission of their acceptability to the conclusion. In this article, we have focused on the transition from the premises to the conclusions of plausible arguments, on the transmission of justification of premises to the conclusions. To establish the peculiarities of such a transmission an outline of the semantics for such arguments is proposed. Its key component is the measures of the plausibility of the premises and rules of inference. A plausible argument itself does not provide the ultimate reason for accepting its conclusion. The justification of the conclusion also depends on other arguments that support or defeat it. So to establish the degree of justification of the conclusion we need to attribute the weights to the premises and rules of inference. We hope that this study provides at least a preliminary answer to the question of how the failure of the transmission of justification in plausible arguments differs from the failure of transmission in deductive arguments.

The Epistemology of Groups

Groups are often said to bear responsibility for their actions, many of which have enormous moral, legal, and social significance. The Trump Administration, for instance, is said to be responsible for the U.S.’s inept and deceptive handling of COVID-19 and the harms that American citizens have suffered as a result. But are groups subject to normative assessment simply in virtue of their individual members being so, or are they somehow agents in their own right? Answering this question depends on understanding key concepts in the epistemology of groups, as we cannot hold the Trump Administration responsible without first determining what it believed, knew, and said. Deflationary theorists hold that group phenomena can be understood entirely in terms of individual members and their states. Inflationary theorists maintain that group phenomena are importantly over and above, or otherwise distinct from, individual members and their states. It is argued that neither approach is satisfactory. Groups are more than their members, but not because they have “minds of their own,” as the inflationists hold. Instead, this book shows how group phenomena—like belief, justification, and knowledge—depend on what the individual group members do or are capable of doing while being subject to group-level normative requirements. This framework, it is argued, allows for the correct distribution of responsibility across groups and their individual members.

Oxford Studies in Epistemology Volume 6

Oxford Studies in Epistemology is a biennial publication offering a regular snapshot of state-of-the-art work in this important field. Under the guidance of a distinguished editorial board composed of leading epistemologists in North America, Europe and Australasia, it publishes exemplary papers in epistemology, broadly construed. Topics within its purview include: (a) traditional epistemological questions concerning the nature of belief, justification, and knowledge, the status of skepticism, the nature of the a priori, etc.; (b) new developments in epistemology, including movements such as naturalized epistemology, feminist epistemology, social epistemology, and virtue epistemology, and approaches such as contextualism; (c) foundational questions in decision-theory; (d) confirmation theory and other branches of philosophy of science that bear on traditional issues in epistemology; (e) topics in the philosophy of perception relevant to epistemology; (f) topics in cognitive science, computer science, developmental, cognitive, and social psychology that bear directly on traditional epistemological questions; and (g) work that examines connections between epistemology and other branches of philosophy, including work on testimony, the ethics of belief, etc. Topics addressed in volume 6 include the nature of perceptual justification, intentionality, modal knowledge, credences, epistemic supererogation, epistemic and rational norms, expressivism, skepticism, and pragmatic encroachment. The various writers make use of a variety of different tools and insights, including those of formal epistemology and decision theory, as well as traditional philosophical analysis and argumentation.

Reid on Our Mental Constitution

Reid is suspected to beg the question of belief-justification by referring to our mental constitution as the already truthful constitution of the knowing subject. But Reid does not simply say that knowledge is a natural or a divine gift. He claims that his inquiry into our constitution shows how natural powers operate and how they give us access to reality. He claims to explain our true beliefs. This chapter first distinguishes Reid’s approach from any subjectivism and shows how, for Reid, knowledge depends on “our constitution”: only the discernment of truth (and not the truth itself) depends on our mental constitution. The chapter considers why Reid claims to explain the discernment of truth by referring to our constitution, and concludes on the originality of Reid’s anti-scepticism by assessing the proper sense in which the mind is a subject of knowledge.