Martin Smith explores a question central to philosophy--namely, what
does it take for a belief to be justified or rational? According to a
widespread view, whether one has justification for believing a
proposition is determined by how probable that proposition is, given
one's evidence. In the present book this view is rejected and replaced
with another: in order for one to have justification for believing a
proposition, one's evidence must normically support it--roughly, one's
evidence must make the falsity of that proposition abnormal in the
sense of calling for special, independent explanation. This conception
of justification bears upon a range of topics in epistemology and
beyond, including the relation between justification and knowledge,
the force of statistical evidence, the problem of scepticism, the
lottery and preface paradoxes, the viability of multiple premise
closure, the internalist/externalist debate, the psychology of human
reasoning, and the relation between belief and degrees of belief.
Ultimately, this way of looking at justification guides us to a new,
unfamiliar picture of how we should respond to our evidence and manage
our own fallibility. This picture is developed here.
Les mer
What Justifies Belief
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780191071638
Publisert
2020
Utgiver
Oxford University Press Academic UK
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter