Epistemic Justification

We often believe what we are told by our parents, friends, doctors, and news reporters.
We often believe what we see, taste, and smell. We hold beliefs about the past, the present,
and the future. Do we have a right to hold any of these beliefs? Are any supported by
evidence? Should we continue to hold them, or should we discard some? These questions
are evaluative. They ask whether our beliefs meet a standard that renders them fitting,
right, or reasonable for us to hold. One prominent standard is epistemic justification.
Very generally, justification is the right standing of an action, person, or attitude with
respect to some standard of evaluation. For example, a person’s actions might be justified
under the law, or a person might be justified before God.

Epistemic justification (from episteme, the Greek word for knowledge) is the right standing
of a person’s beliefs with respect to knowledge, though there is some disagreement about
what that means precisely. Some argue that right standing refers to whether the beliefs
are more likely to be true. Others argue that it refers to whether they are more likely to be
knowledge. Still others argue that it refers to whether those beliefs were formed or are
held in a responsible or virtuous manner.
Because of its evaluative role, justification is often used synonymously with rationality.
There are, however, many types of rationality, some of which are not about a belief’s
epistemic status and some of which are not about beliefs at all. So, while it is intuitive to
say a justified belief is a rational belief, it is also intuitive to say that a person is rational
for holding a justified belief. This article focuses on theories of epistemic justification and
sets aside their relationship to rationality.
In addition to being an evaluative concept, many philosophers hold that justification is
normative. Having justified beliefs is better, in some sense, than having unjustified
beliefs, and determining whether a belief is justified tells us whether we should, should
not, or may believe a proposition. But this normative role is controversial, and some
philosophers have rejected it for a more naturalistic, or science-based, role. Naturalistic
theories focus less on belief-forming decisions—decisions from a subject’s own
perspective—and more on describing, from an objective point of view, the relationship
between belief-forming mechanisms and reality.
Regardless of whether justification refers to right belief or responsible belief, or whether
it plays a normative or naturalistic role, it is still predominantly regarded as essential for
knowledge. This article introduces some of the questions that motivate theories of
epistemic justification, explains the goals that a successful theory must accomplish, and
surveys the most widely discussed versions of these theories.

Table of Contents
1. Starting Points
a. The Dilemma of Inferential Justification
b. Explaining How Beliefs are Justified
 c. Explaining the Role of Justification
d. Explaining Why Justification is Valuable
e. Justification and Knowledge
2. Internalist Foundationalism
. Basic Beliefs
a. Arguments For and Against Foundationalism
3. Internalist Coherentism
. Varieties of Coherence
a. Objections to Coherentism
4. Infinitism
. Arguments for Infinitism
a. Objections to Qualified Infinitism
5. Types of Internalism and Objections
. Accessibilism and Mentalism
a. Objections to Internalism
6. The Gettier Era
. The History of the Gettier Problem
a. Responses to the Gettier Problem
7. Externalist Foundationalism
. Externalism, Foundationalism, and the DIJ
a. Reliabilism
b. Objections to Externalism
8. Justification as Virtue
. Virtue Reliabilism
a. Virtue Responsibilism
b. Objections to Virtue Epistemology
9. The Value of Justification
. The Truth Goal
a. Alternatives to the Truth Goal
b. Objections to the Polyvalent View
c. Rejections of the Truth Goal
10. Conclusion
11. References and Further Reading
1. Starting Points
Consider your simplest, most obvious beliefs: the color of the sky, the date of your birth,
what chocolate tastes like. Are these beliefs justified for you? What would explain the
rightness or fittingness of these beliefs? One prominent account of justification is that a
belief is justified for a person only if she has a good reason for holding it. If you were to
ask me why I believe the sky is blue and I were to answer that I am just guessing or that
my horoscope told me, you would likely not consider either a good reason. In either case,
I am not justified in believing the sky is blue, even if it really is blue. However, if I were to
say, instead, that I remember seeing the sky as blue or that I am currently seeing that it is
blue, you would likely think better of my reason. So, having good reasons is a very natural
explanation of how our beliefs are justified.
Further, the possibility that my belief that the sky is blue is not justified, even if it is true
that the sky is blue, suggests that justification is more than simply having a true belief. All
of my beliefs may be true, but if I obtained them accidentally or by faulty reasoning, then
they are not justified for me; if I am seeking knowledge, I have no right to hold them.
Further still, true belief may not even be necessary for justification. If I understand
Newtonian physics, and if Newton’s arguments seem right to me, and if all contemporary
physicists testify that Newtonian physics is true, it is plausible to think that my belief that
it is true is justified, even if Einstein will eventually show that Newton and I are wrong.
We can imagine this was the situation of many physicists in the late 1700s. If this is right,
justification is fallible—it is possible to be justified in believing false propositions. Though
some philosophers have, in the past, rejected fallibilism about justification, it is now
widely accepted. Having good reasons, it turns out, does not guarantee having true beliefs.
But the idea that justification is a matter of having good reasons faces a serious obstacle.
Normally, when we give reasons for a belief, we cite other beliefs. Take, for example, the
proposition, “The cat is on the mat.” If you believe it and are asked why, you might offer
the following beliefs to support it:

1. I see that the cat is on the mat.

2. Seeing that X implies that X.

Together, these seem to constitute a good reason for believing the proposition:

3. The cat is on the mat.

But does this mean that proposition 3 is epistemically justified for you? Even if the
combination of propositions 1 and 2 counts as a good reason to believe 3, proposition 3 is
not justified unless both 1 and 2 are also justified. Do we have good reasons for believing
1 and 2? If not, then according to the good reasons account of justification, propositions
1 and 2 are unjustified, which means that 3 is unjustified. If we do have good reasons for
believing 1 and 2, do we have good reasons for believing those propositions? How long
does our chain of good reasons have to be before even one belief is justified? These
questions lead to a classic dilemma.
a. The Dilemma of Inferential Justification
For simplicity, let’s focus on proposition 1: I see that the cat is on the mat.

Horn A: If there are no good reasons to believe proposition 1, then proposition 1 is

unjustified, which means 3 is unjustified.

Horn B: If there is a good reason to believe proposition 1, say proposition 1a, then either
1a is unjustified or we need another belief, proposition 1b, to justify 1a. If this process
continues infinitely, then 1 is ultimately unjustified, and, therefore, 3 is unjustified.
Either way, proposition 3 is unjustified.
Horn A of the dilemma is the problem of skepticism about justification. If our most
obvious beliefs are unjustified, then no belief derived from them is justified; and if no
belief is justified, we are left with an extreme form of skepticism. Horn B of the dilemma
is called the regress problem. If every reason we offer requires a reason that also requires
a reason, and so on, infinitely, then no belief is ultimately justified.
Both of these problems assume that all justification involves inferring beliefs from one or
more other beliefs, so let’s call these two problems the dilemma of inferential justification
(DIJ). And let’s call the assumption that all justification involves inference from other
beliefs the inferential assumption (also called the doxastic assumption, Pollock 1986: 19).
Responses to this dilemma typically take one of two forms. On one hand, we might
embrace Horn A, which is, in effect, to adopt skepticism and eschew any further attempts
to justify our beliefs. This is the classic route of the Pyrrhonian skeptics, such as Sextus
Empiricus, and some later Academic skeptics, such as Arcesilaus. (For more on these
views, see Ancient Greek Skepticism.)
On the other hand, we might offer an explanation of how beliefs can be justified in spite
of the dilemma. In other words, we might offer an account of epistemic justification that
resolves the dilemma, either by constructing a third, less problematic option or by
showing that Horn B is not as troublesome as philosophers have traditionally supposed.
This non-skeptical route is the majority position and the focus of the remainder of this
article.

Philosophers tend to agree that any adequate account of epistemic justification—that is,
an account that resolves the dilemma—must do at least three things: (1) explain how a
belief comes to be justified for a person, (2) explain what role justification plays in our
belief systems, and (3) explain what makes justification valuable in a way that is not
merely practically or aesthetically valuable.

b. Explaining How Beliefs are Justified

One of the central aims of theories of epistemic justification is to explain how a person’s
beliefs come to be justified in a way that resolves the DIJ. Those who accept the inferential
assumption argue either that a belief is justified if it coheres with—that is, stands in
mutual support with—the whole set of a person’s beliefs (coherentism) or that an infinite
chain of sequentially supported beliefs is not as problematic as philosophers have claimed
(infinitism).

Among those who reject the inferential assumption, some argue that justification is
grounded in special beliefs, called basic beliefs, that are either obviously true or supported
by non-belief states, such as perceptions (foundationalism). Others who reject the
inferential assumption argue that justification is either a function of the quality of the
mechanisms by which beliefs are formed (externalism) or at least partly a function of
certain qualities or virtues of the believer (virtue epistemology).

In addition to resolving the DIJ, theories of justification must explain what it is about
forming or holding a belief that justifies it in order to explain how a belief is justified.
Some argue that justification is a matter of a person’s mental states: a belief is justified
only if a person has conscious access to beliefs and evidence that support it (internalism).
Others argue that justification is a matter of a belief’s origin or the mechanisms that
produce it: a belief is justified only if it was formed in a way that makes the belief likely to
be true (externalism), whether through an appropriate connection with the state of affairs
the belief is about or through reliable processes. The former view is called internalism
because the justifying reasons—whether beliefs, experiences, testimony, and so forth—are
internal mental states, that is, states consciously available to a person. The latter view is
called externalism because the justifying states are outside a person’s immediate mental
access; they are relationships between a person’s belief states and the states of the world
outside the believer’s mental states (see Internalism and Externalism in Epistemology).
c. Explaining the Role of Justification
A second central aim of epistemology is to identify and explain the role that justification
plays in our belief-forming behavior. Some argue that justification is required for the
practical work of having responsible beliefs. Having certain reasons makes it possible for
us to choose well which beliefs to form and hold and which to reject. This is called the
guidance model of justification. Some philosophers who accept the guidance model, like
René Descartes and W. K. Clifford, pair it with a strongly normative role according to
which justification is a matter of fulfilling epistemic obligations. This combination is
sometimes called the guidance-deontological model of justification, where “deontology”
refers to one’s duties with respect to believing. Other epistemologists reject the guidance
and guidance-deontological models for more descriptive models. Justification, according
to these philosophers, is simply a feature of our psychology, and though our minds form
beliefs more effectively under some circumstances than others, the conditions necessary
for forming justified beliefs are outside of our access and control. This objective,
naturalistic model of justification has it that our understanding of justification should be
informed, in large part, by psychology and cognitive science.

d. Explaining Why Justification is Valuable

A third central aim of theories of justification is to explain why justification is
epistemically valuable. Some epistemologists argue that justification is crucial for
avoiding error and increasing our store of knowledge. Others argue that knowledge is
more complicated than attaining true beliefs in the right way and that part of the value of
knowledge is that it makes the knower better off. These philosophers are less interested
in the truth-goal in its unqualified sense; they are more interested in intellectual virtues
that position a person to be a proficient knower, virtues such as intellectual courage and
honesty, openness to new evidence, creativity, and humility. Though justification
increases the likelihood of knowledge under some circumstances, we may rarely be in
those circumstances or may be unable to recognize when we are; nevertheless, these
philosophers suggest, there is a fitting way of believing regardless of whether we are in
those circumstances.

A minority of epistemologists reject any connection between justification and knowledge

or virtue. Instead, they focus either on whether a belief fits into an objective theory about
the world or whether a belief is useful for attaining our many and diverse cognitive goals.
An example of the former involves focusing solely on the causal relationship between a
person’s beliefs and the world; if knowledge is produced directly by the world, the concept
of justification drops out (for example, Alvin Goldman, 1967). Other philosophers, whom
we might call relativists and pragmatists, argue that epistemic value is best explained in
terms of what most concerns us in practice.

Debates surrounding these three primary aims inspire many others. There are questions
about the sources of justification: Is all evidence experiential, or is some non-experiential?
Are memory and testimony reliable sources of evidence? And there are additional
questions about how justification is established and overturned: How strong does a
reason have to be before a belief is justified? What sort of contrary, or defeating, reasons
can overturn a belief’s justification? In what follows, we look at the strengths and
weaknesses of prominent theories of justification in light of the three aims just outlined,
leaving these secondary questions to more detailed studies.

e. Justification and Knowledge

The type of knowledge primarily at issue in discussions of justification is knowledge that
a proposition is true, or propositional knowledge. Propositional knowledge stands in
contrast with knowledge of how to do something, or practical knowledge. (For more on
this distinction, see Knowledge.) Traditionally, three conditions must be met in order for
a person to know a proposition—say, “The cat is on the mat.”
First, the proposition must be true; there must actually be a state of affairs expressed by
the proposition in order for the proposition to be known. Second, that person must believe
the proposition, that is, she must mentally assent to its truth. And third, her belief that
the proposition is true must be justified for her. Knowledge, according to this traditional
account, is justified true belief (JTB). And though philosophers still largely accept that
justification is necessary for knowledge, it turns out to be difficult to explain precisely how
justification contributes to knowing.
Historically, philosophers regarded the relationship between justification and knowledge
as strong. In Plato’s Meno, Socrates suggests that justification “tethers” true belief “with
chains of reasons why” (97A-98A, trans. Holbo and Waring, 2002). This idea of tethering
came to mean that justification—when one is genuinely justified—guarantees or
significantly increases the likelihood that a belief is true, and, therefore, we can tell
directly when we know a proposition. But a series of articles in the 1960s and 1970s
demonstrated that this strong view is mistaken; justification, even for true beliefs, can be
a matter of luck. For example, imagine the following three things are truth: (1) it is three
o’clock, (2) the normally reliable clock on the wall reads three o’clock, and (3) you believe
it is three o’clock because the clock on the wall says so. But if the clock is broken, even
though you are justified in believing it is three o’clock, you are not justified in a way that
constitutes knowledge. You got lucky; you looked at the clock at precisely the time it
corresponded with reality, but its correspondence was not due to the clock’s reliability.
Therefore, your justified true belief seems not to be an instance of knowledge. This sort
of example is characteristic of what I call the Gettier Era (§6). During the Gettier Era,
philosophers were pressed to revise or reject the traditional relationship.
In response, some have maintained that the relationship between justification and
knowledge is strong, but they modify the concept justification in attempt to avoid lucky
true beliefs. Others argue that the relationship is weaker than traditionally supposed—
something is needed to increase the likelihood that a belief is knowledge, and justification
is part of that, but justification is primarily about responsible belief. Still others argue that
whether we can tell we are justified is irrelevant; justification is a truth-conducive
relationship between our beliefs and the world, and we need not be able to tell, at least
not directly, whether we are justified. The Gettier Era (§6) precipitated a number of
changes in the conversation about justification’s relationship to knowledge, and these
remain important to contemporary discussions of justification. But before we consider
these developments, we address the DIJ.

2. Internalist Foundationalism
One way of resolving the DIJ is to reject the inferential assumption, that is, to reject the
claim that all justification involves inference from other beliefs. The most prominent way
of doing this while avoiding skepticism is to show that all chains of good inference
culminate at a unique kind of belief called a basic belief. Basic beliefs are beliefs that need
not be inferred from any other beliefs in order to be justified. This approach to resolving
the dilemma is called foundationalism because basic beliefs serve as a foundation on
which all other justified beliefs are supported; a person’s beliefs are related to one another
like the parts of a building: beliefs justified by inference are analogous to the roof and
walls, which are in turn supported by foundational basic beliefs (see Figure 1).

Foundationalism comprises a family of views, all of which claim, at minimum, that all
justified beliefs are either basic or inferred from other justified beliefs. Classically,
foundationalists combine this view with the claims that we can know whether a belief is
justified—that is, whether it stands in an evidential chain that starts with a basic belief—
and the claim that knowing whether we are justified helps us fulfill our epistemic duties—
in other words, we do well when we form or keep beliefs that are well supported and
discard or refuse beliefs that are not; we do poorly when we do not.

The view that justification is a matter of having certain internal mental states is
called internalism, and the family of views that include both is called internalist
foundationalism. There is a further debate among internalists as to whether justification
requires simply having certain mental states (propositional justification) or whether
justified beliefs must be based on those mental states (doxastic justification).
Philosophers who reject internalism are called externalists (see §7 of this article). Another
debate among internalists is whether justification helps us to fulfill epistemic duties—that
is, it tells us which beliefs are epistemically permissible, obligatory, or impermissible (the
deontological conception of justification)—or whether it is simply a descriptive fact about
our belief systems. (For an example of the latter, see Conee and Feldman 2004).
 Figure 1: Simple Foundationalist Justification. The dots represent beliefs; the
arrowsrepresent inferential relations.
a. Basic Beliefs
It is one thing to say basic beliefs resolve the DIJ and quite another thing to explain how
they do. René Descartes famously argued that some beliefs are basic because they
are indubitable. If a belief is genuinely indubitable, Descartes argued, it cannot be false.
As it is commonly understood, dubitability is a psychological, not epistemic, matter. It
might be indubitable for me that my mother loves me, even if it is not true and even if it
is the sort of belief that could be doubted, even perhaps by me. But Descartes used
“indubitable” to describe a belief that is clear and distinct, which is supposed to guarantee
that the belief is true. (See Harry Frankfurt, 1973 for a fuller discussion of clarity and
distinctness.) Other foundationalists have explained how some beliefs might stop the
regress in virtue of self-evidence, or their privileged role in our belief-forming systems, or
their incorrigibility.
Long before Descartes, simple mathematical propositions, such as 2 + 2 = 4, and logical
propositions, such as “no one is taller than herself,” were thought to be so obvious that
they could not be false. These propositions, many claimed, are self-evidently true, that is,
they need no supporting evidence because any attempt to support them would be weaker
than their intuitive truth. Some philosophers include perceptual experiences among self-
evident beliefs, experiences such as seeing red and hearing a ringing sound. Even if you
misperceive a color or a sound, or misperceive what seems to be colored or what seems to
be ringing, you cannot doubt that you are having the experience of seeing redness or
hearing ringing.

Another explanation for why some beliefs are basic is that they play a privileged role in
our belief-forming systems. A common example of beliefs privileged in this way are those
formed on the basis of sensory perception: seeing a red ball, touching what feels like a
rough surface, hearing a bell. You could be hallucinating these experiences, so it is not
self-evident that there is a ball, bell, or surface to experience. Nevertheless, the world
impresses itself on you in this way, and it would be difficult to imagine functioning
without any sense perceptions whatsoever; they play a highly privileged role in our belief
systems and, therefore, can justify other beliefs (hence the emphasis that scientists have
traditionally placed on observation).
Further candidates for basicality are beliefs that are true in virtue of being believed, that
is, if you believe them, they are true. For example, propositions about intentional states
(in other words, states about a mental state, such as hoping, doubting, thinking, believing,
and so forth), logically imply the existence of the subject who is in the state. So, for anyone
who, while thinking, believes the proposition “I think” can logically infer “I exist.” Beliefs
that if held are true are called incorrigible. Other examples may include beliefs about
introspective states such as what you believe or feel or remember. If incorrigible beliefs
can be recognized as true without appeal to any other beliefs, they are good candidates
for justifying other, non-basic beliefs.
Unfortunately, it is not easy to see how all of our many and various non-basic justified
beliefs can be inferred from this relatively small set of basic beliefs, even if we accepted
every type of basic belief just mentioned. For example, imagine you have been looking for
your laptop computer. When you find it, you form the belief, “There’s my laptop.” Did
seeing your computer elicit the basic belief, “I seem to be perceiving a laptop there,” from
which you then inferred the belief “There’s my laptop”? Not obviously. Seeing the laptop
allowed you directly—without any reasoning at all—to form the belief that you found your
laptop.

Examples like these have motivated some foundationalists to expand their accounts of
basic beliefs to include a wider variety of experiences. These weaker accounts allow that
there are many types of non-inferentially justified beliefs, all of which are at least properly
basic, where “properly basic” means a belief that is either basic in the classic sense or that
meets some other condition that makes it non-inferentially justified for a person. As long
as there are a sufficient number of properly basic beliefs, these philosophers argue, a
certain sort of foundationalism remains plausible.

One example of how proper basicality might work is Alvin Plantinga’s (1983; 1993a)
argument for the rationality of religious belief. Plantinga’s notion of proper basicality is
supposed to be weak enough to avoid problems with classic basic beliefs but strong
enough to avoid the DIJ. According to him, if a belief is properly basic for a person, it is
rational for that person to accept it without appealing to other reasons. He
uses rational instead of justified to distance himself from classical problems. (Sometimes
Plantinga puts it even more weakly, such that, if a belief is properly basic for a person,
that person is not irrational in holding it.) As an example, Plantinga argues that if a person
is raised in a religious community where the central religious claims he hears are
corroborated by the community and none of those claims is undermined by contrary
experience or argument, he is not violating any epistemic duty in believing that, say, God
exists. His experiences and circumstances can “call forth belief in God” in a way that does
not require other beliefs and can serve as a reason to accept other beliefs (1983: 81). This
is a controversial view, not least because it either changes the discussion from justification
to rationality or conflates justification and rationality. Nevertheless, basic beliefs are
controversial no matter how they are characterized, and Plantinga’s proper basicality is
just one among several. For another attempt to defend classical foundationalism against
objections, see Timothy McGrew (1995).
b. Arguments For and Against Foundationalism
Foundationalism has remained competitive in the history of justification largely because
of its intuitive advantages over competing views. The most common argument for
foundationalism is the positive argument that it explains how we actually form beliefs on
the basis of evidence. I believe the sky is blue because I see that it is blue, not because I
infer it from other beliefs about the sky. Roderick Chisholm offers a sophisticated version
of this argument, concluding that “[t]hinking and believing provide us with paradigm
cases of the directly evident” (1966: 28). In addition to this positive argument,
foundationalists offer the negative argument that no alternative account—skepticism,
coherentism, or infinitism—has the resources to satisfactorily resolve the DIJ, that is, to
avoid both skepticism and an infinite regress (see BonJour and Sosa 2003). This is,
perhaps, the more powerful of the arguments and merits some attention.

Skepticism motivated epistemologists to inquire into justification in the first place, so the
skeptical option is generally considered a loss. As an alternative, coherentists (§3)
maintain that a person’s beliefs are justified in virtue of their relationship to the person’s
belief set (see Lehrer 1974). If a belief stands or can stand in a consistent, mutually
supportive relationship with other beliefs—a “web of belief,” as W. V. O. Quine (1970)
calls it—that belief is justified. However, there is reason to believe that, since all beliefs
stand in mutually supportive relationships, at least some beliefs (perhaps all) will play an
indispensable role in their own support, rendering any coherentist argument viciously
circular. Since circular arguments are fallacious, if coherentism entails that justification
is circular, coherentism cannot resolve the DIJ.

A more recent alternative to skepticism is infinitism (see §4), according to which all
justified beliefs stand in infinite chains of inferential relations (see Klein 2005).
Skepticism is avoided because every belief is justified by some other belief. Unfortunately,
infinitism requires that we accept one of two questionable assumptions: either that there
simply is an infinite number of justifying beliefs available (and to which our minds, in
virtue of being finite, do not have access) or that there is some algorithm that, for any
belief, B, can direct us to a non-circular justifying belief for B. The problem with the
former assumption is that it seems to depend on faith that there is an infinite series of
justifiers, which is not obviously better than having no justification at all. And the problem
with the latter is that it comes dangerously close to foundationalism, where the algorithm
functions as a basic belief. If the infinitist cannot refute these objections, it cannot resolve
the DIJ.

These are simple concerns about coherentism and infinitism, and we consider more
sophisticated objections in sections 3 and 4. But, if neither coherentism nor infinitism can
provide an alternative means of resolving the original dilemma, foundationalism may be
the most promising alternative to skepticism. Unfortunately for foundationalists, even if
they are right that some account of basic belief would adequately resolve the dilemma of
inferential justification, it is not clear that such an account is currently available. Further,
there are at least two other serious objections to foundationalism.

First, there is some concern that foundationalism cannot be justified by its own account
of justification, that is, foundationalism is self-defeating. Alvin Plantinga (1993b) offers a
version of this objection. According to foundationalists, a belief is justified if and only if it
is either basic or inferred from other justified beliefs. This criterion, though, is not itself
basic on any classical conception of basic beliefs (indubitability, self-evidence, evident to
the senses, or incorrigibility), and it is not clear how it could be supported by other
justified beliefs.

One straightforward response to this objection is that the arguments above (the positive
argument and the negative argument by elimination), do provide, contra Plantinga,
inferential support for foundationalism. In fact, Plantinga (1983; 1993) expands his own
notion of proper basicality precisely to avoid the self-defeat objection. Further, if
sophisticated reasoning strategies like induction could be justified on foundationalist
grounds, then foundationalism itself may be justified on such grounds. For example,
Laurence BonJour (1998) defends rational insight as a basic source of evidence and then
argues that induction is justified by rational insight. If foundationalism is roughly correct
and there are arguments grounded in rational insight that justify foundationalism,
foundationalism might be vindicated. Of course, there remain concerns about the
circularity of such arguments.
Other philosophers use an inference to the best explanation to defend a type of basic
evidence, though these views may rightly be regarded as hybrids of foundationalism and
coherentism. For example, Earl Conee and Richard Feldman (2008) argue that
“[p]erceptual experiences can contribute toward the justification of propositions about
the world when the propositions are part of the best explanation of those experiences that
is available to the person.” The idea that what have been called basic beliefs are connected
with the world and how we are positioned in the world is a better explanation of why we
have the evidence we have than traditional accounts of justification. Catherine Z. Elgin
(2005) offers a similar account, arguing that, while perceptions have “initial tenability”
given their privileged role in our belief formation, they do not obtain this tenability in
isolation from our whole evidential context; over time, certain perceptual beliefs have
proved themselves to have the plausibility that allows us to privilege them.

A second objection to foundationalism is the meta-justification argument. The idea is that

basic beliefs cannot resolve the DIJ because, even if their justification does not depend on
other beliefs, it does depend on reasons which themselves require reasons. If I believe a
proposition because it is indubitable, then I must have some reason for thinking that
indubitable beliefs are likely to be true. If I do not, I am stuck with Horn A, and if I do, I
am stuck with Horn B. To demonstrate this problem, Peter Klein (2005) asks us to
imagine an argument between Fred and Doris, where Fred has come to what he regards
as the basic belief on which his argument depends; call it b.
According to Fred, b has autonomous justification, that is, is a type of basic belief. Doris
happens to agree that b is autonomously justified but asks whether beliefs with
autonomous warrant are likely to be true. As a foundationalist, the most plausible option
for Fred is the following: “He can hold that autonomously warranted propositions are
somewhat likely to be true in virtue of the fact that they are autonomously warranted”
(2005: 133).
If Fred is right, however, b only works as a justification for the rest of his argument
precisely because he has added something to b. What has he added? Namely, that he “has
a very good reason for believing b, namely b has F and propositions with F are likely to be
true.” These are propositions independent of b that serve to justify b. Klein continues: “Of
course Fred, now, could be asked to produce his reasons for thinking that b has F and that
basic propositions are somewhat likely to be true in virtue of possessing feature F” (2005:
134). If this is right, basic beliefs do not stop the regress of reasons (see also Smithies
2014).

One response to this criticism comes from Laurence BonJour, who argues that it is
plausible to think that understanding b includes a sort of built-in awareness of the content
of those additional premises Klein mentions, such that understanding b constitutes, in
and of itself, a reason to hold b (BonJour and Sosa 2003: 60-68). If it is possible to have
an evidential state that includes, non-inferentially, all the content necessary for having a
reason to believe a proposition is true, foundationalists may be able to describe a basic
belief that stops the regress and avoids skepticism. But explaining just what this state is
remains a point of controversy.
Another response is to construct an inference to the best explanation, as mentioned above
in response to the self-defeat objection (Elgin, 2005; Conee and Feldman, 2008). The
result, again, is typically a hybrid view, which may be equivalent to giving up
foundationalism. Conee and Feldman say their view is closer to a “non-traditional version
of coherentism” (2008: 98). And Elgin calls her view “a very weak foundationalism or…a
coherence theory” (2005: 166). This raises questions about the merits of coherentism, to
which we now turn.

3. Internalist Coherentism
Like foundationalists, coherentists attempt to avoid skepticism while rejecting infinitism.
But they find a further problem with foundationalism. Every sensory state (seeing red,
smelling cinnamon, and so forth) must be understood in a mental context, that is, one
must have a set of background experiences, beliefs, and vocabulary sufficiently large for
forming and understanding beliefs. All sensory beliefs, such as “I see red” and “I smell
cinnamon,” require an immensely complex set of assumptions about self-reference,
seeing, colors, smelling, and scents. This means that individual beliefs are not isolated
bits of information that act as bricks in a building; they are nodes of information that
depend for their meaning and support on a web of relationships with other beliefs.

Many coherentists accept the inferential assumption and argue that the result is not an
infinite regress of inferences, but a non-linear system of support from which justification
emerges as a property of the combination of inferences. As Donald Davidson puts it,
“[N]othing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief” (2000: 156).
Other coherentists reject the inferential assumption and argue that the result is a non-
linear system of support from which justification emerges as a property of the set as a
whole. Keith Lehrer explains: “This does not make the belief self-justified, however, even
though it might be non-inferential. The belief is not justified independently of relations
to other beliefs. It is justified because of the way it coheres with other beliefs belonging to
a system of beliefs” (1990: 89). As we see below (§3.b), some coherentists reject the belief
requirement of the inferential assumption, arguing that perceptual experiences can play
a justifying role in the set of mental states that includes a person’s beliefs.

Regardless of whether coherentists accept the inferential assumption, they can allow that
some beliefs are non-inferentially generated—for example, by experiences, intuitions,
hunches, and so forth. But they are committed to the idea that the justification for beliefs
generated in these ways depends essentially on their relationship to the person’s complete
set of beliefs. Construed in this way, coherentism is specifically a view about justification
and should not be confused with coherentism about a truth. Some philosophers have held
both coherentism about truth and justification (Blanshard 1939 and Lewis 1946), but
many who hold coherentism about justification reject coherentism about truth (see
BonJour 1985, ch. 5, and Truth).
a. Varieties of Coherence
Broadly, coherentists argue that a belief is justified just in case it stands in a system of
mutually supporting relationships with other beliefs in a person’s system of beliefs. For
instance, my belief that the cat is on the mat involves a complicated set of beliefs: I am
seeing a cat, I am seeing a mat, I am seeing a cat on a mat, a cat is a particular kind of
mammal, a mat is a particular type of floor covering, my vision is generally reliable under
normal circumstances, these are normal circumstances, and so forth. It is difficult to
imagine arranging these in a linear, foundationalist fashion. In addition, it is not clear
whether some of these beliefs are more basic than some others. Nevertheless, they all
cohere, which means they are logically consistent with one another and with other beliefs
in my belief set, and they mutually support one another. The challenge for coherentists is
to explain just what “mutual support” amounts to.

Whereas foundationalists employ the metaphor of a building (or a pyramid, in some

cases) to explain justificational relationships, coherentists employ the metaphor of a web
(or, in some cases, a raft), according to which, each node (or plank) works alongside the
others in a non-linear fashion to constitute a stable, interconnected whole (see Figure 2,
as well as Neurath 1932, Quine 1970, and Sosa 1980). There are four candidates for how
the web or raft holds together: logical consistency, logical entailment, inductive
probability, and explanation.

Figure 2: Simple Coherentist Justification

P-S represent propositions;
the arrows represent lines of inference.
The first candidate, logical consistency, is generally regarded as necessary for coherence
but too weak to stand on its own. For example, the belief that P and the belief that probably
not-P are logically consistent. But they are not coherent; if one of them is true, the other
is not likely to be true (BonJour 1985, ch. 5). Therefore, some early coherentists added
that the relationship must also include logical entailment. This view, which I will
call entailment coherentism, has it that a belief is justified just in case it entails or is entailed
by every other belief in a person’s belief set (Blanshard 1939). Most coherentists now
reject this relationship as overly strict, primarily because it seems possible to have two
very different beliefs, neither of which entails the other and yet which are both justified.
For example, consider the beliefs “I am seeing a needle puncture my skin” and “I am
feeling pain.” Neither belief entails the other; nevertheless, it is intuitively plausible that
both belong to a coherent set of beliefs.
Because of the problems with mere consistency and consistency plus entailment, most
coherentists allow that entailment is sufficient for coherence but not necessary. To
capture weaker relationships, they expand the notion to include inductive
probability. Inductive probability coherentism is the view that a belief is justified just in case
it is a member of a set each of whose members is entailed by or made more probable by a
subset of the rest. C. I. Lewis, calling this type of justification “congruence,” puts it
eloquently: “A set of statements, or a set of supposed facts asserted, will be said to be congruent
if and only if they are so related that the antecedent probability of any one of them will be
increased if the remainder of the set can be assumed as given premises” (1962). With their
emphasis on inferential relations among beliefs, entailment and inductive probability
coherentism attempt to resolve the DIJ by capturing the intuitive plausibility of the
inferential assumption while avoiding the difficulties with basic beliefs.
Unfortunately, inductive probability coherentism faces problems similar to those that
face entailment coherentism. It seems plausible for a person to hold two justified beliefs
without the antecedent probability of either increasing the epistemic probability of the
other, even when conjoined with other beliefs in the set. Consider, for example, your
beliefs that “the Red Sox will win the Pennant” and “John F. Kennedy was shot in 1963.”
Both beliefs are reasonably part of a person’s belief system, and yet it is difficult to see
how one might contribute to a set of beliefs that makes the other more probable. Second,
even if a subset of beliefs in a set increase the probability of each other member, the set
might not be sufficiently comprehensive or well-connected with one’s experiences to
justify one’s beliefs. Imagine a set of 100 beliefs, any 99 of which render the 100th member
more probable than its antecedent probability. This set passes the inductive probability
test and is, therefore, coherent on this account, but it includes very few beliefs. This
suggests that, in order to maintain coherence, we could arbitrarily expand or contract our
set of beliefs at will to avoid loss of rationality. The only guideline is that we preserve
strong inductive inferences. Unfortunately, such arbitrary sets ignore important
differences in the sources of beliefs; we can imagine two inductively coherent sets, one
that includes sensory beliefs and one that does not. Inductive probability coherentism,
without further qualification, implies that neither set is more rational than the other. As
Catherine Z. Elgin puts it, “A good nineteenth-century novel is highly coherent, but not
credible on that account. Even though Middlemarch is far more coherent than our
regrettably fragmentary and disjointed views…, the best explanation of its coherence lies
in the novelist’s craft, not in the truth…of the story” (2005: 159-60).
A third prominent account of coherence aimed at avoiding this criticism allows that
entailment and inductive probability can contribute to coherence but only insofar as they
function in a plausible explanation of the set of beliefs. According to this view, known
as explanatory coherentism, beliefs are justified just in case they explain or are explained
by the other beliefs of the same type (Harman 1986 and Poston 2014). This view is not
committed to the inferential assumption and argues that justification is an emergent
property of the explanatory relations among beliefs. Catherine Z. Elgin says that
“epistemic justification is primarily a property of a suitably comprehensive, coherent
account, when the best explanation of coherence is that the account is at least roughly
true” (2005: 158). Elgin adds that the beliefs comprising a coherent system “must be
mutually consistent, cotenable, and supportive. That is, the components must be
reasonable in light of one another” (2005: 158).
Explanatory coherentism takes its motivation from responses to a problem in philosophy
of science that was similar to the problem that faces inductive probability coherentism
(Neurath 1932 and Hempel 1935). Not every proposition in a scientific theory is derived
inferentially from others, and so there is some question as to whether such propositions
could be believed justifiably. It turns out, though, that those propositions play an
important explanatory role in the theory that organizes evidence and concepts in plausible
ways, even if those propositions have no antecedent probability outside of the system.
Elgin explains, “For example, although there is no direct evidence of positrons, symmetry
considerations show that a physical theory that eschewed them would be significantly less
coherent than one that acknowledged them. So physicists’ commitment to positrons is
epistemically appropriate” (2005: 164). This suggests that explanations can play a
justifying role independently of inferential relations, thus lending plausibility to
coherentism.

Explanatory coherence avoids criticisms of earlier accounts in that it (1) maintains that
consistency is an important constraint on a belief set, and (2) maintains that inferential
relations contribute to explanatory power, while (3) also accounting for the intuitive
connection of certain beliefs with sensory evidence and non-inferential coherence
relations. Nevertheless, some criticisms have led philosophers like BonJour (1985),
Lehrer (1974; 1990), and Poston (2014) to add other interesting and influential conditions
to coherence theories, though space prevents us from exploring them here.

b. Objections to Coherentism
There are three prominent objections to coherentism. The first, which we already
encountered in §2.b, is called the circularity problem. Since coherentism depends on
mutual support relations, every particular belief will likely play an essential role in its own
justification, rendering coherentist justification a form of circular argument (see Figure
3).
The problem with circular justification is that it putatively undermines the goal of
justification, which is to garner support for claim. If a claim is inferred from itself (P à P),
the concluding proposition has only as much support as the premise, but that is precisely
what we do not know. Therefore, multiplying the inferences between a proposition and
an inference to that proposition (for example, (P à Q); (Q à R); (R à S); (S à P)) cannot
justify P.

In response, some coherentists argue that the circularity objection oversimplifies the
view. While it is true that a belief will almost certainly play a role in its own justification,
this is only problematic if we assume the justificational relationship is linear. Properly
understood, justification is a property that emerges from non-linear relationships among
beliefs, whether inferential or non-inferential. For example, Catharine Z. Elgin tells a
story about Meg (adapted from a story by Lewis 1946), whose logic textbook was stolen.
There were three witnesses to the theft, but all are unreliable witnesses (one is aloof, one
has severe vision problems, and one is a known liar). Nevertheless, all three witnesses
agree that the thief had spiked green hair. Despite the fact that no one of the witnesses is
reliable, their independent testimony to a single, unique proposition increases the
likelihood that the proposition is true. As Elgin puts it, “This [agreement] makes a
difference. … Their accord evidently enhances the epistemic standing of the individual
reports” (2005: 157). If this is right, the antecedently low probability of the thief’s having
spiked green hair can be added to the combined strength of the testimonies to create a
justified belief without vicious circularity.

A second objection to coherentism is called the isolation objection. Even if a collection of

beliefs could explain, and thereby justify, its members, it is not obvious how this set of
beliefs is connected with reality, that is, with the content the beliefs are about. In rejecting
basic beliefs, coherentists reject privileging any particular cognitive state in the belief
system, such as sensory experiences. All beliefs are treated equally and are evaluated
according to whether they cohere with the belief set. But beliefs can cohere with one
another regardless of whether their content expresses true propositions about reality.
Coherence cannot guarantee that the set is not isolated from reality.
Some coherentists respond to this objection by making special provisions for beliefs that
derive from coherence-increasing sources, such as sense experience. (BonJour (1985)
calls such beliefs “cognitively spontaneous beliefs.”) This makes the degree of coherence
partly a matter of how well the system of beliefs integrates sense perception. Others
appeal to more abstract distinctions among types of justification. For example, Keith
Lehrer (1986) distinguishes personal justification, which involves the traditional,
internalist coherence requirement, from verific justification, which is an externalist
requirement on coherence. While objective coherence may be outside a person’s ken, it
nevertheless contributes, along with personal justification, to what Lehrer calls complete
justification. This externalist requirement helps to ground a person’s system of beliefs in
the world those beliefs are supposed to be about.

Another coherentist response to the isolation objection is to allow experience itself, not
just beliefs about experience, to figure in the evaluation of coherence. Catherine Z. Elgin
(2005) argues that we have good reasons to privilege some perceptual experiences over
very coherent sets of beliefs. She argues that this is because perception does not—contra
foundationalists—work in isolation from other sorts of evidence. She says, “Only
observations we have reason to trust have the power to unseat theories. So it is not an
observation in isolation, but an observation backed by reasons that actually discredits the
theory” (162). This also explains how we are able to privilege some perceptual experiences
over others (say, in unfavorable conditions), though she admits that her view includes
“something other than coherence,” and allows that it is a very weak form of
foundationalism. For a reply along these lines that maintains a more traditional version
of coherentism, see Kvanvig and Riggs (1992).

A third objection is called the plurality objection. Because justification is determined

solely by the internal coherence of a person’s beliefs, coherence theory cannot guarantee
that there is “one uniquely justified system of beliefs” (BonJour 1985: 107). BonJour
explains that this is because “on any plausible conception of coherence, there will always
be many, probably infinitely many, different and incompatible systems of belief which are
equally coherent” (ibid.). To show just how pernicious this problem is, Lehrer asks us to
imagine one set of beliefs comprised of both necessary and contingent beliefs and then to
imagine a second set created by negating all the contingent beliefs in the first set (1990:
90). This has the nasty implication that, if coherence is sufficient for justification, then
“for any contingent statement a person is completely justified in accepting is such that he
is also completely justified in accepting the denial of that statement” (ibid.).

One response to the plurality objection is to invoke a “total evidence” requirement on

explanatory and probabilistic relations. While we can arbitrarily construct
probabilistically and explanatorily coherent sets, there is a non-trivial sense in which non-
belief states explain our beliefs: sensation, testimony, and so forth. A theory of
explanation that includes the antecedent probabilities of the beliefs based on this
evidence would be more coherent with our total evidence than an arbitrary set of beliefs
that ignores them. Recent debates over the relationship between coherence and truth
include sophisticated analyses of probabilistic assessments (Klein and Warfield 1994 and
Fitelson 2003) and an interesting argument for the impossibility of coherence’s
increasing the probability that a belief is true (Olsson 2009), but there is not space to
develop these arguments here.

For more on coherentism, see Coherentism in Epistemology.

4. Infinitism
Infinitism is an internalist view that proposes to resolve the dilemma of inferential
justification by showing that Horn B of the DIJ, properly construed, is an acceptable
option. In fact, argue infinitists, there are no serious problems with an infinite chain of
justifying beliefs.

Traditionally, epistemologists have rejected the idea that a belief’s linear chain of
justifying beliefs can extend infinitely because it leaves all beliefs ultimately unjustified.
Inferential justification is said to transmit justification, not create it; therefore, an infinite
chain of justifying beliefs would have no source of support to transmit. Similarly, since
one could not hold an infinite number of beliefs or mentally trace an infinitely long chain
of beliefs, infinitism betrays a common internalist intuition that a person must be aware
of good reasons for holding a belief.

Infinitists claim these criticisms are misguided. In practice, justification is not as tidy as
epistemologists would have us believe. The traditional idea that the regress must stop or
bottom out in basic beliefs is unrealistic and unnecessary. Few of us attempt to draw
inferences long enough to arrive at basic beliefs. We often stop looking for reasons when
we are content that we have fulfilled our epistemic responsibility, not because the chain
has actually ended (Aikin 2011). Foundationalists and coherentists, then, are relatively
unconcerned with ultimate justification in their own epistemic behavior and, therefore,
to hold epistemic justification to such high standards renders very few of our beliefs
justified. To accommodate this messiness, infinitists might reject the inferential
assumption, at least as classically understood. Like coherentists, infinitists may hold that
justification is an emergent property of a set of beliefs and that justification comes in
degrees such that, the longer the inferential chain, the stronger the degree of justification
(Klein 2005).

a. Arguments for Infinitism

There are two main lines of argument for infinitism. The first is that foundationalism and
coherentism cannot stop the structure of justification from regressing infinitely. For
example, Peter Klein (2005) constructs a version of the meta-justification argument
against foundationalism and argues that the most plausible version of coherentism
(emergent justification accounts), because of its appeal to a basic assumption about the
reliability of coherent sets, is merely a disguised form of foundationalism. If these
arguments hit their mark, and if externalism is ruled out, infinitism may be the only non-
skeptical option available.

The second main line of argument for infinitism is that the classic objections to infinitism
are aimed at overly simplistic versions of the view; they do not threaten suitably qualified
versions. For example, Scott Aikin (2009) argues that concerns about the regress arise
because of a conflict between two types of intuition: (1) proceduralism, which includes
our standard intuitions about good reasons and responsible believing, and (2)
egalitarianism, which includes our intuitions that people are generally justified in
believing a lot of things (beliefs about how to set DVRs and beliefs about how to get from
home to work). Aikin claims that infinitists take the demands of proceduralism more
seriously than egalitarian intuitions, maintaining that justification and knowledge are
very difficult to attain. The more committed we are to following our chains of evidence,
the more likely we are to attain our epistemic goals. However, we often stop far from what
even foundationalists would take to be the end of those chains. And at every proposed
stopping point, there is an infinite number of justificational questions about the
appropriateness of the terms we are using, the reliability of our perceptions and concept
attributions, and so forth. If this is right, infinitism may be the most plausible implication
of our epistemic intuitions.

Similarly, Peter Klein (2014) argues that infinitism is a minimal thesis about what makes
justification valuable, namely, that it renders our beliefs “reason-enhanced.” He says,
“Infinitism holds that a belief-state is reason-enhanced whenever S deploys a reason for
believing that p. Importantly, S can make a belief-state reason-enhanced even if the basis
is another belief-state that is not (yet) reason-enhanced” (2014: 105). If this is right, then
the process of inferring can create or produce original epistemic support, and we need not
appeal to anything like basic beliefs for ultimate support. Further, infinitists do not object
to a chain of inference’s stopping, for instance, when some presuppositions are explicit.
For example, reasoning about Euclidean geometry may appropriately stop at Euclid’s
axioms when we agree that they are our standard of evaluation. But we can also admit
that those axioms can be challenged, and our reasoning could continue indefinitely.
Infinitists simply argue that this is a standard feature of all justification.

b. Objections to Qualified Infinitism

Carl Ginet (2005) argues that even qualified infinitism is motivated on spurious grounds.
One argument against foundationalism is that, even for basic beliefs, one needs a reason
to believe they are true, and this initiates an infinite regress of reasons. Ginet objects,
however, that this argument threatens foundationalism only if all reasons are inferential
reasons. Of course, this is precisely what foundationalists reject. If some non-belief
reasons are justified independently of any additional reasons for thinking they are true,
that is, if they are inherently reasonable, the infinitist argument against foundationalism
is question-begging.

In response, the infinitist might contend that, even if its critique of foundationalism is
flawed, infinitism may yet be the more plausible alternative. If infinitism captures our
intuitions about justification as adequately as foundationalism, and if it requires fewer
controversial concepts (basic beliefs), infinitism may be an attractive competitor.

Another objection to infinitism is that, given our finite minds, we lack complete access to
the infinite set of justifying beliefs. If a person has no access to his reason for belief, then
infinitism is no longer internalist and, thereby, loses its means of defusing the DIJ. Of
course, the infinitist may concede this and fall back on a mentalist account of epistemic
access (see §5.a below). As Ginet puts it: a belief (L) “is available to S as a reason for so
believing only if S is disposed, upon entertaining and accepting (L), to believe that the fact
that (L) was among his reasons for so believing” (2005: 146). If this is right, a person may
have a disposition to recognize further evidence for his justifying beliefs when prompted
to do so.

Nevertheless, even this mentalist-enhanced infinitism faces the concern that the process
of justification is never complete. An assumption behind the DIJ is that, if for any belief,
there is not a reason to believe it is true, that belief and any beliefs inferred from it are
unjustified. If this is right, and the justification condition for infinitism is never actually
met, then we are left with skepticism.

A variation on this criticism is the idea that inferential justification can only transmit
justification and cannot originate it. The idea is that all inference is conditional ((P → Q);
(Q → R); (R → S)). Given this set of propositions, is S justified for us? That depends on
whether P is justified. Telling us that P is justified by N, (N → P), though, does not answer
the question of whether S is justified. We still need to know whether N is justified (Dancy
1985: 55). If this is right, then no matter how long the chain of inference is—even if it is
infinite—no belief is justified.

Infinitists may respond to this objection by arguing that the justification condition is not
a matter of getting to a final, infinitely large set, but of increasing one’s epistemic reasons
for the proposition in question. Peter Klein, using the term “warrant” for “justification,”
says that infinitism is like coherentism in this respect. He says, “Infinitism is like the
warrant-emergent form of coherentism because it holds that warrant for a questioned
proposition emerges as the proposition becomes embedded in a set of propositions”
(2005: 135). Further, Klein explains that “warrant increases not because we are getting
closer to a basic proposition but rather because we are getting further from the questioned
proposition” (137). This amounts to a rejection of the claim that inferential justification
can only transmit justification and, therefore, that a justificational chain must be
complete in order to be adequate (recall Catherine Z. Elgin’s story about Meg in §3.b
above).
A worry for this response is similar to a worry for coherentism. Any criterion that implies
the infinite set of beliefs is justified is either part of the set or independent of it, in which
case, it, too, needs a justification. If some sort of justification-conferring awareness is built
into the increasingly large set, infinitism seems like foundationalism in disguise.

A further worry is that, if infinitists do not require that a person actually have an infinite
number of justifying beliefs or perform an infinite number of inferences, then infinitism
seems committed to the idea that inference itself can create justification. This, however,
seems implausible. Carl Ginet writes, “…acceptable inference preserves justification …
[but] there is nothing in the inferential relation itself that contributes to making any of
those beliefs justified” (2005: 148-49). If inference cannot produce justification, it is
unclear how a belief in an infinite chain of inferences comes to be justified.
For a more detailed treatment of infinitism, see Infinitism in Epistemology.
5. Types of Internalism and Objections
As noted above (§2), the view that justification is something we can determine by directly
consulting our mental states is called internalism. This view does not entail that all
epistemic concepts are internal. John Greco gives an example to demonstrate the
difference: “[S]uppose that someone learns the history of his country from unreliable
testimony. Although the person has every reason to believe the books that he reads and
the people that teach him, his understanding of history is in fact the result of systematic
lies and other sorts of deception” (2005: 259). Objectively speaking, this person’s beliefs
are not reliably connected with reality. Subjectively, though, he is following his evidence
to their rational conclusion. Should we say this person’s beliefs are justified? Since the
reliability of his sources is beyond his ability to evaluate, the internalist says he has
fulfilled his epistemic duty: yes, he is justified.
For centuries, there was no serious alternative to internalism. As we will see in §6, the
advent of the Gettier case in the 20th century constitutes a serious challenge to
internalism, and it contributed to alternative, externalist accounts of knowledge and
justification. This move to externalism also led to closer scrutiny of internalism, and new
concerns about its adequacy arose. I review just two of these here. But before doing so, it
is helpful to distinguish two types of internalism: accessibilism and mentalism.
a. Accessibilism and Mentalism
According to accessibilists, in order for a belief to be justified for a person, that person
must have “reflective access” to good reasons for holding that belief. To have reflective
access is to be directly mentally aware of reasons for holding a belief. Some accessibilists
argue that a person’s access must be occurrent, that is, she must be currently aware of her
reasons for holding a belief (Conee and Feldman 2004). Others hold the looser
requirement that, as long as a person has had direct access to relevant justifying reason,
she is justified in holding the supported belief.

According to mentalists, reflective access may be sufficient for justification, but it is not
necessary. All that is necessary for a belief to be justified is that a person has mental states
that justify the belief, regardless of whether a person has reflective access to those states.
Mentalists allow that some non-reflectively accessible mental states can justify beliefs.

Mentalism is supposed to have several advantages over accessibilism given the standard
criticisms of internalism. For example, some have objected to internalism on the grounds
that it cannot accommodate intuitive cases of stored or forgotten evidence. If, for
example, you are driving and not thinking about whether Washington, D.C. is the capital
of the United States, or you have forgotten any evidence for this belief, are you justified
in believing that it is? If not, could we say that you know it is the capital? Accessibilists
claim that a person must be able to access her evidence for a belief while she is currently
thinking about it and presumably without prompting. Few of us, though, hold (or even
could hold) a belief with all its attendant reasons in mind at once. Similarly, it seems
reasonable to imagine that a person is justified in believing a proposition for which she
has forgotten her evidence. Mentalists can handle these cases by claiming that the ability
to access stored facts can constitute dispositional justification, and that even in cases of
forgotten evidence, it could still be the case that the fact that it is justified is consciously
available, either occurrently or dispositionally (Conee and Feldman 2004).

The worry for mentalism is that, in allowing non-occurrent mental states to count as
reasons, mentalism betrays its claim to be internalist. For example, there may be a lot of
evidence I could have that P is true if I were in the right place at the right time. But the
existence of that evidence does not obviously justify P for me since being in such a place
might be a matter of luck. Being at the right place at the right time may mean that the
evidence that, say, “Washington is the capital,” is in a book nearby that I never happen to
read or that the evidence is one of my mental states that I am not currently thinking about,
even if I could when prompted. Specifying just what it means for evidence to be available
but not occurrent turns out to be quite difficult. Richard Feldman (1988) argues that in
neither of these examples am I justified in believing that Washington is the capital and
that a mental state counts as evidence if and only if one is currently thinking of P. Feldman
embraces the counterintuitive implication that “one does not know things such as that
Washington is the capital when one is not thinking of them” (237). Despite these
difficulties, the distinction between accessibilism and mentalism plays an important role
in the debate over internalism.

For more on accessibilism and mentalism, see §1.c of, Internalism and Externalism in
Epistemology.
b. Objections to Internalism
In addition to the Gettier problem (§6), there many other lines of argument that challenge
internalism. Here, I review only three. One of these lines is called the access problem.
Traditional foundationalists have accepted some version of accessibilism. For example,
Roderick Chisholm writes that justification is “internal and immediate in that one can find
out directly, by reflection, what one is justified in believing at any time” (1989: 7). But what
if the belief P that justifies my current belief Q is tucked far back in the recesses of my
memory and would require more time than I currently have to access it? Am I still justified
in believing Q? Or worse, imagine that I have forgotten P; there is no possibility that I can
directly access it. However, Q seems true to me, I remember that I had good reasons for
believing it, and I do not have any reasons to doubt Q now. Am I justified in believing Q
in this case?
Without some modification, the internalist must say no in both cases—the relevant
evidence is neither immediately nor reflectively available—though intuitively these are
normal cases of justified belief. The standard response is two-fold. First, we must admit
that justification comes in degrees: having more evidence can increase one’s justification
and some evidence is stronger than others. And second, the state of seeming to be
justified or remembering that I am justified can, themselves, constitute reasons for belief.
Therefore, in these cases, the internalist might respond that, while the justifications are
not as strong as we would prefer, they are, nonetheless, based on accessible mental states.
A second, related objection to internalism is what, following John Greco, I will call
the etiology problem. Internalism tends to make justification so easy that it is unclear how
one is able to distinguish between good and bad reasons. Consider an example from Greco
(2005):
Charlie is a wishful thinker and believes that he is about to arrive at his destination on
time. He has good reasons for believing this, including his memory of train schedules,
maps, the correct time at departure and at various stops, etc. However, none of these
things is behind his belief—he does not believe what he does because he has these reasons.
Rather, it is his wishful thinking that causes his belief. Accordingly, he would believe that
he is about arrive on time even if he were not. (261)
Why is the combination of his beliefs about schedules, maps, and time a better reason for
thinking he is about to arrive than wishful thinking? Presumably, it is because those
things are reliable indicators of truth, whereas wishful thinking is not. Being a reliable
indicator of truth, though, is an external relationship between the belief and the world—
something to which Charlie has no access. We can arrive at a similar result from imagining
that Charlie does base his beliefs on his beliefs about train schedules, and so forth, but
stipulating that he formed those beliefs carelessly and haphazardly, and only accidentally
arrived at the correct conclusion. Nevertheless, based on these beliefs, it seems clear to
Charlie that the conclusion follows.

An internalist might respond that this objection depends on the mistaken assumption
that internal factors exclude empirical evidence. To see how this assumption slips in,
consider how an externalist might determine that train schedules are more fitting sources
of evidence than wishful thinking. Presumably, externalists would evaluate the past track
record of each source of evidence to see which more reliably indicates truth. The act of
“reviewing their past track records,” however, involves appealing to internal states about
what seems to be their track records and, therefore, is not obviously different from what
an internalist would do; one has internal access to evidence that train arrivals correspond
more reliably with train schedules than with wishes. By demanding that justification
depends only on external features of the belief-forming process, and then appealing to
internal features to evaluate external reliability, Greco is not denying that one must have
good, accessible reasons for her beliefs; he is simply disguising the internal features by
including them in the external conditions (Feldman 2005: 281). Therefore, either
objective etiology is essential to justification, and, therefore, since no one has access to it,
we are left with skepticism, or subjective access to evidence of reliable etiology is sufficient
for justification, and the externalist criticism misses its mark.

Both the access problem and the etiology problem challenge the idea that we can
determine whether we are justified by appeal to internal states. But even if this challenge
can be answered, internalism is sometimes thought to imply that we can voluntarily
control or change what we believe, that is, that we are guided but not determined by our
evidence. The view that we have voluntary control over what we believe is called doxastic
voluntarism (from the Greek doxa, for “what is given” and sometimes for “what is
believed”). The idea is that internalism is intuitive partially because it allows us to take
responsibility for our epistemic behavior. In fact, “[n]onvoluntarism is generally taken to
rule out responsibility, since one is not responsible for what one does not control” (Adler
2002: 64). Taking responsibility implies we can decide to respond to evidence well or
poorly. This suggests a third objection to internalism called the guidance problem. (For
presentations of the guidance problem, see John Heil 1983 and William Alston 1989.)
It turns out that it is difficult to control what we believe: try to make yourself believe you
are not reading this page or that you are not real. It is unclear what it would take to
convince you that such things are true. That kind of shift would seem to require a complete
change in your evidence. But if that is right, then our beliefs are tied strongly to factors
outside our control; we cannot simply decide what evidence we have or whether to believe
on the basis of that evidence. According to this critique, the idea that internalism explains
how we take responsibility for our beliefs is misguided.

In response, contemporary internalists tend to accept that our beliefs are largely
determined by the evidence we perceive ourselves to have, but they reject the idea that
complete or even partial voluntary control is necessary for responsibility. Carl Ginet
(2001) argues that our control over our beliefs is limited but that we nonetheless may
decide what to believe in those cases where the evidence is indecisive, cases “where the
subject has it open to her also to not come to believe it” (74). Further, Earl Conee and
Richard Feldman (2004) argue that a person’s beliefs may appropriately fit one’s evidence
even if she cannot control whether she forms those beliefs. For instance:

Suppose that a person spontaneously and involuntarily believes that the lights are on in
the room, as a result of the familiar sort of completely convincing perceptual evidence.
This belief is clearly justified, whether or not the person cannot voluntarily acquire, lose,
or modify the cognitive process that led to the belief. (85)

For a more comprehensive treatment of the debate between internalists and externalists,
see Internalism and Externalism in Epistemology.
6. The Gettier Era
The idea that justification is the crucial link between true belief and knowledge seems to
be implicit in epistemology since Plato. In Theatetus, Socrates gives an example of a jury
that has been persuaded by hearsay of a true judgment that can only be known by an eye-
witness (201b-c). This example shows that “true judgment” is not the same thing as
“knowledge,” and, therefore, that some other element is needed. Theatetus suggests that
knowledge is true judgment plus a logos—an account or argument. Socrates considers
three ways of giving an account of a true judgment but concludes that none is plausible.
Nevertheless, from then until now, philosophers have generally thought something like
the Theatetus’s suggestion must be right, and most of those accounts have been
internalist. Socrates’s own suggestion, in Plato’s Meno, is that knowledge is a type of
remembrance of what is true based on direct experience prior to being born. Descartes
tries to close the gap between true belief and knowledge with the apprehension of clarity
and distinctness. Kant attempts to bring them together with the transcendental
apperception of the conditions for the possibility of veridical perception. In each case, the
knower is assumed to have direct access to something that explains when true belief is
knowledge.
Unfortunately, a thought experiment developed in the 20th century challenges the idea
that any internal criteria can distinguish knowledge from accidentally true belief. This
thought experiment was named the Gettier Problem after Edmund Gettier, who
introduced the most influential examples in a famously brief 1963 paper. Examples from
other philosophers proliferated after Gettier’s publication, but each new instance is
standardly called a “Gettier Case.”
a. The History of the Gettier Problem
The idea is that there are cases where all three conditions on knowledge are met—a belief
is justified and true—and yet that belief fails to be knowledge. Although some traditional
internalists have allowed that a false belief can be justified, they have resisted the idea
that a belief’s justification does not contribute to the likelihood of knowing. But if Gettier
cases are successful, it is possible to be justified (in the classic internalist sense) in holding
a true belief without that belief’s being knowledge.

The the broken clock example in §1 is an early version of this problem, constructed by
Bertrand Russell (1948). Here is another example Russell includes alongside his clock
case:

There is the man who believes, truly, that the last name of the Prime Minister in 1906
began with a B, but believes this because he believes that Balfour was Prime Minister then,
whereas in fact it was Campbell-Bannerman. … Such instances can be multiplied
indefinitely, and show that you cannot claim to have known merely because you turned
out to be right. (171)

The problem, though, contra Russell, is not merely that such a person turns out to be
right; it is that the person’s belief is justified in cases where a belief turns out to be true
by luck; justified true belief in these cases does not increase the likelihood that the belief
is knowledge. The evidence that justifies the belief is not connected with the truth of the
belief in the right way, and, recall from the introduction, believing in the right way is
precisely the sort of thing justification is supposed to indicate.
Such cases trace at least as far back as Alexius Meinong (1906), but the most famous are
Gettier’s. His cases are interesting because they show that such cases can occur even when
our evidence includes logical entailment. In his first example, Gettier asks us to imagine
that two men, Smith and Jones, have applied for the same job. Imagine also that Smith
has very good reasons for believing: “Jones will get the job” and “Jones has 10 coins in his
pocket.” From this, it follows logically that: “The man who will get the job has 10 coins in
his pocket,” and Smith forms the belief that this is true. As it turns out, however, Smith
has 10 coins in his pocket (though he does not know it) and he will get the job. So, Smith’s
belief that the man who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket is true, and he has good
reasons for why this is so, but his reasons are unconnected with the real reasons it is true.
Most philosophers have concluded that, since Smith’s true belief is just a matter of luck
(and not a function of his reasons’ connection with the state of affairs that make it true),
Smith does not know that the man who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket.

Because of the many possible variations on cases like these, the idea that justification is
based on evidence to which we have direct access faces a serious challenge. There is no
clear sense in which that sort of evidence always or even regularly increases the likelihood
that a belief is knowledge.
b. Responses to the Gettier Problem
Some philosophers have tried to save strong internalist justification from Gettier cases.
For example, D. M. Armstrong—although he ultimately defends an externalist theory of
justification—argues that Gettier cases can be avoided by adding a requirement that all
evidence for a belief must be, not merely justified, but also knowledge. In the Gettier case
above, since it is false that Jones will get the job, this belief cannot be knowledge for Smith
and, therefore, undermines Smith’s ability to know the man who will get the job has 10
coins in his pocket. (See Feldman 1974 for a counterexample.)

Others weaken the requirements on justification by arguing that, while knowledge may
have constraints outside our conscious access, justification is more plausibly about
responsible or apt belief than truth. Call this weak internalist justification (see Zagzebski,
1996).
Still others argue that Gettier cases suggest either that justification is simply not an
internal matter or that knowledge does not require justification. Those who argue that
justification is external claim that whether a belief is justified depends on whether there
is a law-like connection (conceptual or physical) between a belief and the state of affairs
it is about (Bergmann 2006). This approach is externalist because it explains justification
in terms of belief-forming processes outside the mental life of the believer. In adopting
externalism, some treat internal mental states as irrelevant for justification, while others
argue that internal states can play an indirect and partial role in justification. Ernest Sosa
(1991), for example, argues that internal states can contribute to the state of affairs that
grounds the reliability of certain belief-forming behaviors.

7. Externalist Foundationalism
Gettier cases, in addition to other challenges to internalism, have led some
epistemologists to reject the idea that justification requires an internal condition. In its
most minimal form, externalism is the view that internalism is false, that is, that some
features external to the mental life of a person play a necessary role in justification (Greco
2005: 258). However, many versions of externalism also explicitly reject internal
conditions for justification, at least for non-inferential knowledge. Some philosophers
have developed externalist accounts of knowledge that lack any account of justification
(compare, Goldman, 1967, though he has since given up this view). The debate between
externalists and internalists, though, is primarily about justification. Externalist accounts
of justification differ from internalist accounts by challenging the idea that justification is
primarily or ultimately about good reasons when good reasons are construed as mental
states.

To accommodate the external features that connect beliefs with states of the world,
externalists modify what was traditionally meant by justification; rather than appealing
to a person’s subjective perspective on her evidence, externalists appeal to the objective
features of the belief-forming and -holding behavior. Epistemic standing is not about the
reasons a person has; it is about the relationship between a belief and the world, how that
belief is formed or how it is maintained, and where the relationship is not a guarantee of
truth but a strong indicator of truth, typically because of a causal, lawful, conceptual, or
counterfactual connection with the states of affairs the belief is about. The most
prominent version of externalism is the view that a belief is justified just in case it is
caused by a reliable process, where “reliable” means that the process produces more true
beliefs than false.

a. Externalism, Foundationalism, and the DIJ

Externalists agree that, to resolve the DIJ, one needs to avoid infinite regress and
skepticism. So, rather than grounding justification in other beliefs (as coherentists do) or
in non-belief states (as classical foundationalists do), externalists ground justification and
knowledge in the objective way the world contributes to belief formation or maintenance.

Some externalists, like Armstrong (1973) and Goldman (1979), make room for something
like basic beliefs, from which something like non-basic beliefs are inferred. This means
that contemporary externalists tend to accept the foundationalist structure—some beliefs
are produced reliably by non-belief states, and some beliefs can be produced by other
beliefs—though they reject the distinction between basic and non-basic beliefs. All belief-
forming processes are states external to the knower’s mental states, and whether a belief
is justified (and, therefore, knowledge) depends on the reliability of those processes.

Unlike classical foundationalists, who appeal to internal seemings, indubitability, or self-

evidence as justifying these states, externalists like Goldman argue that these states are
knowledge simply because they stand in a reliable relationship with the world. A non-
inferential belief is knowledge when and because it is lawfully (Armstrong) or reliably
(Goldman) produced.

b. Reliabilism
The concept of reliability is crucial to externalist theories of justification (in contrast to
externalist theories of knowledge, for example, Goldman 1967, 1976 and Armstrong
1973). There are two types of reliabilist theories of justification. According to reliable
indicator theories, a belief is justified just in case its reason or ground is a reliable indicator
of the belief’s truth (Swain 1981 and Alston 1988). According to process reliabilism, a belief
is justified just in case it was causally produced by reliable processes (Goldman 1979 and
Bach 1985). Although he focuses primarily on externalist theories of knowledge, D. M.
Armstrong’s “thermometer theory of knowledge” explains that certain mental states serve
as reliable indicators or signs of knowledge, and therefore make the belief reasonable, or
“justifiable.” Comparing non-inferential belief and a thermometer, Armstrong writes:
In some cases, the thermometer-reading will fail to correspond to the temperature of the
environment. Such a reading may be compared to non-inferential false belief. In other
cases, the reading will correspond to the actual temperature. Such a reading is like non-
inferential true belief. (166)

There are a number of important qualifications to Armstrong’s view, but the central point
is that a belief is justified independently of whether the person has reasons to believe it:
“The subject’s belief is not based on reasons, but it might be said to be reasonable
(justifiable), because it is a sign, a completely reliable sign, that the situation believed to
exist does in fact exist” (183).

The benefit of Armstrong’s law-like account is that it suggests a counterfactual account of

causal relations along the following lines: as long as a person has a means of
distinguishing a proposition, P, from a mutually exclusive but very similar proposition Q,
then the person is justified in believing P. For example, if Judy and Trudy are twins, and
when John sees someone who looks like Judy, he would not mistake Trudy for Judy, then
Sam is justified in believing that he sees Judy. “But if Sam frequently mistakes Judy for
Trudy, and Trudy for Judy, he presumably does not have any way of distinguishing
between them” (Goldman 1976: 778).

Unfortunately, reliable indicator theories tend to be overly strict in their analysis of cases.
Goldman asks us to consider Oscar, who is standing in an open field and sees a
Dachshund, from which he forms the belief that he sees a dog. As it happens, Oscar often
mistakes certain dog breeds for wolves, who frequent the field. If he were to see a wolf, he
might easily mistake it for a dog. Now, is his seeing a Dachshund a reliable indicator of
seeing a dog? Since Oscar would likely believe he is seeing a dog regardless of whether he
is seeing a wolf or a Dachshund, reliable indicator theories (at least Armstrong’s) would
say his seeing a Dachshund is not a reliable indicator of seeing a dog. Whether this
criticism is ultimately successful or whether it applies to all reliable indicator theories,
reliable process theories quickly overshadowed interest in this type of reliabilism.

Process reliabilism is the view that a belief is justified just in case it is produced by a
reliable cognitive process, where a cognitive process may include either conscious
reasoning processes or unconscious mechanisms. As I formulated it earlier in this article,
reliabilism is a necessary and sufficient condition for justification (“just in case”), but
some reliabilists formulate weaker versions. Goldman treats it as a sufficient condition
(though he argues against the plausibility of alternative sufficient conditions): “If S’s
believing p at t results from a reliable cognitive belief-forming process (or set of
processes), then S’s belief in p at t is justified,” (1979: 13). Kent Bach treats it as only a
necessary condition: “The idea, roughly, is that to be justified a belief must be formed as
the result of reliable processes…” (1985: 199). Despite these differences, externalists
univocally reject internalist conditions as sufficient for justification. This commitment,
however, leaves them open to a number of interesting criticisms.
c. Objections to Externalism
Though externalism, putatively, has the advantage of avoiding the Gettier problem
(though this is controversial) and several other skeptical concerns and of capturing some
important intuitions about knowledge, it faces several serious criticisms. On the basis of
these criticisms, some internalists claim that externalists have simply changed the subject
altogether and are not really talking about justification.

One famous criticism of externalism is called the generality problem. Earl Conee and
Richard Feldman (1998) present an example to demonstrate the problem:
Suppose that Smith has good vision and is familiar with the visible differences among
common species of trees. Smith looks out a house window one sunny afternoon and sees
a plainly visible a nearby maple tree. She forms the belief that there is a maple tree near
the house. Assuming everything else in the example is normal, this belief is justified and
Smith knows that there is a maple tree near the house. Process reliabilist theories reach
the right verdict about this case only if it is true that the process that caused Smith’s belief
is reliable. (372)

Is it reliable? That depends on which process formed the belief. Was it the unique causal
set of events leading to that particular belief? If so, it is not reliable, since token, or one-
time, events have no historical track record. Reliabilists respond to this challenge by
saying it is the type of process that must be reliable in order for a belief to be justified, not
the token. If that is right, then we face the problem of determining which type of process
formed the belief. Was it the “visually initiated belief-forming process,” the “process of a
retinal image of such-and-such specific characteristics leading to a belief that there is a
maple tree nearby,” the “process of relying on a leaf shape to form a tree-classifying
judgment,” the “perceptual process of classifying by species a tree located behind a solid
obstruction,” or any number of others (373)? There are innumerable options, and even if
a combination of types were involved, each type would have to meet reliability conditions.
Conee and Feldman conclude, “Without a specification of the relevant type, process
reliabilism is radically incomplete” (373).
A second objection to externalism is called the New Evil Demon Problem (NEDP) (Cohen
and Lehrer 1983). In Descartes’s original evil demon problem, in order to motivate the
problem of skepticism, we are asked to consider the possibility that all our current
perceptions are the fictitious construction of a being intent on deceiving us such that all
our perceptual and intuitive beliefs are false. Putting the thought experiment to a very
different purpose, if the evil demon world is possible, we can imagine two worlds: (1) a
non-deceptive world, where our perceptions are reliably produced by the world outside
of our minds, and (2) an evil demon world, where there are people just like you and me,
who have exactly the same mental states that we do but whose perceptions are
systematically unreliable—they track nothing of truth at that world. There are no trees,
buildings, bodies, and so forth. Whatever actually exists at that world, those people have
no perception of it. According to externalists—process reliabilists, in particular—the
beliefs of people in the real world are justified and those of people in the demon world are
unjustified, despite the fact that their mental lives are identical. Yet it is difficult to
imagine that demon world beliefs about looking both ways before crossing the street and
getting a second opinion about a medical diagnosis are unjustified. People who believe
such things are acting responsibly from their perspective on their evidence. This suggests
that reliabilism is not really about justification at all.
A third objection to externalism is what Ernest Sosa (2001) calls the metaincoherence
problem, which attempts to show that a person’s belief can be externally reliable while
internally unjustified. In the literature, there are two versions of the metaincoherence
problem. The first is what I call first-order metaincoherence, which attempts to show that
externalism is insufficient for justification. The second is what I call second-order
metaincoherence, which challenges the externalist’s reasons for holding externalism.
One famous example of first-order metaincoherence is a thought experiment given in
various forms by Laurence BonJour (1985) and Keith Lehrer (1990). Consider
Armstrong’s Thermometer Analogy from above. Imagine there was a human
thermometer, that is, someone who “undergoes brain surgery by an experimental surgeon
who invents a small device which is both a very accurate thermometer and a
computational device capable of generating thoughts” (Lehrer 1990: 163). This person,
whom Lehrer names Mr. Truetemp, is unaware of the device despite the fact that it
regularly causes him to form reliable beliefs that he unreflectively accepts about the
temperature. On a given day, he might reliably form and accept the belief that it is 104
degrees Fahrenheit outside. Is this belief knowledge? Lehrer concludes: “Surely not. He
has no idea whether he or his thoughts about the temperature are reliable” (164). BonJour
concludes similarly, “Part of one’s epistemic duty is to reflect critically upon one’s beliefs,
and such critical reflection precludes believing things to which one has, to one’s
knowledge, no reliable means of epistemic access” (1985: 42).

The second-order metaincoherence problem is stated by Barry Stroud (1989):

The scientific ‘externalist’ claims to have good reason to believe that his theory is true. It
must be granted that if, in arriving at his theory, he did fulfill the conditions his theory
says are sufficient for knowing things about the world, then if that theory is correct, he
does in fact know that it is. But still, I want to say, he himself has no reason to think that
he does have good reason to think that his theory is correct. (321)

The worry is that, since externalists claim that features of the world outside the mental
life of a believer ultimately determine whether a belief is justified, then, if externalism is
true, externalists have no reason to believe it is true; in fact, they are committed to
believing that whether their belief that it is true is justified is outside their ability to
determine from within their own perspective. Again, the belief may be externally reliable,
but it is internally unjustified.

If these criticisms hit their mark, epistemologists must make some difficult decisions
about which approach—internalism or externalism—has the fewest or least pernicious
problems. In the 21st century, much work is underway to address these problems. If one
remains unconvinced, there are recent developments that attempt to salvage some of the
insights of internalism and externalism. A prominent example involves introducing
character traits into the conditions for justification. We turn next to this view, called virtue
epistemology.
8. Justification as Virtue
Classical theories of justification that imply a normative or belief-guiding dimension are
modeled largely on normative ethical theories, whether teleological, or outcome-based,
accounts or deontological, or duty-based, accounts. They ask whether people are
rationally obligated to, permitted to, or obligated not to hold particular beliefs given their
evidence. These are decision-based theories of rational normativity, as opposed to
character-based theories. Just as virtue theory offers a non-decision-based alternative in
ethics, it also suggests a non-decision-based alternative in epistemology. The attitudes
and circumstances under which people form, maintain, and discard beliefs can be
described as virtuous or vicious, and just as decision-based theories in epistemology are
concerned with rational obligation (as opposed to moral obligation), character-based
theories in epistemology are concerned either with intellectual character (as opposed to
moral character), or with cognitive faculties understood as traits of a person (such as
reason, perception, introspection, and memory). Of course, in matters of normativity, it
is not a simple task to distinguish moral dimensions from rational or intellectual ones,
but space prevents us from exploring that relationship here.

Virtue theories of justification hold that part of what justifies a belief is the intellectual
traits with which a believer forms or holds the belief. Just as a person’s moral virtues
contribute to the goodness of an action (kindness, compassion, honesty), a person’s
intellectual virtues contribute to the epistemic goodness of a belief. Virtue theorists,
however, are sharply divided as to which intellectual virtues are relevant. One prominent
view is that justification is a function of those virtues that enhance reliability, that is, they
have a strong external component (Sosa 1980; 2007). This view is known as virtue
reliabilism.
A second prominent view is that justification is a function of those intellectual virtues that
contribute to more general epistemic goods, including intellectual well-being, social trust,
and the righting of epistemic injustice. These virtue responsibilists regard the truth-goal in
epistemology very differently than both traditional epistemologists and their virtue
reliabilist counterparts (Code 1984; Montmarquet 1993; Zagzebski 2000).
a. Virtue Reliabilism
A prominent version of virtue reliabilism is offered by Ernest Sosa (1980) in attempt to
resolve the tension between foundationalists and coherentists. Sosa argues that if beliefs
are grounded in truth-conductive intellectual virtues (where truth-conducive is conceived
in process reliabilist terms), then foundationalists have empirically stable abilities or
acquired habits that help explain the connection between sensory experience and non-
inferential belief. Further, reliable virtues help explain how justification emerges from a
coherent set of beliefs—coherence is a type of intellectual virtue.

What do these intellectual virtues look like for Sosa? Borrowing an example from his
(2007), consider an archer who is aiming at a target. In order to be successful, the archer
must have a degree of competence, which Sosa calls “adroitness,” and the shot must be
accurate. These features are analogous to the epistemic state of having a true belief
(accuracy) that is formed on the basis of good evidence (adroitness). These two features
alone, though, are insufficient for the person to believe in the right way. The person must
also exercise his adroitness in circumstances that increase his likelihood of having
accurate beliefs, that is, his shot must be accurate because it is adroit. Sosa calls this third
feature “aptness,” “its being true because competent” (2007: 23). Some of these
circumstances will be outside the believer’s control—wind gusts in the archer’s case;
causal ties to the world in the epistemic case. But some—for example, the virtues—are
within the believer’s control.
Sosa explains:

Aptness depends on just how the adroitness bears on the accuracy. The wind may help
some, for example…. If the shot is difficult, however, from a great distance, the shot might
still be accurate sufficiently through adroitness to count as apt, though with some help
from the wind. (2007: 79)

Notice that the role of the wind is analogous to certain external features of a person’s
belief-forming state. Nevertheless, intellectual virtues like those mentioned above can
increase one’s adroitness and thereby increase the likelihood of accuracy.

Imagine a person who has good evidence that P but who either does not appeal to that
evidence when forming the belief that P, appealing instead to, say, wishful thinking, or
who appeals to that evidence carelessly, refusing to consider alternatives or just how
strong the evidence is. Despite this person’s having good evidence, her belief is not apt
because the belief’s truth was not due to the person’s competence with the evidence.

Because of this external dimension, this branch of virtue epistemology is regarded as a

form of reliabilism. Unlike externalist foundationalism, however, the reliability condition
is not restricted to belief-forming processes; it is also highly dependent on context. Sosa
says:

An archer might manifest sublime skill in a shot that does hit the bull’s-eye. This shot is
then both accurate and adroit. But it could still fail to be accurate because adroit. The
arrow might be diverted by some wind, for example, so that, if conditions remained
normal thereafter, it would miss the target altogether. However, shifting winds might
then ease it back on track towards the bull’s-eye. (79)
In epistemic cases, the believer must be suitably virtuous such that, under normal
conditions, her beliefs are accurate because they are adroit.

b. Virtue Responsibilism
Sosa’s account has been well-received, though there is disagreement as to whether it is
sufficient for solving the problems at issue. One prominent criticism is that Sosa does not
take his use of virtues far enough. Rather than serving a more basic truth-goal, some argue
that virtues should be conceived as central to the epistemic project.

Lorraine Code (1984) coined the term virtue responsibilism in contrast to Sosa’s
reliabilism, and it is the view that justification, or rather, being an intellectually
responsible agent, is a matter of acting virtuously in the practice of inquiry. Code argues
that epistemic responsibility the central intellectual virtue. Similarly, James
Montmarquet argues that, “S is subjectively justified in believing p insofar as S is
epistemically virtuous in believing p” (1993: 99). This means that virtue responsibilism is
internalist through and through.
Not all virtue responsibilists, however, eschew the truth-goal. As Linda Zagzebski
explains, “It would not do any good for a person to be attentive, thorough, and careful
unless she was generally on the right track” (2009: 82). But unlike externalist
foundationalism, “the right track,” according to virtue epistemologists, does not
necessarily include producing more true beliefs than false. There is more than one
virtuous outcome, for example, in cases of creativity or inventiveness. It may be that “only
5 per cent of a creative thinker’s original ideas turn out to be true,” Zagzebski explains.
“Clearly, their truth conduciveness in the sense of producing a high proportion of true
beliefs is much lower than that of the ordinary virtues of careful and sober inquiry, but
they are truth conducive in that they are necessary for the advancement of knowledge”
(2000: 465). This suggests that the conditions under which a subject is justified are highly
contingent on changing context and the goal of our epistemic behaviors. And virtue
epistemologists argue that this captures the typical contingency of our epistemic lives.

c. Objections to Virtue Epistemology

In addition to internal disputes between virtue reliabilists and responsibilists, there are
more serious concerns with the adequacy of virtue epistemology. Virtue reliabilism faces
many of the same criticisms that face traditional reliabilism, including the generality
problem, the New Evil Demon Problem, and the meta-incoherence problems. Further,
although there is an intuitive sense in which a reliably functioning method of forming
beliefs is virtuous (in the Aristotelian sense of “excellence”), it is not clear how virtue
reliabilism is substantively different from classical reliabilism. To be sure, virtue
responsibilists take special pains to explain the roles of context, luck, and the knower’s
aptness in forming beliefs, but these do not seem unavailable to traditional reliabilists.

Similarly, virtue responsibilism faces many of the same problems as virtue ethics. There
are questions about which intellectual states count as epistemic virtues (different
responsibilists have different lists), whether some virtues should be privileged over others
(for example, James Montmarquet (1992) argues that epistemic conscientiousness is the
preeminent intellectual virtue), and the ontological status of virtues (whether they are
real dispositions or simply heuristics for categorizing types of behavior). There are also
serious concerns about some extreme versions of responsibilism that completely
disconnect intellectual virtue from truth-seeking, as with Code’s account, rendering
discussions of intellectual virtue the province of ethics rather than epistemology.

To alleviate some of these concerns, some virtue epistemologists defend a mixed theory,
arguing that an adequate virtue epistemology requires both a reliability and a
responsibility condition Greco (2000).

A general concern for both types of virtue epistemology is that virtue theory associates
justification too closely with the idea of credit or achievement, whether a person has
formed beliefs well. Jennifer Lackey (2007, 2009), for example, argues that if knowledge
is produced by the virtuous activity of others (like that of a reliable witness) or if
knowledge is innate, then it is not obvious how a person’s belief-forming behavior can be
virtuous or vicious, as there is no behavior involved. In the case of the reliable witness, a
hearer simply accepts on the basis of the witness’s testimony. In the case of innate
knowledge, the knower does nothing to increase the likelihood that her beliefs are
reliable; they are reliable for reasons outside her epistemic behavior. If these criticisms
are right, virtue epistemology may be unable to explain a range of important types of
knowledge.
For a more detailed treatment of virtue epistemology, see Virtue Epistemology.
9. The Value of Justification
Each of the theories of justification reviewed in this article presumes something about the
value of justification, that is, about why justification is good or desirable. Traditionally, as
in the case of Theatetus noted above, justification is supposed to position us to understand
reality, that is, to help us obtain true beliefs for the right reasons. Knowledge, we suppose,
is valuable, and justification helps us attain it. However, skeptical arguments, the
influence of external factors on our cognition, and the influence of various attitudes on
the way we conduct our epistemic behavior suggest that attaining true beliefs for the right
reason is a forbidding goal, and it may not be one that we can access internally. Therefore,
there is some disagreement as to whether justification should be understood as aimed at
truth or some other intellectual goal or set of goals.
a. The Truth Goal
All the theories we have considered presume that justification is a necessary condition for
knowledge, though there is much disagreement about what precisely justification
contributes to knowledge. Some argue that justification is fundamentally aimed at truth,
that is, it increases the likelihood that a belief is true. Laurence BonJour writes, “If
epistemic justification were not conducive to truth in this way…then epistemic
justification would be irrelevant to our main cognitive goal and of dubious worth” (1985:
8). Others argue that there are a number of epistemic goals other than truth and that in
some cases, truth need not be among the values of justification. Jonathan Kvanvig
explains:

[I]t might be the case that truth is the primary good that defines the theoretical project of
epistemology, yet it might also be the case that cognitive systems aim at a variety of values
different from truth. Perhaps, for instance, they typically value well-being, or survival, or
perhaps even reproductive success, with truth never really playing much of a role at all.
(2005: 285)

Given this disagreement, we can distinguish between what I will call the monovalent view,
which takes truth as the sole, or at least fundamental, aim of justification, and the
polyvalent view (or, as Kvanvig calls it, the plurality view), which allows that there are a
number of aims of justification, not all of which are even indirectly related to truth.

b. Alternatives to the Truth Goal

One motive for preferring the monovalent view is that, if truth is not the primary goal of
justification—that is, it connects belief with reality in the right way—then one is left only
with goals that are not epistemic, that is, goals that cannot contribute to knowledge. The
primary worry is that, in rejecting the truth goal, one is left with pragmatism. In response,
those who defend polyvalence argue that, in practice, there are other cognitive goals that
are (1) not merely pragmatic, and (2) meet the conditions for successful cognition.
Kvanvig explains that “not everyone wants knowledge…and not everyone is motivated by
a concern for understanding. … We characterize curiosity as the desire to know, but small
children lacking the concept of knowledge display curiosity nonetheless” (2005: 293).
Further, much of our epistemic activity, especially in the sciences, is directed toward
“making sense of the course of experience and having found an empirically adequate
theory” (ibid., 294). Such goals can be produced without appealing to truth at all. If this
is right, justification aims at a wider array of cognitive states than knowledge.

Another argument for polyvalence allows that knowledge is the primary aim of
justification but that much more is involved in justification than truth. The idea is that,
even if one were aware of belief-forming strategies that are conducive to truth (following
the evidence where it leads; avoiding fallacies), one might still not be able to use those
strategies without having other cognitive aims, namely, intellectual virtues. Following
John Dewey, Linda Zagzebski says that “it is not enough to be aware that a process is
reliable; a person will not reliably use such a process without certain virtues” (2000: 463).
As noted above, virtue responsibilists allow that the goal of having a large number of true
beliefs can be superseded by the desire to create something original or inventive. Further
still, following strategies that are truth-conducive under some circumstances can lead to
pathological epistemic behavior. Amélie Rorty, for example, argues that belief-forming
habits become pathological when they continue to be applied in circumstances no longer
relevant to their goals (Zagzebski, ibid., 464). If this argument is right, then truth is, at
best, an indirect aim of justification, and intellectual virtues like openness, courage, and
responsibility may be more important to the epistemic project.

c. Objections to the Polyvalent View

One response to the polyvalent view is to concede that there are apparently many
cognitive goals that fall within the purview of epistemology but to argue that all of these
are related to truth in a non-trivial way. The goal of having true beliefs is a broad and
largely indeterminate goal. According to Marian David, we might fulfill it by believing a
truth, by knowing a truth, by having justified beliefs, or by having intellectually virtuous
beliefs. All of these goals, argues David, are plausibly truth-oriented in the sense that they
derive from, or depend on, a truth goal (David 2005: 303). David supports this claim by
asking us to consider which of the following pairs is more plausible:

A1. If you want to have TBs [true beliefs] you ought to have JBs [justified beliefs].

A2. We want to have JBs because we want to have TBs.

B1. If you want to have JBs you ought to have TBs.

B2. We want to have TBs because we want to have JBs. (2005: 303)

David says, “[I]t is obvious that the A’s [sic] are way more plausible than the B’s. Indeed,
initially one may even think that the B’s have nothing going for them at all, that they are
just false” (ibid.). This intuition, he concludes, tells us that the truth-goal is more
fundamental to the epistemic project than anything else, even if one or more other goals
depend on it.
Almost all theories of epistemic justification allow that we are fallible, that is, that our
justified beliefs, even if formed by reliable processes, may sometimes be false.
Nevertheless, this does not detract from the claim that the aim of justification is true
belief, so long as it is qualified as true belief held in the right way.
d. Rejections of the Truth Goal
In spite of these arguments, some philosophers explicitly reject the truth goal as essential
to justification and cognitive success. Michael Williams (1991), for example, rejects the
idea that truth even could be an epistemic goal when conceived of as “knowledge of the
world.” Williams argues that in order for us to have knowledge of the world, there must
be a unified set of propositions that constitute knowledge of the world. Yet, given
competing uses of terms, vague domains of discourse, the failure of theoretical
explanations, and the existence of domains of reality we have yet to encode into a
discipline, there is not a single, unified reality to study. Williams argues that because of
this, we do not necessarily have knowledge of the world:

All we know for sure is that we have various practices of assessment, perhaps sharing
certain formal features. It doesn’t follow that they add up to a surveyable whole, to a
genuine totality rather than a more or less loose aggregate. Accordingly, it does not follow
that a failure to understand knowledge of the world with proper generality points
automatically to an intellectual lack. (543)

In other words, our knowledge is not knowledge of the world—that is, access to a unified
system of true beliefs, as the classical theory would have it. It is knowledge of concepts in
theories putatively about the world, constructed using semantic systems that are
evaluated in terms of other semantic systems. If this is, in fact, all there is to knowing,
then truth, at least as classically conceived, is not a meaningful goal.

Another philosopher who rejects the truth goal is Stephen Stich (1988; 1990). Stich argues
that, given the vast amount of disagreement among novices and experts about what
counts as justification, and given the many failures of theories of justification to
adequately ground our beliefs in anything other than calibration among groups of
putative experts, it is simply unreasonable to believe that our beliefs track anything like
truth. Instead, Stich defends pragmatism about justification, that is, justification just is
practically successful belief; thus, truth cannot play a meaningful role in the concept of
justification.

A response to both views might be that, in each case, the truth goal has not been
abandoned but simply redefined or relocated. Correspondence theories of truth take it
that propositions are true just in case they express the world as it is. If the world is not
expressible propositionally, as Williams seems to suggest, then this type of truth is
implausible. Nevertheless, a proposition might be true in virtue of being an implication
of a theory, and so, for example, we might adopt a more semantic than ontological theory
of truth, and it is not clear whether Williams would reject this sort of truth as the aim of
epistemology.
 Similarly, someone might object to Stich’s treating pragmatism as if it is not truth-
conductive in any relevant sense. If something is useful, it is true that it is useful, even in
the correspondence sense. Even if evidence does not operate in a classical
representational manner, the success of beliefs in accomplishing our goals is,
nevertheless, a truth goal. (See Kornblith 2001 for an argument along these lines.)

10. Conclusion
Epistemic justification is an evaluative concept about the conditions for right or fitting
belief. A plausible theory of epistemic justification must explain how beliefs are justified,
the role justification plays in knowledge, and the value of justification. A primary motive
behind theories of justification is to solve the dilemma of inferential justification. To do
this, one might accept the inferential assumption and argue that justification emerges
from a set of coherent beliefs (internalist coherentism) or an infinite set of beliefs
(infinitism). Alternatively, one might reject the inferential assumption and argue that
justification derives from basic beliefs (internalist foundationalism) or through reliable
belief-forming processes (externalist reliabilism). If none of these views is ultimately
plausible, one might pursue alternative accounts. For example, virtue epistemology
introduces character traits to help avoid problems with these classical theories. Other
alternatives include hybrid views, such as Conee and Feldman’s (2008), mentioned
above, and Susan Haack’s (1993) foundherentism.

11. References and Further Reading

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Author Information
Jamie Carlin Watson
Email: jamie.c.watson@gmail.com
Broward College
U. S. A.