Justification-Skepticism

ABSTRACT: Justification-Skepticism is the radical skeptical position that calls into question our ability to reach a low standard of epistemic justification with respect to beliefs based on perception, memory, and induction. Whereas knowledge-skepticism is the view that we never reach a high standard of epistemic justification (i.e., the standard required for knowledge), justification-skepticism is the view that our doxastic attitudes based on perception, memory, and induction have no positive epistemic status whatsoever. The sort of reasoning for justification-skepticism that I focus on has worried epistemologists at least since David Hume. A typical argument begins with the assumption that SE is typical sensory evidence for proposition p (there is a tree in front of me). (Pr1): You have no good reason to believe that SE makes p probable. (Pr2): If you have no good reason to believe that SE makes p probable, then you are not epistemically justified in believing p. Thus, (C): You are not epistemically justified in believing p. I argue that such arguments are weak, because they rely on two false assumptions: (1) the truth-conduciveness thesis: necessarily, an epistemically justified belief is more likely (in a frequency sense) to be true than false, and (2) the skeptical higher-order thesis: necessarily, if one is epistemically justified in believing a target proposition, then one has assurance that one's evidence makes that proposition likely (in a frequency sense) to be true.

Using the goal-oriented approach to understanding epistemic justification, which has been widely discussed in the literature, I consider various accounts of epistemic justification in order to assess their consistency with nine key intuitions affirmed by epistemic internalists (which includes justification-skeptics). Among the key intuitions are the same evidence principle (necessarily, two people with the same internal mental states possess the same evidence) and the same justification principle (necessarily, two people with the same evidence possess the same epistemic justification toward a proposition). I argue that there is no account of epistemic justification that both supports the arguments for justification-skepticism and is consistent with all the key intuitions. Any view that supports justification-skepticism (i.e., that affirms both the truth-conduciveness thesis and the skeptical higher-order thesis) is inconsistent with either the same evidence principle or the same justification principle. However, I do reveal accounts of epistemic justification that are consistent with the nine key intuitions but which are inconsistent with one or more of the key skeptical assumptions. By means of examples, I illustrate how bizarre and counterintuitive the skeptical requirements for having epistemic justification turn out to be.

My results strongly suggest that the justification-skeptic's requirements for epistemic justification are much too stringent. In light of the fact that there are accounts of epistemic justification that avoid the implausible consequences of justification-skepticism and are also consistent with the nine key intuitions, I argue that we have good reason to think that the justification-skepticism arguments depend on faulty assumptions, and thus are weak arguments.