Follow up to this post. The question here is quite short, what would constitute as justification in regards to justified belief theory? Seems something a bit vague to me.
My main motivation to this post was reading this question
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Sign up to join this communityFollow up to this post. The question here is quite short, what would constitute as justification in regards to justified belief theory? Seems something a bit vague to me.
My main motivation to this post was reading this question
The word justification has an extended family of epistemological uses. In no particular order of generality (and not exhaustively), see:
Resources outside the SEP (miscellaneous):
Often, when engaging in dialogue with established (the cynic will say "entrenched") theorists of one or another stripe, one will be able to pick up on their sense of justification from their usage in context. But so keep in mind "Sayre's law" and the shifting sands of Internet gatekeepers.
Kristian, as usual, is thorough. From a tertiary source:
Justification in the epistemological sense is an essentially contested concept:
The term essentially contested concepts gives a name to a problematic situation that many people recognize: that in certain kinds of talk there is a variety of meanings employed for key terms in an argument, and there is a feeling that dogmatism ("My answer is right and all others are wrong"), skepticism ("All answers are equally true (or false); everyone has a right to his own truth"), and eclecticism ("Each meaning gives a partial view so the more meanings the better") are none of them the appropriate attitude towards that variety of meanings.
You could spend your life surveying various definitions proffered for 'justification'. In the simplest sense, it's a process by which belief can be held to be knowledge (presuming you believe such a thing is possible). For some, it's a path for 'proving' knowledge is objective and irrefutable. For others, it's a means of applying a 'warrant' to a possible or likely conclusion that might experience defeaters down the road. For yet others, it's a political tool and shibboleth for determining who gets to share in the exercise of power. And if you hold all to be true, then to a pluralist, it means different things to different people depending on their metaphilosophical views and each view is a theory (which itself requires justification amusingly enough).
That's why in the above article, multiple theories are given:
It is my observation that as one evolves one's views to be logically more coherent and epistemologically more articulate, one's personal theory of justification changes. In a sense, we all move from the faith in our parents and guardians as small children through a societally acceptable common-sense view, ultimately graduating, with diligence to very studious and technical notions of justification. In this way, justification and personal truth are inextricably linked.