This study surveys the usage of various justification activities in plants that have adopted advanced manufacturing technology (AMT). Relationships between the usage of these activities and the level of performance of AMT projects are also determined. Our findings suggest that justification approaches and justification criteria preference help to explain the adoption of the more integrated technologies. However, the number of functional departments involved in AMT justification activities is more effective in explaining project performance than the other justification activities. Our results also indicate that the majority of plants are not utilizing discounted cash-flow and probabilistic justification techniques. This study provides some insights into the formation of decision making teams for the justification process. Future research directions in this area are also suggested.

Although political dissent is an idea that perennially receives much public attention, its standing in the academic literature is relatively slight. Very few thinkers engage the idea of dissent outside of its manifestation as an illegal action, and ever fewer dedicate any time to understanding the idea conceptually. A substantial portion of my dissertation aims to address this conspicuous gap. In the remaining portion, I advance a normative claim. My claim is that the very same justificatory considerations that pertain to illegal acts of dissent pertain as well to those acts that ought to be legally protected by a citizen’s right to dissent. Put more simply, I argue that whether or not a dissenting action is done within, or outside of, the law is of no normative effect. The upshot of this argument is that it places the burden on agents to be responsible for all the dissenting actions they undertake. This is so regardless of whether or not those actions find institutional shelter. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

I explore the epistemic justification of self-beliefs regarding personality traits within the internalism-externalism debate. Historically, the question of epistemic justification of self-beliefs has been discussed only with respect to our beliefs about our current mental states while the epistemic justification of our self-beliefs about our personality traits was assumed not to be any different from the justification of our beliefs about the external world. However, I use empirical psychology to highlight a few unique characteristics of our self-beliefs about personality traits that make the typical application of internalist or externalist standards less straightforward. These characteristics have to do with the biases and the self-verification that accompany our self-beliefs about our personality traits. I argue that externalism, in general, and virtue reliabilism, in particular, are more suitable to the context of our self-beliefs about our personality traits than other theories of justification. However, I contend that within the virtue reliabilism framework, a self-belief-forming process can become more competent if it generates self-belief from the instances where individuals manifest the trait in question while having the motivation and opportunity to do otherwise. I show how this condition makes the self-belief-forming process more competent and, therefore, makes the produced self-beliefs more epistemically justified. / Thesis / Master of Philosophy (MA)

No description available.

In philosophical theories of knowledge (epistemology), justification is a desirable property that one's beliefs ought to have before they can be accepted as part of a rational discourse. Roughly, for internalists about justification, a belief is justified if the subject has or has available to him good reasons to believe it; while for externalists a belief is justified if there exist good reasons to believe it, regardless of whether the subject actually has or has access to those reasons. One such externalist view of justification is reliabilism, the position that a belief is justified if it has been produced by a properly functioning belief-forming mechanism (BFM). Some examples of BFMs available to human beings are sense perception, memory, and deduction. Epistemic circularity is a notorious problem for reliabilism. If a belief is only justified if it was produced reliably by a certain BFM, how can I ever know for sure that a certain BFM is itself reliable? For instance, take the meta-belief that "sense perception is a reliable BFM." This belief is produced, at least in part, through sense perception itself, for example by analyzing the track record of my past sense perceptions and finding it to be in good order. But if a BFM is thus allowed to vouch for its own trustworthiness, then we have no way to discriminate between reliable and unreliable BFMs. After all, when trying to ascertain if a suspect in a murder case is sincere, it is quite irresponsible to ask the suspect himself. Thus, internalist critics complain, reliabilism is plagued by epistemic circularity and loses sight of the normative goal of epistemology. Reliabilist responses to this serious charge have been of two kinds: (1) to show that epistemically circular arguments can be justificatory, and thus that BFMs can vouch for their own re-liability; or (2) to concede that epistemically circular arguments cannot be justificatory, but then to also insist that some higher-level circularity must be allowed in one's justificatory practices, or no beliefs at all can ever be justified. Here I argue that the first strategy fails and the second succeeds. Internalists are correct that epistemically circular arguments cannot be justificatory in the way that some reliabilists expect them to be, but they are incorrect that all circularity must be banished before our justificatory practices can be virtuous. To always allow circularity makes knowledge reprehensibly easy, but to never let it in at all is a kind of epistemic suicide. / Master of Arts

How should we understand the question "Why be moral?" Can we answer this question? If so, how? In this paper I develop an exemplarist theory of practical moral justification; that is, a theory of the justification of the prima facie moral things that we do, not the moral beliefs that we have. I take as my starting point that morality is, essentially, a set of practices in which all persons, in virtue of their being persons, participate. I argue that skillful practitioners of these various practices should be understood as moral authorities, and that the appeal to a moral authority for the purpose of one's justifying one's moral doings is necessarily justified for the appealer whenever she is practicing the same practice as the moral authority. This theory holds that moral authorities, so circumscribed, are Authoritative Exemplars, and as the appeal to their authority is necessarily justified they are able to provide a foundation for practical moral justifications, and thus rebutting the objection that all such justifications will run to regress. Among other things this account allows us to interpret the "Why be moral?" question as a question asking for more than can be had posed from a position of misunderstanding the nature of morality and practical moral justification. We cannot answer the "Why be moral?" question any more than we can answer the "Why be human?" question. / Master of Arts / In moral philosophy, the study of questions and puzzles arising in broadly moral thought, one of the perennial questions is “Why be moral?” Since the time of Plato, various philosophers have given very different answers to this question. These answers range from “It is in your best interests to be moral” to “It would be irrational for you not to be moral” to “If you have to ask then we cannot convince you that you should be moral.” The most recent thought on this question has taken it to be a very important one; a question that must be answered if moral practice is to retain its sense and relevance to our lives. The question, in more precise terms, is taken to be a demand for a justification of the demands that morality places upon us all. Moreover, this demand for <i>justification</i> is taken to require not just some answer, but an answer that <i>any</i> person must accept. In this paper I argue that the question is simply a bad question, because what morality <i>is</i> is not a theoretical system of principles which we may or may not act in accordance with. Morality is something that we <i>do</i>; it is something that we all do and we cannot stop doing it. To justify <i>what we do</i>, I argue that we may appeal to moral authorities which can rightly serve as our exemplars, as moral authorities are those persons who are skilled at doing what we are doing.

On admet en didactique des langues que les savoirs enseignés à l’école s’articulent inévitablement aux « déjà-là » qui constituent un appui ou une entrave à l’apprentissage selon qu’ils entrent en résonnance ou en dissonance avec les savoirs enseignés en classe (Dabène, 2005, Reuter, 2001). Cette recherche qualitative porte sur l’apprentissage de l’écriture de justifications en classe de français au 1er cycle du secondaire (12-13 ans). Elle part du fait que les élèves, plurilingues (Coste, 2008), amènent avec eux un savoir d’expérience de cette conduite. Elle vise à connaître ce « déjà-là » et à comprendre comment il entre en jeu lors de pratiques d’écriture de justifications en classe de français. Des entretiens d’explicitation (Vermersch, 1996) ont été menés auprès de 15 élèves, diverses manières de connaître la justification, que Chevallard (2003) nomme « rapport à », et plusieurs tactiques (Delamotte et Penloup, 2000) ont été catégorisées puis mises en relation suivant la méthode d’analyse par théorisation ancrée (Paillé et Mucchielli, 2008). L’analyse a permis de mettre en lumière des liens entre la contextualisation (Blanchet, 2010) de la situation d’écriture établie par l’élève, le rapport à la justification qui entre en jeu et les tactiques adoptées par l’élève. Des interventions didactiques sont enfin proposées en appui sur ces résultats.

Dans les dernières décennies, une majorité des pays occidentaux a vu les filles surpasser les garçons en matière de réussite académique. Pourtant, celles-ci restent sous-représentées dans les sciences et la recherche. Nous proposons dans la présente thèse d’explorer ce paradoxe contemporain à la lumière de la théorie de la justification du système (Jost & Banaji, 1994). En particulier, nous suggérons qu’il existe un stéréotype de genre de réussite scolaire, non spécifique à une discipline particulière, dont le contenu permet la justification et le maintien des trajectoires académiques défavorables aux femmes. Cette hypothèse générale est testée dans trois axes de recherche, donnant lieu à huit études. Le premier axe est destiné à documenter le contenu d’un stéréotype de genre de réussite scolaire. Le deuxième axe est consacré à l’étude du rôle possible du stéréotype de genre de réussite scolaire dans la perpétuation des inégalités de genre dans les trajectoires académiques. Enfin, l'objectif dans le troisième axe est de tester dans quelle mesure le stéréotype de genre de réussite scolaire permet de satisfaire le besoin de justifier le système lorsque celui-ci est menacé. Pris dans leur ensemble, les résultats indiquent que les élèves ont connaissance d’un stéréotype de genre décrivant les filles qui réussissent à l’école comme moins affirmées, mais plus conformismes et plus intelligentes et travailleuses que les garçons qui réussissent. Cependant, l’intelligence des filles est jugée moins malléable que celle des garçons. Les résultats semblent en outre confirmer que le contenu de ce stéréotype de genre, parce qu’il associe aux garçons plus qu’aux filles les caractéristiques jugées prédictives de la réussite dans les filières prestigieuses, pourrait servir une fonction de rationalisation et de maintien des trajectoires scolaires défavorables aux filles. En conclusion de cette thèse, nous réaffirmons la nécessité pour les recherches futures d'articuler les explications de niveaux intra-individuel, situationnel, positionnel et idéologique pour une meilleure compréhension des processus de perpétuation de la hiérarchie de genre défavorable aux femmes dans le milieu académique. / In spite of continuous academic improvement, female students are still underrepresented in the fields of science and research. Our aim is to explore this contemporary paradox from a system justification perspective (Jost & Banaji, 1994). Specifically, we suggest that a gender stereotype on academic achievement exists, and that its content serves to justify and maintain unfavourable academic paths for women. We test this general assumption in eight studies organized into three lines of research. The first line is intended to document the content of a gender stereotype on academic achievement. The second one focuses on the role of the gender stereotype on academic achievement in the perpetuation of gender inequalities in academic paths. The third one is devoted to testing the justifying function of the gender stereotype on academic achievement, when the gender system is threatened. Taken together, results show that students are aware of the shared belief that girls who succeed in school are less assertive, but more compliant, intelligent and hardworking than boys who succeed in school. Girls' intelligence is nevertheless described as less malleable than boys' intelligence. Results indicate that the caracteristics deemed to predict success in the most prestigious fields of education are ascribed to male students more than to female students, confirming that the gender stereotype on academic achievement could serve to rationalize and perpetuate the gender gap in higher education. Finally, we emphasize that future research should articulate individual, situational, positional and ideological levels of explanation to fully account for the processes underlying the maintenance of the gender hierarchy in the academic domain.

In this thesis, I analyze the classical tripartite definition of knowledge. According to this definition there are three conditions for a knowledge claim to arise, namely, belief, truth and justification conditions. The main problem with this definition is even if these three conditions are satisfied one may not know a proposition p because of the fact that the justification of the proposition p may not be relevant in showing that p is true. Therefore, my primary purpose is to establish a strong conceptual connection between justification and truth conditions. To realize this, first, I defend a three-way interrelation between these three conditions. Second, I inquire as to which kind of justification should lead us to which kind of truth. To answer to this question, I postulate three kinds of realities, namely, Subjective Reality, Inter-Subjective Reality, and Allegedly Pure Reality. Furthermore, I re-define the justification condition in such way that there is a kind of whole justification and it requires both internal and external justification. According to this conception of reality and re-definition of justification there already exists a strong conceptual connection between internal justification and Subjective Reality which is completely subject-relative. And I defend the existence of such a connection also between the whole justification and Inter-Subjective Reality. Finally, I argue that no conception of justification can lead us to an Allegedly Pure Reality that the hardest version of skepticism claims to exist.

In this thesis I scavenge the history of philosophy for answers to the question ‘How are claims to knowledge justified?’. I argue that Plato’s psychological doctrine of knowledge marks the starting point of a philosophical inquiry motivated by the possibility to discover foundations of knowledge through investigating the nature of mind. At the core of this inquiry lies the hypothesis that if the psychological mechanisms that govern the capacity for knowledge acquisition is fully understood, then answers will follow about why judgements are true or false. The prospective result of the inquiry is a theory of universal epistemic justification which demarcates epistemically warranted beliefs from unwarranted beliefs. I suggest that there is a historically persistent case of cognitive dissonance within the epistemological enterprise — a tension between two of its central theses — which is caused by the persistence of the of the hitherto unsuccessful but ongoing quest for universal epistemic justification, and its inciting promises. The contradicting theses are those of certain justification (that one is justified in believing that p only if p is entailed by evidence) and proportional justification (that one is proportionally justified in believing that p to the extent that evidence makes p credible). I discuss the consequences of giving up one of the respective theses. I conclude that the thesis of certain justification cannot be given up unless an adequate theory of proportional justification is proposed, and that the legacy of searching for universal epistemic justification will continue unless epistemologists are able to construct one.