Friday, May 18, 2012

Two new drafts

I have drafts available online now of two projects I've been working on recently. One is my paper, "Justification is Potential Knowledge," which defends a knowledge-first account of doxastic justification. The other is a draft of an "Analysis of Knowledge" SEP entry. (The current entry, by Matthias Steup, is in need of revisions, and Matthias has taken me on a co-author for that purpose.) Comments on either are very welcome!

I'm off to Scotland tomorrow, for an extended visit to the NIP.

1 comment:

  1. Hi Jonathan,

    Wonderful entry to the SEP. One small thing. In 1.3.2., you discuss two kinds of justification (or justification ascription). I know that the entry is really about K rather than J, but Catherine Lowy distinguished personal from doxastic justification in her 1978 Mind article. It seemed important then because some of Gettier's critics thought that his cases weren't genuine. Their complaint was that his cases weren't cases where someone would be justified in believing something since (wait for it...) the subject based his belief on a false belief. She said that this was neither here nor there because Gettier's notion of justification had to do with whether a person was justified in believing, not in whether the person's belief was justified. This connects to a point that comes up later. I wouldn't deny that Gettier cases are genuine. I also would say that there's a notion of justification that doesn't require truth--personal justification. I think that there are some people (myself) who would say that in Gettier's cases we often have personal without doxastic justification. It's not obvious to me that we should strengthen the J condition to rule out Gettier cases.

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