The Structure of Justification

This collection of papers transcends two of the most widely misunderstood positions in philosophy - foundationalism and coherentism.

This collection of papers by one of the foremost philosophers in epistemology transcends two of the most widely misunderstood positions in philosophy - foundationalism and coherentism. Audi proposes a distinctively moderate, internalist foundationalism that incorporates some of the virtues of both coherentism and reliabilism. He develops important distinctions between positive and negative epistemic dependence, substantively and conceptually naturalistic theories, dispositional beliefs and dispositions to believe, episodically and structurally inferential beliefs, first and second order internalism, and rebutting as opposed to refuting scepticism. These contrasts are applied not only to rational belief, but to rational action and the rationality of desires and intentions. The overall position is a pluralist, moderately rationalistic, internalist theory of justification and a partly externalist conception of knowledge. However, by virtue of offering a theory of rationality as well as an account of knowledge and justified belief, it will interest philosophers of ethics, science, and the social sciences and teachers and students of epistemology.

Overview; Part I. The Foundationalism-Coherentism Controversy: 1. Psychological foundationalism; 2. Axiological foundationalism; 3. Foundationalism, epistemic dependence, and defeasibility; 4. The foundationalism-coherentism controversy: hardened stereotypes and overlapping theories; Part II. Knowledge and Justification: 5. the limits of self-knowledge; 6. defeated knowledge, reliability, and justification; 7. The causal structure of indirect justification; 8. Belief, reason, and inference; 9. Structural justification; Part III. Epistemic Principles and Skepticism: 10. Justification, truth and reliability; 11. Causalist internalism; 12. The old skepticism, the new foundationalism, and naturalized epistemology; Part IV. Rationality: 13. An epistemic conception of rationality; 14. Rationalization and rationality; 15. The architecture of reason.

This collection of papers by one of the foremost philosophers in epistemology transcends two of the most widely misunderstood positions in philosophy - foundationalism and coherentism.