Abstract
When is a belief justified? There are three families of arguments we typically use to support different accounts of justification: (1) arguments from our intuitive responses to vignettes that involve the concept; (2) arguments from the theoretical role we would like the concept to play in epistemology; and (3) arguments from the practical, moral, and political uses to which we wish to put the concept. I focus particularly on the third sort (3), and specifically on arguments of this sort offered by Clayton Littlejohn in Justification and the Truth-Connection (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012) and Amia Srinivasan in ‘Radical Externalism’ (Philos Rev 129(3): 395–431, 2018) in favour of externalism. I counter Srinivasan’s argument in two ways: (a) first, I show that the internalist’s concept of justification might figure just as easily in the sorts of structural explanation Srinivasan thinks our political goals require us to give; and (b) I argue that the internalist’s concept is needed for a particular political task, namely, to help us build more effective defences against what I call epistemic weapons. I conclude that we should adopt an Alstonian pluralism about the concept of justification.
Highlights
When is a belief justified? There are three families of arguments we typically use to support different accounts of justification: (1) arguments from our intuitive responses to vignettes that involve the concept; (2) arguments from the theoretical role we would like the concept to play in epistemology; and (3) arguments from the practical, moral, and political uses to which we wish to put the concept
Many putative answers to the latter question have been proposed, and one of the central points of disagreement that has emerged is between internalists and externalists. The debate between these two camps is often set up with internalism as an extreme position that says that only internal states of a subject are relevant to whether their beliefs are justified, while externalism is just the negation of internalism, covering any view that takes any external state to be in any way relevant
The clearest inventory of arguments for and against different versions of internalism and externalism about justified belief is found in the introduction to Clayton Littlejohn’s Justification and the Truth-Connection (Littlejohn, 2012, 1–61). The arguments he enumerates there can be divided into three categories based on the considerations they adduce in favour of the various accounts: in the first sort of argument, we appeal to the intuitive responses that competent users of the concept give when they are presented with particular cases; in the second, we appeal to theoretical considerations from within epistemology; and in the third, we appeal to the practical uses to which we would like to put the concept, including moral and political uses
Summary
When is a belief justified? There are three families of arguments we typically use to support different accounts of justification: (1) arguments from our intuitive responses to vignettes that involve the concept; (2) arguments from the theoretical role we would like the concept to play in epistemology; and (3) arguments from the practical, moral, and political uses to which we wish to put the concept. Is the externalist best equipped to preserve our intuitions in the case of Nour, Charles, and Radha, but that an externalist concept of justification is best able to provide a certain sort of explanation that we need for political purposes.
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