Chisholm, Naturalism, and the Role of Logic in Epistemology

Traditionally, the pre-theoretic notion of epistemic justification is thought to possess two properties: accessibility and truth-conduciveness. Epistemic justification is thought to be accessible in the sense that an agent S who is justified to believe a proposition p is in a position, even if only in principle, to access the item (assertion or cognition) that justifies p—whether that item be a linguistic item, precept, memory, or other belief. First-person accessibility is thought necessary for S to demonstrate or evaluate his reason for holding p, which is one type of role that the notion of justification is thought to play. Saying one is justified in believing p seems to imply that one has a good reason to believe p, which suggests a capacity to view those items so to judge their bearing on p. Truth-conduciveness concerns the contribution that justification seems to make to the possession of true beliefs. We aren’t interested in epistemic justification simply to have a just-so story for our belief that p. Rather, we’re interested in epistemic justification because we think that, all other things being equal, a set of justified beliefs tends to bring us closer to the truth of the matter than a set of unjustified beliefs does. The idea here is that justification appears to include a property or procedure that tends to yield true beliefs. That truth-conduciveness and accessibility are difficult properties to fully maintain in a single concept of justification is a key back-story to philosophical theories of epistemic justification. As a consequence, fundamentally different conceptions of justification arise from viewing one of these properties as primary. Even how to evaluate these two conceptions of justification is a topic of debate. It is common to frame the debate between first-person conceptions of justification and primarily truth-conducive conceptions of justification in terms