Epistemologists often debate whether we ought to be internalists or externalists about epistemic justification. Internalists say that whether an agent's belief is justified depends on facts internally accessible to the agent, and externalists deny this. But what if internalists and externalists could both be right? This would be a pluralist view of epistemic justification. You might think that a pluralist view would be plausible because it would allow us to explain why we have different intuitions in different cases, and it would allow us to use different concepts for different purposes. In this paper, I argue the pluralist view has several serious flaws that make it much less plausible than it might initially seem. I show that pluralists run into even worse problems than monists when trying to vindicate intuitions about cases. They also run into problems when trying to specify a singular concept of epistemic justification to use for a certain purpose. It is therefore unclear what reason we would have to adopt a pluralist stance. I conclude that we ought to be monists about epistemic justification. / Master of Arts / Epistemologists often debate what it is that makes a belief justified. The view that the criteria for justification are internal to an agent is called "internalism" and the view that the criteria include factors external to an agent is callee "externalism." But what if internalists and externalists could both be right? This would be a pluralist view of epistemic justification. You might think that a pluralist view would be plausible because it would allow us to explain why we have different intuitions in different cases, and it would allow us to use different concepts for different purposes. In this paper, I argue the pluralist view has several serious flaws that make it much less plausible than it might initially seem.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/111188 |
| Date | 08 July 2022 |
| Creators | Hirshland, Samantha Jane |
| Contributors | Philosophy, Hoek, Daniel, Parker, Wendy, MacKenzie, Jordan |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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