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Is justification easy or impossible?
getting acquainted with a middle road
pp. 2987-3009
Abstrakt
Can a belief source confer justification when we lack antecedent justification for believing that it’s reliable? A negative answer quickly leads to skepticism. A positive answer, however, seems to commit one to allowing pernicious reasoning known as “epistemic bootstrapping.” Puzzles surrounding bootstrapping arise because we illicitly assume either that justification requires doxastic awareness of a source’s epistemic credentials or that there is no requirement that a subject be aware of these credentials. We can resolve the puzzle by splitting the horns and requiring a non-conceptual awareness of, or direct acquaintance with, a source’s legitimacy. Requiring non-conceptual as opposed to doxastic awareness halts the regress and avoids the skeptical results. On the other hand, requiring non-conceptual awareness also guarantees that we are aware of evidence for a source’s reliability prior to using that source to form justified beliefs; we thereby avoid the problem of allowing epistemic bootstrapping to generate the illicit gains in justification.
Publication details
Published in:
Balcerak Jackson Magdalena (2015) The roles of experience in a priori knowledge. Synthese 192 (9).
Seiten: 2987-3009
DOI: 10.1007/s11229-015-0697-1
Referenz:
Taylor Samuel A. (2015) „Is justification easy or impossible?: getting acquainted with a middle road“. Synthese 192 (9), 2987–3009.