Justification

In the most general sense, the term“justification” refers to the act of providing reasons for the validity, legitimacy, and defensibility of (1) an action, (2) a belief, and/or (3) a social arrangement. Thus, justificatory practices –which may be described as reason-giving acts oriented toward demonstrating that something is right, cogent,and persuasive–emerge in relation to (1) empirical and behavioral, (2) conceptual and ideological, and/or (3) conventional and institutional processes and structures

Not without justification

In this paper I take issue with Jonathan Sutton's attempt at defending the thesis that knowledge is justified belief. I argue, first, that the arguments he adduces in support of it fail. Second, I provide independent reason to believe that knowledge and justified belief come apart

Justification in Context

Determining knowledge happens by indexically attuned\ud justification. One may also say that knowledge comes\ud without justification if standards for knowledge are\ud measured by fancy requirements. A lower setting of scores\ud brings justification back. Epistemic responsibility requires\ud attuning to context. Structures of epistemic justification are\ud extended from these resting on exceptionless general\ud rules to the ones involving generalities with exceptions and\ud further to those proceeding from particular contextual\ud cases. How can justification in the context really work?\ud Discussion involves the last two manners of how to\ud systematize the structure of justification. The first of these\ud involves general patterns and thus normative authority of\ud the general and the second builds on particular contexts.\ud The structure of justification proposed by this last one\ud complies with accommodation requirements for a realistic\ud account of knowledge

Temporal Justification Logic

Justification logics are modal-like logics with the additional capability of recording the reason, or justification, for modalities in syntactic structures, called justification terms. Justification logics can be seen as explicit counterparts to modal logics. The behavior and interaction of agents in distributed system is often modeled using logics of knowledge and time. In this paper, we sketch some preliminary ideas on how the modal knowledge part of such logics of knowledge and time could be replaced with an appropriate justification logic

Knowledge-First Theories of Justification

Knowledge-first theories of justification give knowledge priority when it comes to explaining when and why someone has justification for an attitude or an action. The emphasis of this entry is on knowledge-first theories of justification for belief. As it turns out there are a number of ways of giving knowledge priority when theorizing about justification, and in what follows I offer an opinionated survey of more than a dozen existing options that have emerged in the last two decades since the publication of Timothy Williamson’s Knowledge and Its Limits. I first trace several of the general theoretical motivations that have been offered for putting knowledge first in the theory of justification. I then go on to examine existing knowledge-first theories of justification and their standing objections. These objections are largely, but not exclusively, concerned with the extensional adequacy of knowledge-first theories of justification. There are doubtless more ways of giving knowledge priority in the theory of justification than I cover here, but the resulting survey will be instructive as it highlights potential shortcomings that would-be knowledge-first theorists of justification may wish either to avoid or else to be prepared with a suitable error theory

The Doctrine of Justification

This paper seeks to define and describe the doctrine of justification, and to track the historical origin of the doctrine’s present evangelical understanding. The present-day evangelical understanding of the doctrine of justification is quite complex—integrating many scriptural topics such as righteousness, imputation, faith, grace, forgiveness, works and the Law—an understanding which originated with and developed since Luther’s departure from the traditional Roman Catholic view of justification. The paper analyzes Wayne Grudem’s theory of justification as he developed it in his Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine

The logic of epistemic justification

Theories of epistemic justification are commonly assessed by exploring their predictions about particular hypothetical cases – predictions as to whether justification is present or absent in this or that case. With a few exceptions, it is much less common for theories of epistemic justification to be assessed by exploring their predictions about logical principles. The exceptions are a handful of ‘closure’ principles, which have received a lot of attention, and which certain theories of justification are well known to invalidate. But these closure principles are only a small sample of the logical principles that we might consider. In this paper, I will outline four further logical principles that plausibly hold for justification and two which plausibly do not. While my primary aim is just to put these principles forward, I will use them to evaluate some different approaches to justification and (tentatively) conclude that a ‘normic’ theory of justification best captures its logic

On Actualist and Fundamental Public Justification in Political Liberalism

Public justification in political liberalism is often conceptualized in light of Rawls’s view of its role in a hypothetical well-ordered society as an ideal or idealizing form of justification that applies a putatively reasonable conception of political justice to political matters. But Rawls implicates a different idea of public justification in his doctrine of general reflective equilibrium. The paper engages this second, more fundamental idea. Public justification in this second sense is actualist and fundamental. It is actualist in that it fully enfranchises actual reasonable citizens. It is fundamental in that political liberalism qualifies conceptions of political justice as reasonable to begin with only if they can be accepted coherently by actual reasonable citizens. Together, these features invite the long-standing concern that actualist political liberalism is objectionably exclusionary. I argue that the exclusion objection, while plausible, is more problematic in own right than it seems if actualist and fundamental public justification hypotheticalizes and discursive respect is compatible with substantive discursive inequality. This leaves proponents and critics of political liberalism with deeper questions about the nature of permissible discursive inequality in public justification