In this essay I construct a theory of epistemic justification. Specifially, I utilize and modify techniques adopted from cognitive decision theory to develop an account of the conditions under which an agent is justified in believing some proposition. Thus, my principal interest is in an internalist analysis of justified belief. That is, the conditions of justified belief are a function of the agent's subjective conception of his cognitive situation and his assessments of the relationships between the various parameters of justification. The proposed theory focuses on two aspects of justification, the relationship between evidence and belief, and the relationship between what an agent takes to be his evidence for some belief and his other beliefs. These two aspects I refer to as the methodological and cognitive components, respectively Chapter I considers and rejects some alternative internalist analyses of justification. I suggest these analyses are inadequate principally because they do not provide adequate specification of the methodological components Chapter II considers Levi's account of inductive acceptance. While I take Levi's analysis to be a significant advance, I reject it since the methodological component is too idealized and the cognitive component is insufficiently specified In Chapter III I present my analysis of the methodological component. I develop a notion of epistemic probability and show how the methodological component may be analyzed utilizing only comparative probabilities. A significant feature of this approach is that it reflects the limitations of ordinary epistemic agents Chapter IV presents my analysis of the cognitive component. Utilizing a notion of a reliable characterization of the evidence, which specifies the relationship between what an agent takes to be his evidence for some belief and his other beliefs, and the results of Chapter III, I then present an analysis of justified belief In Chapter V I first reject externalism as an adequate approach to justification. After arguing that an adequate analysis of knowledge must be externalist, I claim that the conditions of epistemic rationality are to be sought in a theory of epistemic justification and not in an analysis of knowledge / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_26371 |
| Date | January 1984 |
| Contributors | Crumley, Jack Stuart, Ii (Author) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
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