Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition.

The aim of this paper is to sketch a theory of justified belief. What I have in mind is an explanatory theory, one that explains in a general way why certain beliefs are counted as justified and others as unjustified. Unlike some traditional approaches, I do not try to prescribe standards for justification that differ from, or improve upon, our ordinary standards. I merely try to explicate the ordinary standards, which are, I believe, quite different from those of many classical, (...) e. g., ‘Cartesian’, accounts. (shrink)

A collection of essays by contemporary Calvinist philosophers of religion that examine the epistemology of religious belief between Reformed and Roman Catholic philosophers.

One of the many problems that would have t o be solved by a satisfactory theory of empirical knowledge, perhaps the most central is a general structural problem which I shall call the epistemic regress problem: the problem of how to avoid an in- finite and presumably vicious regress of justification in ones account of the justifica- tion of empirical beliefs. Foundationalist theories of empirical knowledge, as we shall see further below, attempt t o avoid the regress by locating a (...) class of empirical beliefs whose justification does not depend on that of other empirical beliefs. Extemalist theories, the topic of the present paper, represent one species of foundationalism. (shrink)

Several of these essays have been printed whole in journals; others are in varying degrees new. Two main themes run through them. One is the problem of meaning, particularly as involved in the notion of an analytic statement. The other is the notion of ontological, commitment, particularly as involved in the problem of universals.

This new edition of the classic Contemporary Theories of Knowledge has been significantly updated to include analyses of the recent literature in epistemology.

Against the traditional view, Alvin Goldman argues that logic, probability theory, and linguistic analysis cannot by themselves delineate principles of rationality or justified belief. The mind's operations must be taken into account.

1 Knowledge and Justification This book is an investigation of one central problem which arises in the attempt to give a philosophical account of empirical ...

In his new foreword to this edition, Hilary Putnam forcefully rejects these nativist claims.

Evidentialism is a view about the conditions under which a person is epistemically justified in having a particular doxastic attitude toward a proposition. Evidentialism holds that the justified attitudes are determined entirely by the person's evidence. This is the traditional view of justification. It is now widely opposed. The essays included in this volume develop and defend the tradition.Evidentialism has many assets. In addition to providing an intuitively plausible account of epistemic justification, it helps to resolve the problem of the (...) criterion, helps to disentangle epistemic and ethical evaluations, and illuminates the relationship between epistemic evaluations of beliefs and the evaluation of the methods used to form beliefs. These issues are all addressed in the essays presented here. External world skepticism poses the classic problem for an epistemological theory. The final essay in this volume argues that evidentialism is uniquely well qualified to make sense of skepticism and to respond to its challenge.Evidentialism is a version of epistemic internalism. Recent epistemology has included many attacks on internalism and has seen the development of numerous externalist theories. The essays included here respond to those attacks and raise objections to externalist theories, especially the principal rival, reliabilism. Internalism generally has been criticized for having unacceptable deontological implications, for failing to connect epistemic justification to truth, and for failing to provide an adequate account of what makes basic beliefs justified. Each of these charges is answered in these essays. The collection includes two previously unpublished essays and new afterwords to five of the reprinted essays; it will be the definitive resource on evidentialism for all epistemologists. (shrink)

Thoughts and other mental states are defined by their role in a functional system. Since it is easier to determine when we have knowledge than when reasoning has occurred, Gilbert Harman attempts to answer the latter question by seeing what assumptions about reasoning would best account for when we have knowledge and when not. He describes induction as inference to the best explanation, or more precisely as a modification of beliefs that seeks to minimize change and maximize explanatory coherence. Originally (...) published in 1973. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Scientific essentialism is the view that some necessities can be known only with the aid of empirical science. The thesis of the paper is that scientific essentialism does not extend to the central questions of philosophy and that these questions can be answered a priori. The argument is that the evidence required for the defense of scientific essentialism is reliable only if the intuitions required by philosophy to answer its central questions is also reliable. Included is an outline of a (...) modal reliabilist theory of basic evidence and a concept-possession account of the reliability of a priori intuition. (shrink)

_The Foundations of Knowing _ was first published in 1982. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. This collection of essays on the foundations of empirical knowledge brings together ten of Roderick M. Chisholm's most important papers in epistemology, three of them published for the first time, the others significantly revised and expanded for this edition. The essays in Part I constitute a (...) thoroughgoing defense of foundationalism—the doctrine that our justification for believing always rests upon a self-evident basis. In Part II, Chisholm applies foundationalist principles to various areas within the theory of knowledge, and in part III he presents a history of twentieth-century American epistemology. "Roderick M. Chisholm's work has been most influential both in the development of epistemology and in the widespread application of his analytic method. I am sure this publication featuring the unification of his views will be of great value to those working on the central issues of philosophy." Hector-Neri Castañeda, Indiana University Roderick Chisholm is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the department of philosophy at Brown University. Among his books are _Perceiving: A Philosophical Study, Theory of Knowledge, Person and Object_,and _The First Person _. (shrink)

explores the interaction between psychology and epistemology and addresses empirical questions about how we should arrive at our beliefs, and whether the processes by which we arrive at our beliefs are the ones by which we ought to arrive at our beliefs.

Internalist theories of justification put introspection to work in service of the task of error detection. Introspecting to determine whether our beliefs are well-supported by reasons is supposed to reveal where it is that our beliefs fail to measure up to appropriate standards. Internalists do not, however, offer any empirical evidence that introspection can constructively play this role. This chapter examines relevant evidence from social psychology about the way in which introspection actually works. It is argued that introspection is especially (...) ill-suited to play this crucial role in epistemic self-improvement. (shrink)

It is common in recent epistemology to distinguish different senses, or conceptions, of epistemic justification. The proposed oppositions include the objective/subjective, internalist/externalist, regulative/nonregulative, resource-relative/resource-independent, personal/verific, and deontological/evaluative conceptions of justification. In some of these cases, writers regard both members of the contrasting pair as legitimate; in other cases only one member. In this paper I want to propose another contrasting pair of conceptions of justification, and hold that both are defensible and legitimate. The contrast will then be used to construct (...) a modified version of reliabilism, one which handles certain problem cases more naturally than my previous versions of reliabilism. (shrink)

Princeton University Press, 1974. This book is out of print, but can be downloaded as a pdf file (5 MB).

The Mind-Body Problem Questions: What is the mind? What is its connection to the body? Most basic division of answers: Dualist and Materialist (or Physicalist) responses.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The question is: how should a theist think of justification or positive epistemic status? The answer I suggest is: a belief B has positive epistemic status for S only if S’s faculties are functioning properly (i.e., functioning in the way God intended them to) in producing B, and only if S’s cognitive environment is sufficiently similar to the one for which her faculties are designed; and under those conditions the more firmly S is inclined to accept B, the more positive (...) epistemic status it has for her. I conclude by making some qualifications and applications and exmaining some objections. (shrink)

A central issue in epistemology concerns the connection between truth and justification. The burden of our paper is to explain this connection. Reliabilism, defended by Goldman, assumes that the connection is one of reliability. We argue that this assumption is too strong. We argue that foundational theories, such as those articulated by Pollock and Chisholm fail to elucidate the connection. We consider the potentiality of coherence theories to explain the truth connection by means of higher level convictions about probabilities, which (...) we call doxastic ascent, and defend such a theory. Our defense appeals to the work of Reid and contemporary cognitive psychology in order to account for the psychological reality of higher level evaluations. (shrink)

In the wake of Frege's attack on psychologism and the subsequent influence of Logical Positivism, psychological considerations in philosophy came to be viewed with suspicion. Philosophical questions, especially epistemological ones, were viewed as 'logical' questions, and logic was sharply separated from psychology. Various efforts have been made of late to reconnect epistemology with psychology. But there is little agreement about how such connections should be made, and doubts about the place of psychology within epistemology are still much in evidence. It (...) therefore remains to be clarified just how such links should be established, and what impact they would have on the direction of epistemology. (shrink)

I wish to advocate a reorientation of epistemology. Lest anyone maintain that the enterprise I urge is not epistemology at all (even part of epistemology), I call this enterprise by a slightly different name: epistemics. Despite this terminological concession, I believe that the inquiry I advocate is significantly continuous with traditional epistemology. Like much of past epistemology, it would seek to regulate or guide our intellectual activities. It would try to lay down principles or suggestions for how to conduct our (...) cognitive affairs. The contrast with traditional epistemology – at least "analytic" epistemology of the twentieth century – would be its close alliance with the psychology of cognition. The basic premise of epistemics is that one cannot give the best advice about intellectual operations without detailed information about mental processes. Since these processes are most illuminatingly studied by cognitive psychology, epistemics would go hand in hand with empirical investigation of our "information-processing" mechanisms. (shrink)

Internalism restricts justifiers to what is "within" the subject. two main forms of internalism are (1) perspectival internalism (pi), which restricts justifiers to what the subject knows or justifiably believes, and (2) access internalism (ai), which restricts justifiers to what is directly accessible to the subject. the two forms are analyzed and interrelated, and the grounds for each are examined. it is concluded that although pi is both unacceptable and without adequate support, a modest form of ai might be defended.

In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls defines a hypothetical contract situation and argues rational people will agree on reflection it is fair to contractors. He solves the rational choice problem it poses by deriving two lexically-ordered principles of justice and suggests the derivation justifies the principles. Its soundness aside, just what justificatory force does such a derivation have?On one view, there is no justificatory force because the contract is rigged specifically to yield principles which match our pre-contract moral judgments. (...) Rawls provides ammunition for this claim: “By going back and forth, sometimes altering the conditions of the contractual circumstances, at others withdrawing our judgments [about what is just] and conforming them to principle, I assume that eventually we shall find a description of the initial situation that both expresses reasonable conditions and yields principles which match our considered judgments duly pruned and adjusted.”. (shrink)

In Minimal Rationality, Christopher Cherniak boldly challenges the myth of Man the the Rational Animal and the central role that the "perfectly rational...