Epistemic Consent and Doxastic Justification1

Abstract

My starting point is what we can call the Normative Authority Conception of justification, where S is justified in their belief that p at t (to some degree n) if and only if their believing that p at t is not ruled out by epistemic norms that have normative authority over S at t. With this in mind, this paper develops an account of doxastic justification by first developing an account of the normative authority of epistemic norms. Drawing from work in political philosophy, I argue that (a) the cognitive and evaluative commitments and concerns behind our actual practices of holding each other and ourselves accountable for our beliefs reveal which epistemic norms we have consented to be under, and that (b) it is because we have consented to be under the authority of these norms -by actually holding ourselves and others accountable to them -that they in turn have normative authority over us. By connecting the authority of epistemic norms to the authority we have over ourselves in this way, the resulting account of doxastic justification (i) explains why it can be appropriate to criticize, resent, or sanction someone for having unjustified beliefs, (ii) avoids the phenomena of normative alienation and normative parochialism, and (iii) respects the social and collective nature of epistemic justification.

Social Inquisitiveness: A Normative Account of the Social Epistemic Virtue of Good Questioning

“…This fairly broad definition does not provide many elements to understand what sort of group an epistemic community is. In the literature various authors have offered their own accounts, connecting the notion of epistemic community to concepts as varied as entitlement (Kusch 2002), epistemic injustice (McHugh 2017), objectivity (Koskinen 2017), epistemic expectations (Goldberg 2021), epistemic norms for acquiring and transmitting knowledge (Greco 2019), practices of accountability (Oliveira 2022), trust (Greco 2021), among others.…”

“…John Greco also employs concept and norm interchangeably (2019: 280, 2021: 40). For profitable discussions on epistemic normativity, see Henderson and Graham (2020); Oliveira (2022); Goldberg (2020); Greco (2021).…”

Hinduism, Belief and the Colonial Invention of Religion: A before and after Comparison

“…There may be ways to justify beliefs, but that takes us to a discussion outside of logic (cf. Oliveira and Silva 2022). Acknowledging this distinction between psychology and logic is important for it highlights (as we shall see) the ways in which Hindu philosophers were prescient about these distinctions now made in western academic philosophy.…”