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Evidentialism and Epistemic Justification

New York: Routledge (2014)

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  1. Epistemic norms on evidence-gathering.Carolina Flores & Elise Woodard - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (9):2547-2571.
    In this paper, we argue that there are epistemic norms on evidence-gathering and consider consequences for how to understand epistemic normativity. Though the view that there are such norms seems intuitive, it has found surprisingly little defense. Rather, many philosophers have argued that norms on evidence-gathering can only be practical or moral. On a prominent evidentialist version of this position, epistemic norms only apply to responding to the evidence one already has. Here we challenge the orthodoxy. First, we argue that (...)
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  • Permissivism, Underdetermination, and Evidence.Elizabeth Jackson & Margaret Greta Turnbull - 2023 - In Maria Lasonen-Aarnio & Clayton Littlejohn, The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Evidence. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 358–370.
    Permissivism is the thesis that, for some body of evidence and a proposition p, there is more than one rational doxastic attitude any agent with that evidence can take toward p. Proponents of uniqueness deny permissivism, maintaining that every body of evidence always determines a single rational doxastic attitude. In this paper, we explore the debate between permissivism and uniqueness about evidence, outlining some of the major arguments on each side. We then consider how permissivism can be understood as an (...)
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  • What is Rational Belief?Clayton Littlejohn & Julien Dutant - 2024 - Noûs 58 (2):333-359.
    A theory of rational belief should get the cases right. It should also reach its verdicts using the right theoretical assumptions. Leading theories seem to predict the wrong things. With only one exception, they don't accommodate principles that we should use to explain these verdicts. We offer a theory of rational belief that combines an attractive picture of epistemic desirability with plausible principles connecting desirability to rationality. On our view, it's rational to believe when it's sufficiently likely that you'd know (...)
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  • A Permissivist Defense of Pascal’s Wager.Elizabeth Grace Jackson - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (6):2315-2340.
    Epistemic permissivism is the thesis that the evidence can rationally permit more than one attitude toward a proposition. Pascal’s wager is the idea that one ought to believe in God for practical reasons, because of what one can gain if theism is true and what one has to lose if theism is false. In this paper, I argue that if epistemic permissivism is true, then the defender of Pascal’s wager has powerful responses to two prominent objections. First, I argue that (...)
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  • Against Minimalist Responses to Moral Debunking Arguments.Daniel Z. Korman & Dustin Locke - 2020 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 15:309-332.
    Moral debunking arguments are meant to show that, by realist lights, moral beliefs are not explained by moral facts, which in turn is meant to show that they lack some significant counterfactual connection to the moral facts (e.g., safety, sensitivity, reliability). The dominant, “minimalist” response to the arguments—sometimes defended under the heading of “third-factors” or “pre-established harmonies”—involves affirming that moral beliefs enjoy the relevant counterfactual connection while granting that these beliefs are not explained by the moral facts. We show that (...)
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  • Systematizing the theoretical virtues.Michael N. Keas - 2017 - Synthese 1 (6):1-33.
    There are at least twelve major virtues of good theories: evidential accuracy, causal adequacy, explanatory depth, internal consistency, internal coherence, universal coherence, beauty, simplicity, unification, durability, fruitfulness, and applicability. These virtues are best classified into four classes: evidential, coherential, aesthetic, and diachronic. Each virtue class contains at least three virtues that sequentially follow a repeating pattern of progressive disclosure and expansion. Systematizing the theoretical virtues in this manner clarifies each virtue and suggests how they might have a coordinated and cumulative (...)
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  • How and Why Knowledge is First.Clayton Littlejohn - 2017 - In J. Adam Carter, Emma C. Gordon & Benjamin W. Jarvis, Knowledge First: Approaches in Epistemology and Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 19-45.
    A defense of the idea that knowledge is first in the sense that there is nothing prior to knowledge that puts reasons or evidence in your possession. Includes a critical discussion of the idea that perception or perceptual experience might provide reasons and a defense of a knowledge-first approach to justified belief.
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  • Rational social and political polarization.Daniel J. Singer, Aaron Bramson, Patrick Grim, Bennett Holman, Jiin Jung, Karen Kovaka, Anika Ranginani & William J. Berger - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (9):2243-2267.
    Public discussions of political and social issues are often characterized by deep and persistent polarization. In social psychology, it’s standard to treat belief polarization as the product of epistemic irrationality. In contrast, we argue that the persistent disagreement that grounds political and social polarization can be produced by epistemically rational agents, when those agents have limited cognitive resources. Using an agent-based model of group deliberation, we show that groups of deliberating agents using coherence-based strategies for managing their limited resources tend (...)
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  • Why Credences Are Not Beliefs.Elizabeth Jackson - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (2):360-370.
    A question of recent interest in epistemology and philosophy of mind is how belief and credence relate to each other. A number of philosophers argue for a belief-first view of the relationship between belief and credence. On the belief-first view, what it is to have a credence just is to have a particular kind of belief, that is, a belief whose content involves probabilities or epistemic modals. Here, I argue against the belief-first view: specifically, I argue that it cannot account (...)
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  • Permissivist Evidentialism.Elizabeth Jackson - forthcoming - In Scott Stapleford, Kevin McCain & Matthias Steup, Evidentialism at 40: New Arguments, New Angles. Routledge.
    Many evidentialists are impermissivists. But there’s no in-principle reason for this. In this paper, I examine and motivate permissivist evidentialism. Not only are permissivism and evidentialism compatible but there are unique benefits that arise for this combination of views. In particular, permissivist evidentialism respects the importance of evidence while capturing its limitations and provides a plausible and attractive explanation of the relationship between the epistemic and non-epistemic. Permissivist evidentialism is thus an attractive option in logical space that hasn’t received enough (...)
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  • Evidentialism.Giada Fratantonio - forthcoming - In Kurt Sylvan, Ernest Sosa, Jonathan Dancy & Matthias Steup, The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 3rd edition. Wiley Blackwell.
    At the core of evidentialism lies a very plausible claim: rational thinkers follow their evidence. While this seems to be a very intuitive, almost trivial, claim, providing a full and complete evidentialist theory is complicated. In this entry, I begin with elucidating what kind of theory evidentialists aim to provide us with. I will show that, in order to provide a complete evidentialist theory, we have to provide a lot of details on what evidence is and how it relates to (...)
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  • Debunking Arguments in Metaethics and Metaphysics.Daniel Z. Korman - 2019 - In Alvin I. Goldman & Brian P. McLaughlin, Metaphysics and Cognitive Science. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 337-363.
    Evolutionary debunking arguments abound, but it is widely assumed that they do not arise for our perceptual beliefs about midsized objects, insofar as the adaptive value of our object beliefs cannot be explained without reference to the objects themselves. I argue that this is a mistake. Just as with moral beliefs, the adaptive value of our object beliefs can be explained without assuming that the beliefs are accurate. I then explore the prospects for other sorts of vindications of our object (...)
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  • The Weirdness of the World.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2024 - Princeton University Press.
    How all philosophical explanations of human consciousness and the fundamental structure of the cosmos are bizarre—and why that’s a good thing Do we live inside a simulated reality or a pocket universe embedded in a larger structure about which we know virtually nothing? Is consciousness a purely physical matter, or might it require something extra, something nonphysical? According to the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, it’s hard to say. In The Weirdness of the World, Schwitzgebel argues that the answers to these fundamental (...)
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  • Evidence and its Limits.Clayton Littlejohn - 2018 - In Conor McHugh, Jonathan Way & Daniel Whiting, Normativity: Epistemic and Practical. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    On a standard view about reasons, evidence, and justification, there is justification for you to believe all and only what your evidence supports and the reasons that determine whether there is justification to believe are all just pieces of evidence. This view is mistaken about two things. It is mistaken about the rational role of evidence. It is also mistaken about the rational role of reasons. To show this, I present two basis problems for the standard view and argue that (...)
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  • Facts about incoherence as non-evidential epistemic reasons.Eva Schmidt - 2023 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 2 (1):1-22.
    This paper presents a counterexample to the principle that all epistemic reasons for doxastic attitudes towards p are provided by evidence concerning p. I begin by motivating and clarifying the principle and the associated picture of epistemic reasons, including the notion of evidence concerning a proposition, which comprises both first- and second-order evidence. I then introduce the counterexample from incoherent doxastic attitudes by presenting three example cases. In each case, the fact that the subject’s doxastic attitudes are incoherent is an (...)
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  • String Theory, Non-Empirical Theory Assessment, and the Context of Pursuit.Frank Cabrera - 2021 - Synthese 198:3671–3699.
    In this paper, I offer an analysis of the radical disagreement over the adequacy of string theory. The prominence of string theory despite its notorious lack of empirical support is sometimes explained as a troubling case of science gone awry, driven largely by sociological mechanisms such as groupthink (e.g. Smolin 2006). Others, such as Dawid (2013), explain the controversy by positing a methodological revolution of sorts, according to which string theorists have quietly turned to nonempirical methods of theory assessment given (...)
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  • Reasons and Theoretical Rationality.Clayton Littlejohn - 2018 - In Daniel Star, The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity. New York, NY, United States of America: Oxford University Press.
    A discussion of epistemic reasons, theoretical rationality, and the relationship between them. Discusses the ontology of reasons and evidence, the relationship between reasons (motivating, normative, possessed, apparent, genuine, etc.) and rationality, the relationship between epistemic reasons and evidence, the relationship between rationality, justification, and knowledge, and many other related topics.
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  • What Makes Evolution a Defeater?Matt Lutz - 2018 - Erkenntnis 83 (6):1105-1126.
    Evolutionary Debunking Arguments purport to show that our moral beliefs do not amount to knowledge because these beliefs are “debunked” by the fact that our moral beliefs are, in some way, the product of evolutionary forces. But there is a substantial gap in this argument between its main evolutionary premise and the skeptical conclusion. What is it, exactly, about the evolutionary origins of moral beliefs that would create problems for realist views in metaethics? I argue that evolutionary debunking arguments are (...)
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  • Epistemology.Matthias Steup - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Defined narrowly, epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. As the study of knowledge, epistemology is concerned with the following questions: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge? What are its sources? What is its structure, and what are its limits? As the study of justified belief, epistemology aims to answer questions such as: How we are to understand the concept of justification? What makes justified beliefs justified? Is justification internal or external to one's own mind? (...)
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  • Uniqueness and Logical Disagreement (Revisited).Frederik J. Andersen - 2023 - Logos and Episteme 14 (3):243-259.
    This paper discusses the Uniqueness Thesis, a core thesis in the epistemology of disagreement. After presenting uniqueness and clarifying relevant terms, a novel counterexample to the thesis will be introduced. This counterexample involves logical disagreement. Several objections to the counterexample are then considered, and it is argued that the best responses to the counterexample all undermine the initial motivation for uniqueness.
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  • (1 other version)Seemings as sui generis.Blake McAllister - 2018 - Synthese 195 (7):3079-3096.
    The epistemic value of seemings is increasingly debated. Such debates are hindered, however, by a lack of consensus about the nature of seemings. There are four prominent conceptions in the literature, and the plausibility of principles such as phenomenal conservatism, which assign a prominent epistemic role to seemings, varies greatly from one conception to another. It is therefore crucial that we identify the correct conception of seemings. I argue that seemings are best understood as sui generis mental states with propositional (...)
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  • Logical Disagreement.Frederik J. Andersen - 2024 - Dissertation, University of St. Andrews
    While the epistemic significance of disagreement has been a popular topic in epistemology for at least a decade, little attention has been paid to logical disagreement. This monograph is meant as a remedy. The text starts with an extensive literature review of the epistemology of (peer) disagreement and sets the stage for an epistemological study of logical disagreement. The guiding thread for the rest of the work is then three distinct readings of the ambiguous term ‘logical disagreement’. Chapters 1 and (...)
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  • Countering Justification Holism in the Epistemology of Logic: The Argument from Pre-Theoretic Universality.Frederik J. Andersen - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Logic 20 (3):375-396.
    A key question in the philosophy of logic is how we have epistemic justification for claims about logical entailment (assuming we have such justification at all). Justification holism asserts that claims of logical entailment can only be justified in the context of an entire logical theory, e.g., classical, intuitionistic, paraconsistent, paracomplete etc. According to holism, claims of logical entailment cannot be atomistically justified as isolated statements, independently of theory choice. At present there is a developing interest in—and endorsement of—justification holism (...)
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  • The Reliability Challenge in Moral Epistemology.Matt Lutz - 2020 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 15:284-308.
    The Reliability Challenge to moral non-naturalism has received substantial attention recently in the literature on moral epistemology. While the popularity of this particular challenge is a recent development, the challenge has a long history, as the form of this challenge can be traced back to a skeptical challenge in the philosophy of mathematics raised by Paul Benacerraf. The current Reliability Challenge is widely regarded as the most sophisticated way to develop this skeptical line of thinking, making the Reliability Challenge the (...)
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  • A Timid and Tepid Appropriation: Divine Presence, the Sensus Divinitatis, and Phenomenal Conservativism.Timothy Perrine - 2024 - Res Philosophica 101 (1):109-129.
    Plantinga develops an ambitious theistic religious epistemology on which theists can have non-inferential knowledge of God. Central to his epistemology is the idea that human beings have a “sensus divinitatis” that produces such knowledge. Recently, several authors have urged an appropriation of the sensus divinitatis that is more friendly to internalist views, such as Phenomenal Conservativism. I argue that this appropriation is too timid and tepid in a variety of ways. It applies only to a small fraction of theistic beliefs; (...)
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  • Reasoned Change in Logic.Elijah Chudnoff - forthcoming - In Scott Stapleford, Kevin McCain & Matthias Steup, Evidentialism at 40: New Arguments, New Angles. Routledge.
    By a reasoned change in logic I mean a change in the logic with which you make inferences that is based on your evidence. An argument sourced in recently published material Kripke lectured on in the 1970s, and dubbed the Adoption Problem by Birman (then Padró) in her 2015 dissertation, challenges the possibility of reasoned changes in logic. I explain why evidentialists should be alarmed by this challenge, and then I go on to dispel it. The Adoption Problem rests on (...)
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  • Disbelief is a distinct doxastic attitude.Joshua Smart - 2020 - Synthese 198 (12):11797-11813.
    While epistemologists routinely employ disbelief talk, it is not clear that they really mean it, given that they often equate disbelieving p with believing ¬p. I argue that this is a mistake—disbelief is a doxastic attitude of rejection and is distinct from belief. I first clarify this claim and its opposition, then show that we must distinguish disbelieving p from believing ¬p in order to account for the fact that we continue to hold doxastic attitudes toward propositions that we reject. (...)
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  • Deontological evidentialism, wide-scope, and privileged values.Luis R. G. Oliveira - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (2):485-506.
    Deontological evidentialism is the claim that we ought to form and maintain our beliefs in accordance with our evidence. In this paper, I criticize two arguments in its defense. I begin by discussing Berit Broogard’s use of the distinction between narrow-scope and wide-scope requirements against W.K. Clifford’s moral defense of. I then use this very distinction against a defense of inspired by Stephen Grimm’s more recent claims about the moral source of epistemic normativity. I use this distinction once again to (...)
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  • (1 other version)Seemings as sui generis.Blake McAllister - 2017 - Synthese:1-18.
    The epistemic value of seemings is increasingly debated. Such debates are hindered, however, by a lack of consensus about the nature of seemings. There are four prominent conceptions in the literature, and the plausibility of principles such as phenomenal conservatism, which assign a prominent epistemic role to seemings, varies greatly from one conception to another. It is therefore crucial that we identify the correct conception of seemings. I argue that seemings are best understood as sui generis mental states with propositional (...)
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  • Eliminating the Problem of Stored Beliefs.Matthew Frise - 2018 - American Philosophical Quarterly 55 (1):63-79.
    The problem of stored beliefs is that of explaining how non-occurrent, seemingly justified beliefs are indeed justified. Internalism about epistemic justification, the view that one’s mental life alone determines what one is justified in believing, allegedly cannot solve this problem. This paper provides a solution. It asks: Does having a belief that p require having a special relation to a mental representation that p? If the answer is yes, then there are no stored beliefs, and so there is no problem. (...)
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  • Knowledge and Prizes.Clayton Littlejohn & Julien Dutant - forthcoming - In Artūrs Logins & Jacques Henri Vollet, Putting Knowledge to Work: New Directions for Knowledge-First Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    We examine two leading theories of rational belief, the Lockean view and the explanationist view. The first is appealing because it fits with some independently plausible claims about the ways that rational persons pursue their aims. The second is appealing because it seems to account for intuitions that cause trouble for the Lockean view. While fitting the intuitive data is desirable, we are troubled that the explanationist view seems to clash with our theoretical beliefs about what rationality must be like. (...)
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  • Rules for the Inquiring Mind: A Unified Framework of Norms of Inquiry.Luis Rosa - 2024 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    This book concerns the nature and the norms of inquiry. It tackles not only philosophical issues regarding what inquiry is, but also issues regarding how it should and should not be executed. Roughly put, inquiry is the activity of searching for the true answers to questions of our interest. But what is the difference between empirical and armchair inquiry? And what are the right and the wrong ways to inquire? Under what conditions should one start inquiring? Which questions are such (...)
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  • No Infelicity for the Infallibilist.Giada Fratantonio - 2021 - Theoria (5):1307-1321.
    According to Probability 1 Infallibilism (henceforth, Infallibilism), if one knows that p, then the probability of p given one’s evidence is 1. Jessica Brown (2018, 2013) has recently argued that Infallibilism leads to scepticism unless the infallibilist also endorses the claim that if one knows that p, then p is part of one’s evidence for p. By doing that, however, the infalliblist has to explain why it is infelicitous to cite p as evidence for itself. And yet, the infallibilist doesn’t (...)
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  • Background beliefs and plausibility thresholds: defending explanationist evidentialism.Matt Lutz - 2020 - Synthese 197 (6):2631-2647.
    In a recent paper, Appley and Stoutenburg present two new objections to Explanationist Evidentialism : the Regress Objection and the Threshold Objection. In this paper, I develop a version of EE that is independently plausible and empirically grounded, and show that it can meet Appley and Stoutenburg’s objections.
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  • Armchair Access and Imagination.Giada Fratantonio - 2018 - Dialectica 72 (4):525-547.
    In this paper, I focus on the Armchair Access Problem for E=K as presented by Nicholas Silins (2005), and I argue, contra Silins, that it does not represent a real threat to E=K. More precisely, I put forward two lines of response, both of which put pressure on the main assumption of the argument, namely, the Armchair Access thesis. The first line of response focuses on its scope, while the second line of response focuses on its nature. The second line (...)
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  • On the Nature and Relationship of Individual and Collective Justification.Simon Graf - 2024 - Dissertation, University of Leeds
    This thesis is an investigation into the nature of epistemic justification. It brings together themes from traditional, individual-centred epistemology, and collective, group-centred epistemology. The first half of the thesis is concerned with the question of whether rationality is epistemically permissive; that is, whether one body of evidence can rationalise more than one doxastic attitude. In chapter 1, I argue that permissive cases are best understood as epistemic standard conflicts. Doing so provides us with a novel understanding of the arbitrariness objection (...)
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  • Forgetting memory skepticism.Matthew Frise & Kevin McCain - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (2):253-263.
    Memory skepticism denies our memory beliefs could have any notable epistemic good. One route to memory skepticism is to challenge memory’s epistemic trustworthiness, that is, its functioning in a way necessary for it to provide epistemic justification. In this paper we develop and respond to this challenge. It could threaten memory in such a way that we altogether lack doxastic attitudes. If it threatens memory in this way, then the challenge is importantly self-defeating. If it does not threaten memory in (...)
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  • Pritchard’s Reasons.Clayton Littlejohn - 2016 - Journal of Philosophical Research 41:201-219.
    My contribution to the author meets critics discussion of Pritchard's _Epistemological Disjunctivism_. In this paper, I examine some of the possible motivations for epistemological disjunctivism and look at some of the costs associated with the view. While Pritchard's view seems to be that our visual beliefs constitute knowledge because they're based on reasons, I argue that the claim that visual beliefs are based on reasons or evidence hasn't been sufficiently motivated. In the end I suggest that we'll get all the (...)
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  • Two new objections to explanationism.Bryan C. Appley & Gregory Stoutenburg - 2017 - Synthese 194 (8):3069-3084.
    After a period of inactivity, interest in explanationism as a thesis about the nature of epistemic justification has been renewed. Poston and McCain have both recently offered versions of explanationist evidentialism. In this paper, we pose two objections to explanationist evidentialism. First, explanationist evidentialism fails to state a sufficient condition for justification. Second, explanationist evidentialism implies a vicious regress.
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  • The No-Defeater Clause.Simon Graf - forthcoming - Episteme.
    Rational or epistemically justified beliefs are often said to be defeasible. That is, beliefs that have some otherwise justification conferring property can lose their epistemic status because they are defeated by some evidence possessed by the believer or due to some external facts about the believer’s epistemic environment. Accordingly, many have argued that we need to add a so-called no defeater clause to any theory of epistemic justification. In this paper, I will survey various possible evidentialist as well as responsibilitst (...)
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  • The Reliability of Memory: An Argument from the Armchair.Ali Hasan - 2021 - Episteme 18 (2):142-159.
    The “problem of memory” in epistemology is concerned with whether and how we could have knowledge, or at least justification, for trusting our apparent memories. I defend an inductive solution—more precisely, an abductive solution—to the problem. A natural worry is that any such solution would be circular, for it would have to depend on memory. I argue that belief in the reliability of memory can be justified from the armchair, without relying on memory. The justification is, roughly, that my having (...)
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  • (1 other version)Misleading higher-order evidence, conflicting ideals, and defeasible logic.Aleks Https://Orcidorg Knoks - 2020 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8:141--74.
    Thinking about misleading higher-order evidence naturally leads to a puzzle about epistemic rationality: If one’s total evidence can be radically misleading regarding itself, then two widely-accepted requirements of rationality come into conflict, suggesting that there are rational dilemmas. This paper focuses on an often misunderstood and underexplored response to this (and similar) puzzles, the so-called conflicting-ideals view. Drawing on work from defeasible logic, I propose understanding this view as a move away from the default metaepistemological position according to which rationality (...)
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  • Strong internalism, doxastic involuntarism, and the costs of compatibilism.Timothy Perrine - 2020 - Synthese 197 (7):3171-3191.
    Epistemic deontology maintains that our beliefs and degrees of belief are open to deontic evaluations—evaluations of what we ought to believe or may not believe. Some philosophers endorse strong internalist versions of epistemic deontology on which agents can always access what determines the deontic status of their beliefs and degrees of belief. This paper articulates a new challenge for strong internalist versions of epistemic deontology. Any version of epistemic deontology must face William Alston’s argument. Alston combined a broadly voluntarist conception (...)
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  • (1 other version)Justifying the principle of indifference.Jon Williamson - 2018 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 8 (3):559-586.
    This paper presents a new argument for the Principle of Indifference. This argument can be thought of in two ways: as a pragmatic argument, justifying the principle as needing to hold if one is to minimise worst-case expected loss, or as an epistemic argument, justifying the principle as needing to hold in order to minimise worst-case expected inaccuracy. The question arises as to which interpretation is preferable. I show that the epistemic argument contradicts Evidentialism and suggest that the relative plausibility (...)
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  • Internalism and the Problem of Stored Beliefs.Matthew Frise - 2017 - Erkenntnis 82 (2):285-304.
    A belief is stored if it is in no way before the subject’s mind. The problem of stored beliefs is that of satisfactorily explaining how the stored beliefs which seem justified are indeed justified. In this paper I challenge the two main internalist attempts to solve this problem. Internalism about epistemic justification, at a minimum, states that one’s mental life alone determines what one is justified in believing. First I dispute the attempt from epistemic conservatism, which states that believing justifies (...)
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  • Explanationist aid for phenomenal conservatism.Kevin McCain - 2018 - Synthese 195 (7):3035-3050.
    Phenomenal conservatism is a popular theory of epistemic justification. Despite its popularity and the fact that some think that phenomenal conservatism can provide a complete account of justification, it faces several challenges. Among these challenges are the need to provide accounts of defeaters and inferential justification. Fortunately, there is hope for phenomenal conservatism. Explanationism, the view on which justification is a matter of explanatory considerations, can help phenomenal conservatism with both of these challenges. The resulting view is one that respects (...)
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  • Skepticism and Spatial Objects.Ali Hasan - 2018 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 8 (2):73-95.
    I defend external world realism. I assume that the principle of inference to the best explanation is justified: roughly, a hypothesis that provides a better explanation of the total evidence is more probable than one that does not. I argue that the existence of a world of spatial objects provides a systematic explanation of the spatial contents of visual experience, and that it provides a better explanation than traditional skeptical hypotheses. This paper thus pursues the explanationist strategy of Laurence BonJour (...)
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  • Problems for Explanationism on Both Sides.T. Ryan Byerly & Kraig Martin - 2015 - Erkenntnis 80 (4):773-791.
    This paper continues a recent exchange in this journal concerning explanationist accounts of epistemic justification. In the first paper in this exchange, Byerly argues that explanationist views judge that certain beliefs about the future are unjustified when in fact they are justified. In the second paper, McCain defends a version of explanationism which he argues escapes Byerly’s criticism. Here we contribute to this exchange in two ways. In the first section, we argue that McCain’s defense of explanationism against Byerly’s objection (...)
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  • The demon that makes us go mental: mentalism defended.Jonathan Egeland - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (12):3141-3158.
    Facts about justification are not brute facts. They are epistemic facts that depend upon more fundamental non-epistemic facts. Internalists about justification often argue for mentalism, which claims that facts about justification supervene upon one’s non-factive mental states, using Lehrer and Cohen’s :191–207, 1983) New Evil Demon Problem. The New Evil Demon Problem tells you to imagine yourself the victim of a Cartesian demon who deceives you about what the external world is like, and then asks whether you nevertheless have justification (...)
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  • On what we should believe (and when (and why) we should believe what we know we should not believe).Clayton Littlejohn - 2020 - In Scott Stapleford & Kevin McCain, Epistemic Duties: New Arguments, New Angles. New York: Routledge.
    A theory of what we should believe should include a theory of what we should believe when we are uncertain about what we should believe and/or uncertain about the factors that determine what we should believe. In this paper, I present a novel theory of what we should believe that gives normative externalists a way of responding to a suite of objections having to do with various kinds of error, ignorance, and uncertainty. This theory is inspired by recent work in (...)
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