The distinction between propositional and doxastic justification is well-known among epistemologists. Propositional justification is often conceived as fundamental and characterized in an entirely apsychological way. In this chapter, I focus on beliefs based on deductive arguments. I argue that such an apsychological notion of propositional justification can hardly be reconciled with the idea that justification is a central component of knowledge. In order to propose an alternative notion, I start with the analysis of doxastic justification. I then offer a notion (...) of propositional justification, intersubjective propositional justification, that is neither entirely apsychological nor idiosyncratic. To do so, I argue that to be able to attribute propositional justification to a subject, we have to consider her social context as well as broad features of our human cognitive architecture. (shrink)

There is a substantial disagreement in the literature over whether ‘remembering’ is a normative concept. Some philosophers have attempted to defend the normativity of ‘remembering’ by highlighting its normative importance or its conceptual affinities with ‘knowing’ or ‘duties’. This paper will first reveal defects of these existing normativist arguments. After that, I will propose and defend a new normativist argument, according to which the concept ‘remembering’ is partly constituted by a paradigmatically normative concept, namely ‘rational’. To be more specific, I (...) argue that full possession of the concept of ‘remembering’ requires having an inclination to believe that ‘if S remembers that p, then S would be (at least defeasibly) rational in holding a memory-based belief that p’. This, according to a persuasive constitutive account of normative concepts, suffices to demonstrate the normative nature of remembering. (shrink)