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The project consists of a defense of the reductivist program generally and an application of the program to the theory of epistemic justification. Chapter One sets out the problem of reducing justification to other terms and defends the legitimacy of this problem against attacks by Quine in particular and supervenience theorists generally. Chapter Two is an explication and refutation of all possible theories which reduce justification-facts to facts about the reliability of cognitive processes. All such theories founder due to their insensitivity to the perspectival component of thought. Chapter Three argues that this perspectival component is non-truth-theoretic and hence that the connection between justification and truth is much less important than has been generally supposed. Chapter Four lays out the structure of epistemic justification and proposes a reductive thesis entailing this structure. It is argued that essential elements of both coherence theories of justification and foundations theories of justification are present in rational thought and that this is explicable in terms of the teleology of human cognition. Chapter Five explicates and defends the theory constructed in Chapter Four.

It is argued that an analysis of causation using counterfactual conditionals can be given. Causes and effects are considered to be propositional entities, and a semantics for counterfactuals employing possible worlds is presupposed. The analysis stems from an attempt to handle cases proving problematic for other counterfactual analyses. Preempted causes, which would have been causes had they not been preempted by causes, are distinguished from causes by requiring that a causal chain connecting cause and effect exist. The condition is strengthened to require that the causal chain still would have existed even had the preempted causes been false. Causal chains are analyzed as sequences of true propositions satisfying two conditions: any member after the first would not have been true had its immediate predecessor alone been false, and the truth of any member of the sequence is sufficient for the truth of any subsequent member. The analysis is weakened slightly to permit many causes to overdetermine an effect. The analysis is then amended to exclude certain noncausal connections. Though it is true that had Socrates not died, Xanthippe would not have become a widow, his dying did not cause her to become a widow. To yield this result, an analysis is offered of the relation that logically simple propositions bear to the more complex propositions that they make true. It is then proposed that the sets of simple propositions making the cause and effect true not entail the effect and the cause, respectively. Finally, an attempt is made to distinguish between cause and effect. It is argued that cases of backward causation are possible, and thus no analysis should require causes to be temporally prior to effects. It is proposed that only when there is symmetry with respect to the subjunctive conditions of the analysis should temporal considerations be employed to discriminate cause and effect.

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