180232 SE Epistemic Justification (2010W)

We are very free and easy with talk of justification in everyday life. We judge each other's emotions: 'Your anger with me was unjustified'; we judge each other's actions: 'Given what he knew of her he was justified in not giving her money again'; we judge each other's beliefs: 'How can you believe this of me? It is completely unjustified.' Although we daily swap justification-judgements with ease, the philosophical analysis of the notion of justification is far from easy. The concern of this course is with epistemic justification - with what makes beliefs justified. Two questions loom large in modern epistemology:
(1) What sorts of things can justify an individual belief? There are three options. Roughly:
(a) Only things internal to us - our other beliefs, our perceptions - can justify our beliefs (Internalism).
(b) What justifies a belief are the (impersonal) mechanisms which produced it (Externalism).
(c) Analyse justification in more ethical terms, e.g., beliefs are justified when formed out of the exercise of epistemic virtues (Virtue epistemology).
(2) How does one's whole belief system come to be justified? Again three options. Again roughly:
(a) There are certain foundational beliefs - perceptual, a priori - which ground the rest of one's beliefs without themselves requiring the kind of justification which ordinary beliefs do (Foundationalism).
(b) Beliefs come in a network, the members of which mutually support each other. There is no need for foundations and there are no beliefs with a privileged justifying status (Coherentism).
(c) Some beliefs can support each other, some require foundational beliefs (Foundherentism).
The two debates are connected: if you think (1a) that individual beliefs are justified by internal things such as other beliefs, the question becomes what justifies these other beliefs. A regress is launched and only an account of (2) can stop it. The aim of the course is to explore these debates and the connections between them.