New Paper – Evidence, Reasons, and Epistemic Justification
January 11, 2010
There’s a new paper up on the papers page. It’s entitled Evidence, Reasons, and Epistemic Justification. Here’s the abstract:
- This paper puts forward a new account of epistemic justification. The Evidence and Reasons for Belief (ERB) thesis is offered as a response to deficiencies in a thesis endorsed by Stephen Kearns and Daniel Star (2008, 2009). In section 1, I substantiate the components of ERB in reference to the literature on the nature of propositions, facts, evidence, and normative reasons. Section 2 argues against the Kearns and Star thesis called Reasons as Evidence (RE). This is done by laying bare the logical structure of RE and showing that either of the conditionals in the biconditional endorsed by RE can be falsified using two cases inspired by Richard Foley (1991). In section 3, I argue for ERB in relation to ordinary linguistic intuitions and the ability of ERB to handle the two cases RE was unable to handle. Section 4 responds to a couple of objections to ERB, and section 5 summarizes and concludes the paper.
Update: The paper is now down for revision.
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