Many epistemologists agree with the intuition that “there is no exit from the circle of one’s beliefs”. I shall construe this vague intuition as the claim that justification supervenes on the totality of one’s beliefs: two agents with identical beliefs will be indistinguishable with respect to which of their beliefs are justified and to what degree. My central purpose in this paper is to undermine the supervenience thesis. To this end I shall consider the role(s) of the concept of justification.

Epistemology or the Theory of Knowledge has become one of the most complicated and esoteric areas of philosophy. This paper attempts to defend a form of foundationalism in epistemology which does not require the reader to be familiar with the philosophical literature; so, it should be of interest to psychologists concerned with the nature and character of human knowledge as well as, of course, to philosophers. The heart of the foundationalism defended here is the thesis that a belief is epistemically (...) reliable unless it has been shown to be suspect. (shrink)