Questions tagged [justification]
The justification tag has no usage guidance.
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Testing Free Will
Could we ever come up with an experiment that is able to explain once and for all if free will exists or not? Another way to put it: given a universe and agents acting within it, is it possible for ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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How can I justify trusting my own thoughts without begging the question?
Suppose I attempt to justify trusting my own thoughts with an argument. Suppose I read the argument and find it compelling. The very process of reading an argument (presumably written in English or ...
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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 ...
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Similarities and differences between an evidentialist justification and a reliabilist justification for a belief?
Evidentialism
Evidentialism in epistemology is defined by the following thesis about epistemic justification:
(EVI) Person S is justified in believing proposition p at time t if and only if S’s ...
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Is belief in abiogenesis justified under evidentialism and process reliabilism?
Asking whether a belief X is justified can lead to very opinion-based answers (e.g., Does life have a natural or supernatural origin?), but I don't think this necessarily has to be the case if we ...
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Under physicalism, should I still be sad if my murdered wife is replaced with a perfect clone?
Context: This question follows up on Under physicalism, can my consciousness reappear in a different body?.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that some form of physicalism is true. Imagine my wife is ...
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Is it epistemologically self-consistent to use the scientific method to justify some beliefs and non-scientific justifications for others?
Let’s call B(p) the set of all beliefs a person p holds. We can denote S(B(p)) as the subset of beliefs held by p for which they can provide a scientific justification, and NS(B(p)) as the set B(p) ...
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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 "...
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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 ...
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Ground vs justification?
I'm wondering if there is a technical distinction I've been missing between 'ground' and 'justification' in philosophy. If I say that my true belief is 'grounded', isn't that the same as saying that ...
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Are two persons equally rational in choosing different dogmatic stopping points in their chains of justification as per the Münchhausen trilemma?
In epistemology, the Münchhausen trilemma is a thought experiment
intended to demonstrate the theoretical impossibility of proving any
truth, even in the fields of logic and mathematics, without ...
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Are we only justified in holding beliefs that are supported by evidence susceptible to peer review, leading to substantial intersubjective consensus?
In other words, what about beliefs rooted in personal experiences that cannot be scrutinized or validated through a rigorous peer-review process? This often occurs in religious, mystical, or spiritual ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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Can the AC-DC argument against infinitism be defused?
Infinitism is the epistemic theory that claims that justification is only achieved by an infinite chain of non-repeating reasons.
At first, this feels like the "troll" theory of epistemic ...
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What sorts of beliefs can be justified non-scientifically?
Can I be justified in believing in a proposition X through a justification that doesn't meet the standards of the scientific method? What sorts of beliefs would be justifiable in this way (non-...
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Is it ever rational or justified to believe in a claim X based on eyewitness accounts if X seems to contradict mainstream scientific theories? [duplicate]
Can the testimony of multiple credible witnesses challenge the conventional understanding of the laws of physics? If several trustworthy individuals report events that appear to contradict well-...
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If A is justified in believing in X based on their personal experience, can B also be justified in believing in X based on A's testimony?
The title already expresses the question perfectly well, so I don't see much point in complicating the question further, beyond including a few thought-provoking examples below:
Example 1: The ...
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"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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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Does K = JTB imply KK? [closed]
Does KK imply JTB? I am asking becasue it seems I now know that I know that my wife is not a teapot, precisely becasue I can justify my strong belief that she is not. But then if I already knew that ...
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Can belief in God be grounded in (and justified by) personal experience rather than philosophical argumentation?
Attempts at legitimizing belief in God through reasoned philosophical argumentation abound in the fields of natural theology and apologetics. This is particularly evident in formal debates and ...
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Are there non-scientific ways to have a justified belief in levitation?
Levitation, as a paranormal phenomenon, has been reported more than once. For instance, it is not totally uncommon to hear about reports of levitation among exorcists (e.g., see these sources).
Is it ...
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Can a reliabilist have a reliably justified belief in God?
Reliabilism is defined by several sources as follows:
Reliabilism is an approach to the nature of knowledge and of justified belief. Reliabilism about justification, in its simplest form, says that a ...
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Questions about the Justification part of knowledge (justified true belief)
There is a so-called Justified, true belief as knowledge.
When was the justification part of the definition of knowledge
started to become explicitly stated and not merely implied? Who
wrote about it ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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) ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 "...
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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 ...
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