Questions tagged [justification]

The tag has no usage guidance.

Filter by
Sorted by
Tagged with
8 votes
4 answers
500 views

Can private experiences justify private belief in supernaturalism?

Is it ever rational or justified to believe in supernaturalism on the basis of private experiences (of the kind for which publicly accesible evidence can hardly be produced)? If someone has private ...
6 votes
7 answers
721 views

To what extent is intersubjective agreement required for one to be justified in trusting one's own subjective experiences?

Context: this is a follow-up to my last question Is the hallucination hypothesis always the best explanation? Suppose A has a subjective experience (or multiple subjective experiences) that leads them ...
9 votes
5 answers
2k views

Can I know something but not be able to justify it to anyone else?

Can I know something but not be able to justify it to anyone else? I don't necessarily mean metaphysical puzzles, but everyday examples. If I cannot - and I know I cannot - prove to anyone else, all ...
2 votes
5 answers
360 views

Can God make the belief in His own existence justified (if He exists)?

In a hypothetical scenario in which God exists, would God be able to make the belief in His existence justified for humans? If so, how? What would God need to do to accomplish that goal? If not, does ...
1 vote
1 answer
59 views

Is the (truth of) justification of political beliefs necessary given Pyrrhonism?

To explain real quick. Pyrrhonism is some sort of philosophical practice which does reject (or suspend judgment on) epistemic criteria. It is debatable if they can hold beliefs, but even if the could ...
2 votes
0 answers
49 views

Infinitesimals and plural quantification

In reply to, "Does nature jump?" Mikhail Katz notes that: There is a different idea in Leibniz called the Law of Continuity. One of its formulations is the rules of the finite are found to ...
0 votes
0 answers
58 views

Fixed/critical points of a nonexistence quantifier/function

Let j(∃0) = 1, and j(∃1) = 1, for a justification function j on ∃-sentences. So far, 0 is the initial critical point of the composite quantifier-function, and 1 is the initial fixed point. So let ...
1 vote
1 answer
35 views

What is meant by "nonreliabilist foundationalism" in the Philpapers survey? Why is it popular?

In the 2020 Philpapers survey epistemologists favour nonreliabilist foundationalism, what theories of justification does this include? Maybe classical foundationalism ala Fumerton or phenomenal ...
3 votes
2 answers
237 views

What would constitute as justification?

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 ...
2 votes
1 answer
85 views

Basic truths as self-justified or parajustified

Some foundationalists maintain that basic truths are self-justifying, which means they are allowing, in some exceptional cases at least, a form of circular reasoning; petitio principii or begging the ...
2 votes
6 answers
277 views

How do we know (i.e. justify our belief) that time exists without "proving too much"?

How do we know that time exists? This is a complex question. First, we cannot make sense of a question like this without first establishing what we mean by knowledge. For convenience, let's pick the ...
17 votes
4 answers
5k views

How could one distinguish crankery from serious work?

Suppose I read a work, and I don't understand it or see its meaning, then it could be that either the information itself is inconsistent/non-sensical or I don't understand it personally. How do I know ...
0 votes
0 answers
62 views

Justification versus mental causation

A justification: "we know A is true because B is true." A mental causation: "I concluded A because first I believed B and that led me to A." There is certainly a strong ...
4 votes
5 answers
538 views

Defending the Unpopular: Foundationalism

Foundationalism, once considered a valid and popular philosophy, now receives nearly universal contempt. There seems to be a consensus, in both analytic and continental camps, it is dead. Are there ...
0 votes
1 answer
84 views

Is the axiomatic method an inherently well-founded method?

It occurred to me a little while ago, that there is a trichotomy in set theory that maps to the positive solutions to the problem of the regress of inferential reasons. Namely, well-founded sets map ...
0 votes
0 answers
44 views

What can be known and what can be believed when neither induction nor deduction is justified?

Kant is well known for taking seriously the lack of justification for induction voiced by Hume and finding what is left for us to be able to know and believe. I wonder, with the knowledge that the ...
1 vote
0 answers
67 views

The structure of the epistemic regress

I just read this essay on coherentism, and it resonated with a question I have about reconciling foundationalism, coherentism, and infinitism. The gist of the essay is that there are graph-theoretic ...
0 votes
0 answers
54 views

Justification values

The concept of truth values is sometimes expressed in terms of "truth as an object vs. truth as a property." My in-a-slogan understanding of this alternative is "sentences being ...
3 votes
1 answer
120 views

Is this a case of JTB that may be true, but not knowledge?

Belief: P != NP True? Maybe. Justification: Experimental evidence Basically the justification for the belief is that despite lots of research nobody has managed to discover an efficient solution for ...
0 votes
0 answers
72 views

Forcing and justification

In "The set-theoretic multiverse," Hamkins talks about forcing giving us "glimpses" of other set-theoretic universes. He states his position as a Platonistic one, i.e. these "...
2 votes
2 answers
888 views

What's the difference between Justification and Evidence?

Q: In what ways does use of the term "Evidence" differ from that of the term "Justification" in philosophy? Ive read Evidence posed as the internalist counterpoint to the ...
4 votes
6 answers
2k views

What does "true" mean in "justified true belief"?

What does TRUE mean in JUSTIFIED TRUE BELIEF? We define knowledge as "justified true belief". Now, my question is what does the term TRUE mean in the formal definition? Why not only "...
3 votes
0 answers
118 views

Question about the IEP’s (Michael Huemer’s) formulation of phenomenal conservatism

(I posted the identical question on the AskPhilosophy subreddit.) I first learned about phenomenal conservatism under a different name, “the principle of credulity”, from the philosopher of religion ...
0 votes
4 answers
519 views

Is Philosopical Skepticism self-defeating?

Whilst researching philosophical skepticism, I found this answer to the question here which states the following: [Jon Erison] Extreme skepticism is in fact self-defeating. According the the ...
3 votes
1 answer
687 views

What is the difference between warrant and justification according to Plantinga?

According to the traditional account of knowledge: S knows P iff S has a (1) Justified (2) True (3) Belief. I have not faced any account of knowledge that denies that last two things (epistemic ...
0 votes
0 answers
48 views

Self-evident vs. self-explanatory vs. ...?

How far apart are these descriptions? I was approaching the issue from the perspective of erotetic logic, and my intuition is that self-evidence is when a proposition is evident from its erotetic ...
0 votes
2 answers
107 views

A priori vs false witness statement

John tells Linda the following false statement to trick her into believing that UFO:s exist. Yesterday when I was walking in the forest I saw a UFO for 5 seconds and then it disappeared, you have to ...
1 vote
0 answers
93 views

Can coherentism be understood purely without deductive logic?

To me, deductive logic is essential not just for distinguishing between foundational and coherent knowledge, but to any sort of reasoning. For instance if you want to really figure out (reason) ...
0 votes
2 answers
355 views

"Dinosaurs did exist once". Is it knowledge or is it only justified belief?

On Wikipedia, knowledge is defined as justified true belief: The concept of justified true belief states that in order to know that a given proposition is true, one must not only believe the ...