Abstract
To avoid the problem of regress, externalists have put forward defeaters-based accounts of justification. The paper argues that existing proposals face two serious concerns: (i) They fail to accommodate related counterexamples such as Norman the clairvoyant, and, more worryingly, (ii) they fail to explain how one can be epistemically responsible in holding basic beliefs—i.e., they fail to explain how basic beliefs can avoid being arbitrary from the agent’s point of view. To solve both of these problems, a new, externalist, defeaters-based account of justification is offered—viz., System Reliabilism. The core message of the view—and the way it deals with both (i) and (ii)—is the claim that the justificatory status of justified basic beliefs originates from being the undefeated outputs of a reliable, cognitively integrated system that is capable of defeating them. Simply put, to be candidates for being justified, basic beliefs must be epistemically responsible and to be so they must be undefeated while being defeasible. The paper also offers a detailed, naturalistic analysis of the notion of cognitive integration. This long-due, mechanistic account of cognitive integration is then used to argue that an additional advantage of System Reliabilism is its unique position to account for the as yet unexplained intuition that responsible beliefs are also likely to be true.
Highlights
Many of my beliefs, for example my empirical beliefs, appear to be basic
Capture the significance of the agent’s perspective on her beliefs, awareness of supporting reasons figures nowhere. We can distill this general approach to justification in the form of the following principle6: No Awareness Justification (NAJ): S is justified in believing p iff (i) p is the product of a reliable and/or properly functioning process and (ii) S has no mental state defeaters against her belief that p
Of its source—and that is so whether or not the belief is reliably formed.”14 And notice, as Bergmann’s quote suggests, that the intuitive support may only go so far as to motivate the simple idea that defeaters can remove justification, while falling short of supporting the fancier idea that their absence somehow adds epistemic responsibility. This is precisely what externalist defeaters-based accounts of justification require—otherwise they have to accept that non-inferentially derived beliefs are either arbitrary, or that their epistemic responsibility arises ex nihilo
Summary
For example my empirical beliefs, appear to be basic. I believe there is a laptop in front of me, that the room in which I am sitting is warm, that noise is coming from the street... not because I infer them from other justified. 2 and 3, I argue that, generally, this defeaters-based approach to justification faces the following two (aforementioned) concerns: (i) It fails to accommodate relevant counterexamples such as Norman the clairvoyant and (ii) it fails to explain how lack of defeaters (i.e., the absence of something) may confer epistemic responsibility to the agent’s beliefs (and thereby prevent them from being arbitrary from her point of view). Capture the significance of the agent’s perspective on her beliefs, awareness of supporting reasons figures nowhere We can distill this general approach to justification in the form of the following principle: No Awareness Justification (NAJ): S is justified in believing p iff (i) p is the product of a reliable and/or properly functioning process and (ii) S has no mental state defeaters against her belief that p (or the way it was formed). The second problem is that it fails to explain how lack of defeaters (i.e., the absence of something) may confer epistemic responsibility to the agent’s beliefs
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