Grounds for justification

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.

Evidentialism, Reliabilism, Evidentialist Reliabilism?

Experientialism is compared and contrasted with Evidentialism, Reliabilism, and Evidentialist Reliabilism. The generality problem for Reliabilism is discussed, as well as the issue of how to measure reliability. A probabilistic understanding of reliability is put forward. In particular, reliability is understood in terms of evidential probabilities, not physical probabilities. An extension to credences is explored. Experientialism is non-Evidentialist insofar as it does not take experience to be evidence, and is non-Reliabilist insofar as it appeals to a normatively loaded notion of evidential probability.

Luck, Knowledge, and Epistemic Probability

Epistemic probability theories of luck come in two versions. They are easiest to distinguish by the epistemic property they claim eliminates luck. One view says that the property is knowledge. The other view says that the property is being guaranteed by a subject’s evidence. Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen defends the Knowledge Account (KA). He has recently argued that his view is preferable to my Epistemic Analysis of Luck (EAL), which defines luck in terms of evidential probability. In this paper, I defend EAL against Steglich-Petersen’s arguments, clarify the view, and argue for the explanatory significance of EAL with respect to some core epistemological issues. My overall goal is to show that an epistemic probability account of luck rooted in the concepts of evidence and evidential support remains a viable and fruitful overall account of luck.

Factivity

It is natural to wonder whether we might use traditional notions of epistemic possibility or evidential probability to address the case for probabilistic knowledge in chapter 5, without embracing the revisionary thesis that we can know probabilistic contents. This chapter spells out the shortcomings of several such proposals. For instance, it is argued that these proposals fail to predict that probabilistic knowledge is factive. The second half of the chapter explores this notion of factivity at length. It is argued that ascriptions of probabilistic knowledge can themselves have probabilistic contents. The theory of epistemic vocabulary defended in this book is compared and contrasted with existing expressivist and relativist theories of epistemic modals. Finally, it is argued that the analog of truth for degrees of belief is not agreement with objective chance, but rather truth itself.

‘More Likely Than Not’Knowledge First and the Role of Bare Statistical Evidence in Courts of Law

In this chapter, Michael Blome-Tillmann argues that embracing a knowledge-first approach can help to resolve important epistemological problems in legal philosophy. Blome-Tillmann takes, as a starting point, a puzzle arising from the evidential standard Preponderance of the Evidence and its application in civil procedure. The evidential standard captured by Preponderance of the Evidence is usually glossed as ‘greater than 0.5 given the admissible evidence’. But this characterization generates puzzles, where our intuitions about whether a defendant should be found liable diverge in case pairs where the evidential probability captured this way is the same. Blome-Tillmann argues that the tension generated by such puzzles can be resolved fairly straightforwardly within a knowledge-first framework.

Probability in Epistemology

In recent years, probabilistic approaches to epistemological questions have become increasingly influential. This chapter surveys a number of the most significant ways in which probability is relevant to contemporary epistemology. Topics surveyed include: the debate surrounding the connection between full and partial beliefs; synchronic rational constraints on credences including probabilism, regularity, reflection, and the principal principle; diachronic rational constraints on credences including conditionalization and de se updating; the application of the requirement of total evidence; evidential probability, focusing on the theories of Henry Kyburg and Timothy Williamson; sharp and fuzzy credences; likelihood arguments, including the fine-tuning argument for Design; dogmatism and its critics; and transmission failure, focusing on the work of Crispin Wright.