Justification (I): Normality & Normativity

In order to contribute to shed light on the nature, aim and value of justification, the workshop approach consists, about the nature of justification, in investigating the relation between justification and normality: is it possible to say that a belief is justified when its truth would be normal? If so, how should normality be conceived: in a fiabilist way? In terms of probability and/or possible worlds? Or what else? About the aim and value of justification, the workshop approach consists in relating such a matter to the question of what is, if any, the standard of correctness, the aim or the norm of belief.

Thursday, April 5

Afternoon

2.30-2.40. Opening by Claudine Tiercelin

2.40- 3.40. Conor McHugh (University of Southampton): "Justification and Judgment"

3.40-4.40. Martin Smith (University of Glasgow): "Justification, Normalcy and Evidential Probability"

4.40-5. Coffee Break

5.-6. Jesper Kallestrup (University of Edinburgh): "Robust Virtue Epistemology and Epistemic Dependence"  

Friday, April 6

Morning

9.40-10.40. Davide Fassio (Université de Genève): "The Truth-Norm of Belief and its Regulation"

10.40-11. Coffee Break

11.-12. Clayton Littlejohn (King's College London): TBA

noon-1pm. Benoit Gaultier (Collège de France, Institut Jean Nicod): "Everything but Knowledge is a (Constitutive) Failure of Belief"

Afternoon

3.-4. Veli Mitova (Universität Wien) "The Value of Epistemic Justification"

4.-5. Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen (Aarhus Universitet) "Normality and Guiding Reasons"

5. End of the workshop



Thursday, April 5

Conor McHugh (University of Southampton): "Justification and Judgment"
Justification is often understood as a standard of appraisal that entails responsibility. But what grounds our responsibility for our beliefs? In this paper I argue that responsibility for belief is a matter of reasons-responsiveness, and essentially involves susceptibility to control through conscious judgment.

Martin Smith (University of Glasgow):
"Justification, Normalcy and Evidential Probability"
My concern in this paper is with a certain, pervasive picture of epistemic justification. On this picture, acquiring justification for believing something is essentially a matter of minimising one’s risk of error – so one is justified in believing something just in case it is sufficiently likely, given one’s evidence, to be true. This view is motivated by an admittedly natural thought: If we want to be falliblists about justification then we shouldn’t demand that something be *certain* - that we *completely* eliminate error risk - before we can be justified in believing it. But if justification does not require the complete elimination of error risk, then what could it possibly require if not its minimisation? If justificationdoes not require epistemic certainty then what could it possibly require if not epistemic probability? When all is said and done, I’m not sure that I can offer satisfactory answers to these questions – but I will attempt to trace out some possible answers here. The alternative picture that I’ll outline makes use of a notion of *normalcy* that I take to be irreducible to notions of statistical frequency or predominance.

Jesper Kallestrup (University of Edinburgh): "Robust Virtue Epistemology and Epistemic Dependence"
According to robust virtue epistemology, knowledge is a cognitive achievement, where this means that the agent’s cognitive success is because of her cognitive ability. It is argued that a fundamental problem which faces this view is its inability to accommodate the fact that our knowledge can be dependent upon factors that are entirely independent of our cognitive agency. This is the problem ofepistemic dependence.

Friday, April 6

Davide Fassio (Université de Genève): 
"The Truth-Norm of Belief and its Regulation" Some philosophers argued that the concept of belief involves a truth-norm according to which a belief is correct if and only if true. The truth-norm has been the object of some criticisms. In particular, in my talk I consider three criticisms directed to the possibility that the agent is guided by the norm. The problems are 1) that the satisfaction conditions of the norm do not bear on an action, but on a possible state of affairs; 2) that the requirment of the norm is not transparent to the agent, and 3) that beliefs are not under one’s voluntary control. I consider and criticize a possible solution to such problems suggested by some philosophers according to which the truth-norm would be regulated by a set of subjective norms – such as norms of evidence, rationality, and similar norms. I defend an alternative solution based on a neat distinction between norms and practices of norm-regulation.

Clayton Littlejohn (King's College London): TBA

Benoit Gaultier (Collège de France, Institut Jean Nicod): "Everything but Knowledge is a (Constitutive) Failure of Belief"

Veli Mitova (Universität Wien)
"The Value of Epistemic Justification" The aim of this talk is to clear space for a new account of the value of epistemic justification. I argue that there are two constraints on such an account: it must explain both the motivational force of justification-considerations and their normativity. None of the existing accounts, I show, meets both constraints: pragmatic and moral accounts breach both, while concept-of-belief accounts breach the normative. So, we should look elsewhere for the value of epistemic justification. A fruitful place to look, I suggest, is agency, in particular David Velleman’s proposal that the hallmark of agency is our drive for explanatory coherence. This drive, I argue, plausibly sources both the motivational and normative force of justification-considerations, while also making sense of the recent move in epistemology toward understanding justification in terms of normalcy.

Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen (Aarhus Universitet)
"Normality and Guiding Reasons"