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__Justification__ (from [MITECS])

Philosophers distinguish between justified and unjustified
beliefs. The former are beliefs a cognizer is entitled to hold
by virtue of his or her evidence or cognitive operations. The
latter are beliefs he or she is unwarranted in holding, for
example, beliefs based on sheer fantasy, popular superstition,
or sloppy thinking. Some justified beliefs are based on scientific
findings, but scientific beliefs do not exhaust the class of
justified beliefs. Ordinary perceptual and memorial beliefs,
such as “There is a telephone before me” and “Nixon
resigned from the Presidency,” are also normally justified.

A belief’s justification is usually assumed to be something
that makes it probable that the belief is true. But justified
beliefs are not guaranteed to be true. Even sound
scientific evidence can support a hypothesis that is actually
false. Almost all contemporary epistemologists accept this
form of fallibilism.

There are three principal approaches to the theory of justification:
foundationalism, coherentism, and reliabilism.
The historical inspiration for foundationalism was RENÉ
DESCARTES (1637), who launched the project of erecting his
system of beliefs on solid, indeed indubitable, foundations.
Most contemporary foundationalists reject Descartes’s insistence
on indubitable or infallible foundations, because
they doubt that there are enough infallible propositions (if
any) to support the rest of our beliefs. On their view, the
core of foundationalism is the notion that justification has a
vertical structure. Some beliefs are directly or immediately
justified independently of inference from other beliefs, for
example, by virtue of current perceptual experience. These
beliefs are called basic beliefs, and they comprise the foundations
of a person’s justificational structure. Nonbasic justified
beliefs derive their justification via reasoning from
basic beliefs. It has been widely rumored that foundationalism
is dead, perhaps because few people still believe in infallible
foundations. But most epistemologists regard weak
versions of foundationalism—those that acknowledge fallibility—
as still viable.

Coherentism rejects the entire idea of basic beliefs, and
the image of vertical support that begins at the foundational
level. Instead, beliefs coexist on the same level and provide
mutual support for one another. Each member of a belief
system can be justified by meshing, or cohering, with the
remaining members of that system. Beliefs get to be justified
not by their relationship with a small number of basic
beliefs, but by their fit with the cognizer’s total corpus of
beliefs.

Reliabilism, a theory of more recent vintage, holds (in
its simplest form) that a belief is justified if it is produced
by a sequence of reliable psychological processes (Goldman
1979). Reliable processes are ones that usually output
true beliefs, or at least output true beliefs when taking true
beliefs as inputs. Perceptual processes are reliable if they
typically output accurate beliefs about the environment, and
reasoning processes are (conditionally) reliable if they output
beliefs in true conclusions when applied to beliefs in
true premises. Some types of belief-forming processes are
unreliable, and they are responsible for unjustified beliefs.
This might include beliefs formed by certain kinds of biases
or illegitimate inferential methods.

Because reliabilism’s account of justification explicitly
invokes psychological processes, its connection to cognitive
science is fairly straightforward. To determine exactly which
of our beliefs are justified or unjustified, we should determine
which of the belief-forming practices that generate them are
reliable or unreliable, and that is a task for cognitive science
(Goldman 1986). There is no special branch of cognitive science
that addresses this topic, but it is sprinkled across a range
of cognitive scientific projects.

Although most perceptual beliefs are presumably
justified, some applications of our visual object-recognition
system are fairly unreliable. Biederman’s (1987) account of
visual object recognition posits a process of matching
visually detected components of a stimulus with the
component types associated with object categories, such as
“cup,” “elephant,” or “airplane.” Object recognition is
sometimes produced by partial matching, however, as when
an occluded or degraded stimulus reveals only a few of its
contours. When partial matching is unreliable, beliefs so
formed are unjustified. An example of unreliable reasoning
is the overuse of confirming information and the neglect of
disconfirming information in drawing covariational conclusions:
“I am convinced you can cure cancer with positive
thinking because I know somebody who whipped the Big C
after practicing mental imagery.” People focus on instances
that confirm their hypothesis without attending to evidence
that might disconfirm it (Crocker 1982; Gilovich 1991). The
search for evidence can also be biased by desire or
preference. If we prefer to believe that a political
assassination was a conspiracy, this may slant our evidence
collection. In one study, subjects were led to believe that
either introversion or extroversion was related to academic
success. Those who were led to believe that introversion
was predictive of success (a preferred outcome) came to
think of themselves as more introverted than those who
were led to believe that extroversion was associated with
success (Kunda and Sanitioso 1989).

Proponents of foundationalism and coherentism often
reject the relevance of experimental science to the theory of
justification (e.g., Chisholm 1989). But even these types of
theories might benefit from psychological research. What
makes a memory belief about a past event justified or unjustified,
according to foundationalism? It is the conscious
memory traces present at the time of belief. Exactly what
kinds of memory traces are available, however, and what
kinds of clues do they contain about the veridicality of an
apparent memory? This question can be illuminated by psychology.
Johnson and Raye (1981) suggest that memory
traces can be rich or poor along a number of dimensions,
such as their sensory attributes, the number of spatial and
temporal contextual attributes, and so forth. Johnson and
Raye suggest that certain of these dimensions are evidence
that the trace originated from external sources (obtained
through perception) and other of these dimensions are evidence
of an internal origin (imagination or thought). A characterization
of these dimensions could help epistemologists
specify when a memory belief about an allegedly external
past event is justified and when it is unjustified (Goldman
forthcoming).

Epistemological theories of justification sometimes ignore
computational considerations, which are essential from
a cognitivist perspective. Coherentism, for example, usually
requires of a justified belief that it be logically consistent
with the totality of one’s current beliefs. But is this logical
relationship computationally feasible? Cherniak (1986)
argues that even the apparently simple task of checking for
truth-functional consistency would overwhelm the computational
resources available to human beings. One way to check
for truth-functional consistency is to use the familiar truthtable
method. But even a supermachine that could check a
line in a truth-table in the time it takes a light ray to traverse
the diameter of a proton would require 20 billion years to
check a belief system containing only 138 logically independent
propositions. Thus, the coherence theory implicitly
requires a humanly impossible feat, thereby rendering justification
humanly unattainable (Kornblith 1989). Attention to
computational feasibility, obviously, should be an important
constraint on theories of justification.

See also EPISTEMOLOGY AND COGNITION; INDUCTION;
JUDGMENT HEURISTICS; RATIONAL AGENCY

—Alvin I. Goldman

__References__

Biederman, I. (1987). Recognition-by-components: A theory of
human image understanding. Psychological Review 94: 115–
147.

Cherniak, C. (1986). Minimal Rationality. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.

Chisholm, R. (1989). Theory of Knowledge. 3rd ed. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Crocker, J. (1982). Biased questions in judgment of covariation
studies. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 8: 214–220.

Descartes, R. (1637). Discourse on Method.

Gilovich, T. (1991). How We Know What Isn’t So. New York: Free
Press.

Goldman, A. (1979). What is justified belief? In G. Pappas, Ed.,
Justification and Knowledge. Dordrecht: Reidel. Reprinted in
Goldman (1992).

Goldman, A. (1986). Epistemology and Cognition. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.

Goldman, A. (Forthcoming). Internalism exposed. In M. Steup,
Ed., Knowledge, Truth, and Obligation: Essays on Epistemic
Responsibility and the Ethics of Belief. New York: Oxford University
Press.

Johnson, M., and C. Raye (1981). Reality monitoring. Psychological
Review 88: 67–85.

Kornblith, H. (1989). The unattainability of coherence. In J.
Bender, Ed., The Current State of the Coherence Theory. Dordrecht:
Kluwer.

Kunda, Z., and R. Sanitioso. (1989). Motivated changes in the
self- concept. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 25:
272–285.

__Further Readings__

Alston, W. (1989). Epistemic Justification. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.

Bonjour, L. (1985). The Structure of Empirical Knowledge. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.

Goldman, A. (1992). Liaisons: Philosophy Meets the Cognitive
and Social Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Harman, G. (1986). Change in View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lehrer, K. (1990). Theory of Knowledge. Boulder, CO: Westview
Press.

Pollock, J. (1986). Contemporary Theories of Knowledge. Totowa,
NJ: Rowman and Littlefield.

Steup, M. (1996). An Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology.
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
