Justification without Awareness – Michael Bergmann

Well written, tightly argued and provocative, this superb book represents the best in current work in epistemology. Bergmann champions an externalist account of doxastic justification, which ‘is more objective than subjective deontological justification (understood as epistemic blamelessness) and yet insufficient for warrant’ (p. 6). He says little about the standards for a successful account, but rejects one common expectation of many epistemologists: justification need not be explained in terms of non‐normative concepts (pp. 146–7). The first part of his presentation is an attack on externalism's main competitors, internalism and mentalism. The second is the development of his own externalist view. Bergmann's attack on internalism utilizes two assumptions. First, internalist theories are committed to an awareness requirement: our beliefs are justified only if we are aware of some factor that contributes to their justification. Secondly, the main reason for the awareness requirement is the subject's‐perspective objection: theories which reject the awareness requirement mistakenly award justification to beliefs when it is an accident from the subject's perspective that they are true. Bergmann poses a dilemma for internalists. There is a distinction between strong awareness and weak awareness. Strong awareness of a justification‐contributor involves conceiving of it as relevant to the belief's justification or truth. Weak awareness does not. If the awareness requirement concerns strong awareness, it produces a vicious regress of justified beliefs leading to scepticism. If the requirement concerns weak awareness, then it does not meet the concern raised by the subject's‐perspective objection. Internalism thus either leads to radical scepticism or loses the main support for its awareness requirement. (Bergmann also rejects other reasons for requiring awareness, including an attempt to derive the requirement from the deontologism thesis, that justification is best understood in terms of such concepts as duty, obligation and blame.)

Argument (complex analysis) · Dilemma · Epistemology · Expressivism · Externalism · Internalism and externalism · Normative · Perspective (graphical) · Skepticism · Subject (documents) · Computer Science · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Free Will and Agency · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy · Psychology