This paper gives an explication of our intuitive notion of strength of justification in a controversial debate. It defines a thesis' degree of justification within the bipolar argumentation framework of the theory of dialectical structures as the ratio of coherently adoptable positions according to which that thesis is true over all coherently adoptable positions. Broadening this definition, the notion of conditional degree of justification, i.e.\ degree of partial entailment, is introduced. Thus defined degrees of justification (...) correspond to our pre-theoretic intuitions in the sense that supporting and defending a thesis t increases, whereas attacking it decreases, t's degree of justification. Moreover, it is shown that (conditional) degrees of justification are (conditional) probabilities. Eventually, the paper explains that it is rational to believe theses with a high degree of justification insofar as this strengthens the robustness of one's position. (shrink)

Based on the theory of dialectical structures, I review the concept of degree of justification of a partial position a proponent may hold in a controversial debate. The formal concept of degree of justification dovetails with our pre-theoretic intuitions about a thesis' strength of justification. The central claim I'm going to defend in this paper maintains that degrees of justification, as defined within the theory of dialectical structures, correlate with a proponent position's verisimilitude. I vindicate (...) this thesis with the results of simulations of controversial argumentation. (shrink)

The question addressed in this paper is how the degree of justification of a belief is determined. A conclusion may be supported by several different arguments, the arguments typically being defeasible, and there may also be arguments of varying strengths for defeaters for some of the supporting arguments. What is sought is a way of computing the “on sum” degree of justification of a conclusion in terms of the degrees of justification of all relevant premises and (...) the strengths of all relevant reasons. (shrink)

This paper describes a formal measure of epistemic justification motivated by the dual goal of cognition, which is to increase true beliefs and reduce false beliefs. From this perspective the degree of epistemic justification should not be the conditional probability of the proposition given the evidence, as it is commonly thought. It should be determined instead by the combination of the conditional probability and the prior probability. This is also true of the degree of incremental confirmation, and I (...) argue that any measure of epistemic justification is also a measure of incremental confirmation. However, the degree of epistemic justification must meet an additional condition, and all known measures of incremental confirmation fail to meet it. I describe this additional condition as well as a measure that meets it. The paper then applies the measure to the conjunction fallacy and proposes an explanation of the fallacy. (shrink)

This paper studies degrees of doxastic justification. Dependency relations among different beliefs are represented in terms of causal models. Doxastic justification, on this picture, is taken to run causally downstream along appropriate causal chains. A theory is offered which accounts for the strength of a derivative belief in terms of (i) the strength of the beliefs on which it is based, and (ii) the epistemic quality of the belief-forming mechanisms involved. It is shown that the structure of (...) degrees of justification converges to ranking theory under ideal conditions. (shrink)

In this paper, I present the fundamental ideas of a new theory of justification strength. This theory is based on the epistemological approach to argumentation. Even the thesis of a valid justification can be false for various reasons. The theory outlined here identifies such possible errors. Justification strength is equated with the degree to which such possible errors are excluded. The natural expression of this kind of justification strength is the (rational) degree of certainty of the (...) belief in the thesis. (shrink)

According to the recent Perceptual Confidence view, perceptual experiences possess not only a representational content, but also a degree of confidence in that content. The motivations for this view are partly phenomenological and partly epistemic. We discuss both the phenomenological and epistemic motivations for the view, and the resulting account of the interface between perceptual experiences and degrees of belief. We conclude that, in their present state of development, orthodox accounts of perceptual experience are still to be favoured over (...) the perceptual confidence view. (shrink)

We regularly make graded normative judgements in the epistemic domain. Recent work in the literature examines degrees of justification, degrees of rationality, and degrees of assertability. This paper addresses a different dimension of the gradeability of epistemic normativity, one that has been given little attention. How should we understand degrees of epistemic criticizability? In virtue of what sorts of factors can one epistemic failing be worse than another? The paper develops a dual-factor view of (...) class='Hi'>degrees of epistemic criticizability. According to the view, degrees of epistemic criticizability are (i) an inverse function of degrees of doxastic justification and (ii) a function of degrees of agent culpability. The paper develops an account of each factor, and explains how they should be weighted. The paper also addresses the importance of modelling degrees of epistemic criticizability in a broader context. I focus on the role that such a model can play in the ethics of epistemic criticism. (shrink)

An essay on Kant's theory of justification, where by “justification” is meant the evaluative concept that specifies conditions under which a propositional attitude is rationally acceptable with a moderate-to-high degree of confidence. Kant employs both epistemic and non-epistemic concepts of justification: an epistemic concept of justification sets out conditions under which a propositional attitude is rationally acceptable with a moderate-to-high degree of confidence and a candidate (if true and Gettier-immune) for knowledge. A non-epistemic concept of (...) class='Hi'>justification, by contrast, sets out conditions under which attitudes are rationally acceptable with a moderate-to-high degree of confidence but not candidates for knowledge (even if true). The latter conditions will typically be “pragmatic” or “practical,” and thus license acceptance from a “practical” point of view. For Kant, only broadly-speaking practical reasons can provide adequate motivation for adopting a positive attitude towards a proposition (rather than suspending judgment) in the absence of sufficient epistemic grounds. -/- . (shrink)

If we think, as Ramsey did, that a degree of belief that P is a stronger or weaker tendency to act as if P, then it is clear that not only uncertainty, but also vagueness, gives rise to degrees of belief. If I like hot coffee and do not know whether the coffee is hot or cold, I will have some tendency to reach for a cup; if I like hot coffee and know that the coffee is borderline hot, (...) I will have some tendency to reach for a cup. Suppose that we take degrees of belief arising from uncertainty to obey the laws of probability and that we model vagueness using degrees of truth. We then encounter a problem: it does not look as though degrees of belief arising from vagueness should obey the laws of probability. One response would be to countenance two different sorts of degrees of belief: degrees of belief arising from uncertainty, which obey the laws of probability; and degrees of belief arising from vagueness, which obey a different set of laws. I argue, however, that if a degree of belief that P is a stronger or weaker tendency to act as if P, then this option is not open. Instead, I propose an account of the behaviour of degrees of belief that integrates subjective probabilities and degrees of truth. On this account, degrees of belief are expectations of degrees of truth. The account explains why degrees of belief behave in accordance with the laws of probability in cases involving only uncertainty, while also allowing degrees of belief to behave differently in cases involving only vagueness, and in mixed cases involving both uncertainty and vagueness. Justifications of the account are given both via Dutch books and in terms of epistemic accuracy. (shrink)

One possible aim of epistemology is to advise cognizers on the proper choice of beliefs or other doxastic attitudes. This aim has often been part of scientific methodology: to tell scientists when they should accept a given hypothesis, or give it a certain degree of credence. This regulative function is naturally linked to the notion of epistemic justification. It may well be suggested that a cognizer is justified in believing something just in case the rules of proper epistemic procedure (...) prescribe that belief. Principles that make such doxastic prescriptions might thereby "double" as principles of justification. In the first part of this paper I contrast the regulative conception of justification with another, equally tenable, conception. Then, after noting a fundamental worry about the applicability of the regulative conception, I proceed to lay it out in more detail. The regulative justificational status of a doxastic attitude for person S at time t depends upon (a) the right set of doxastic instructions and (b) the states S is in at (or just before) t. (shrink)

This paper takes issue with a recent proposal due to Shogenji (Synthese 184:29–48, 2012). In his paper, Shogenji introduces J, a normatively motivated formal measure of justification (and of confirmation), and then proceeds to recruit it descriptively in an explanation of the conjunction fallacy. We argue that this explanation is undermined by the fact that it cannot be extended in any natural way to the inverse conjunction fallacy, a more recently discovered, closely related fallacy. We point out that since (...) the inverse conjunction fallacy occurs in the absence of any form of explicit evidence, formal measures of confirmation such as J, are hard pressed to apply to it at all. We then proceed to argue that this problem with Shogenji’s measure is actually quite difficult to come to terms with; even if the situations where people commit the inverse conjunction fallacy are understood in such a way that the measure is applicable, it doesn’t seem possible to reasonably interpret these situations in such a way that the measure can explain the found response pattern. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to refute the widespread view that challenging a knowledge-claim always raises the original standards of justification–a view often associated with contextualism. To that purpose the distinction between undermining and overriding defeaters will be used. Three kinds of challenges will be considered that differ in their degree of specification. In all three kinds of challenges, the rising standards of justification model fails to capture the dialectic of justification in the case of undermining (...) defeaters. At the end, the skeptical challenge will more briefly be given a similar analysis. (shrink)

Many epistemologists agree with the intuition that “there is no exit from the circle of one’s beliefs”. I shall construe this vague intuition as the claim that justification supervenes on the totality of one’s beliefs: two agents with identical beliefs will be indistinguishable with respect to which of their beliefs are justified and to what degree. My central purpose in this paper is to undermine the supervenience thesis. To this end I shall consider the role(s) of the concept of (...) justification. (shrink)

What is the relation between ‘full’ or ‘outright’ belief and the various levels of confidence that agents can have in the propositions that concern them? This paper argues for a new answer to this question. Decision theory implies that in making decisions, rational agents must treat certain propositions as though they were completely certain; but on most forms of decision theory, these propositions are not ones for which any finite agent could have maximal justification – the agent will clearly (...) have less justification for these propositions than for elementary logical truths. Thus, every adequate model of a finite rational agent's belief‐system must involve two set of credences – theoretical credences and practical credences . A full or outright belief in p can be defined as the state of being stably disposed to assign a practical credence of 1 to p, for all normal practical purposes. This definition allows for a kind of reconciliation between the pragmatist and intellectualist approaches in epistemology. (shrink)

The moral issues about nationalism arise from the character of nationalism as a form of partiality. Nationalists care more about their own nation and its members than about other nations and their members; in that way nationalists are partial to their own national group. The question, then, is whether this national partiality is morally justified or, on the contrary, whether everyone ought to care impartially about all members of all nations. As Jeff McMahan emphasizes in [another chapter of the book (...) in which this essay appears], a philosophical examination of this question must consider the specific features of nationalism as one form of partiality among others. Some partiality--for example, toward one's spouse and children--seems morally acceptable and even a duty. According to commonsense moral thinking, one not only may but also should care more about one's family members than about strangers. But other instances of partiality, most notably racial partiality, are in most circumstances widely condemned. Is national partiality more like familial partiality or more like racial partiality? To answer this question, we must know what in general justifies attitudes of partiality. Caring more about certain people is appropriate when one stands in certain special relations to those people. But what are these relations, and to what degree do they hold among members of the same nation? Assuming they are present within families and not within races, to what degree are they present within nations? (shrink)

This project is concerned with the attempt to diagnose certain types of deductive inferences as exhibiting failure of transmission of justification. The canonical example of alleged transmission failure is G. E. Moore’s infamous ‘proof’ of the external world, in which Moore reasoned here is a hand, therefore the external world exists. If the transmission failure diagnosis is correct, then this inference is incapable of providing a route to learning of its conclusion on the grounds that it is only if (...) one already has some justification to believe its conclusion that one can acquire justification for its premise. The thesis presents two novel problems for the transmission failure diagnosis. Firstly, this diagnosis is only appealing if it is able to safeguard epistemic closure, but it is unclear whether it is able to do this once we distinguish between propositional and doxastic justification. Secondly, a dilemma is presented for entitlement theory, the traditional framework for understanding how there could be justification for believing the conclusions at issue. The dilemma arises once we consider the question of what the apposite degree of confidence is that is licenced by an entitlement, the upshot of which is that either entitlement theory is unmotivated, or it leads to irrational doxastic attitudes. In light of these problems, an alternative framework for understanding the phenomenon of transmission failure is presented. This framework rejects a common assumption in the literature that we can only accommodate the phenomenon by appealing to internalist notions of justification. The resulting externalist framework is defended against two potentially devastating objections. Finally, implications for how these views regarding the structure of justification bear on issues in the epistemology of testimony are considered, and it is argued that a certain family of views in the literature on testimony are committed to certain problematic views regarding the structure of justification. (shrink)

Epistemic contextualism is a thesis about truth conditions of knowledge ascribed to sentences such as “S knows that p” and “S does not know that p”. According to contextualists it is the speaker’s context – the one attributing knowledge – that is pertinent to the truth conditions and truth value of knowledge attributions. Thus, in one context a speaker might say “S knows p” while in another context another he/she might say “S does not know p” without any contradiction involved. (...) Cohen’s version of contextualism takes justification, rather than knowledge, to come in degrees. I shall argue that Cohen’s contextualist theory of justification suffers from several major problems. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the strategy of justifying doctrinal beliefs by appealing to special revelation. Even if one thinks that belief in God is rationally warranted, it does not follow that one's distinctive religious doctrines are justified. Though theism may be justified, it remains an open question whether or not believers are entitled to believe, for example, that Jesus Christ is God Incarnate or that God is triune. Traditionally, religious believers have claimed that their doctrinal beliefs are justified because they have (...) been revealed by God. ;My assessment of this claim consists of three parts. First I examine the concept of special revelation and defend it against charges of incoherence. But if even it makes sense to say that God can reveal himself, the more philosophically interesting question concerns how we could know that he has in fact done so. Hence the second part of the dissertation assesses criteria for adjudicating revelation claims. Locke's claim that the veracity of revelation is vouchsafed through miracles is examined. I argue that it is preferable to understand our doctrinal beliefs as properly basic rather than attempt to authenticate revelation claims through appeals to miracles. Finally, in part three, I consider and respond to several objections against the claim that our doctrinal beliefs can be justified. The first objection says that the strategy of justifying doctrinal beliefs through appeals to special revelation is undermined by competing claims to revelation. The second criticism claims that appeals to special revelation fail to provide the degree of justification required to underwrite decisive assent to doctrinal beliefs. I argue that neither of these criticisms is effective. (shrink)

Today it is generally assumed that epistemic justification comes in degrees. The consequences, however, have not been adequately appreciated. In this paper we show that the assumption invalidates some venerable attacks on infinitism: once we accept that epistemic justification is gradual, an infinitist stance makes perfect sense. It is only without the assumption that infinitism runs into difficulties.

Belief formation and justification of belief is the subject of epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of action. In this article we are mostly interested in the application of analytic techniques for the explication of belief justification under uncertainty. We need to explicate this phenomenon in order to answer, at least in part, the question of what are the features of reasoning made in conditions that cause doubts, how people make decisions in such conditions. Arguments used for the (...) justification of such decisions have the status of plausible arguments. The crucial issues related to the analysis and evaluation of plausible arguments are of the acceptability of the premises and the transmission of their acceptability to the conclusion. In this article, we have focused on the transition from the premises to the conclusions of plausible arguments, on the transmission of justification of premises to the conclusions. To establish the peculiarities of such a transmission an outline of the semantics for such arguments is proposed. Its key component is the measures of the plausibility of the premises and rules of inference. A plausible argument itself does not provide the ultimate reason for accepting its conclusion. The justification of the conclusion also depends on other arguments that support or defeat it. So to establish the degree of justification of the conclusion we need to attribute the weights to the premises and rules of inference. We hope that this study provides at least a preliminary answer to the question of how the failure of the transmission of justification in plausible arguments differs from the failure of transmission in deductive arguments. (shrink)

Justification as Ignorance offers an original account of epistemic justification as both non-factive and luminous, vindicating core internalist intuitions without construing justification as an internal condition knowable by reflection alone. Sven Rosenkranz conceives of justification, in its doxastic and propositional varieties, as a kind of epistemic possibility of knowing and of being in a position to know. His account contrasts with recent alternative views that characterize justification in terms of the metaphysical possibility of knowing. Instead, (...) he develops a suitable non-normal multi-modal epistemic logic for knowledge and being in a position to know that respects the finding that these notions create hyperintensional contexts. He also defends his conception of justification against well-known anti-luminosity arguments, shows that the account allows for fruitful applications and principled solutions to the lottery and preface paradoxes, and provides a metaphysics of justification and its varying degrees of strength that is compatible with core assumptions of the knowledge-first approach and disjunctivist conceptions of mental states. (shrink)

This paper formally explores the common ground between mild versions of epistemological coherentism and infinitism; it proposes—and argues for—a hybrid, coherentist–infinitist account of epistemic justification. First, the epistemological regress argument and its relation to the classical taxonomy regarding epistemic justification—of foundationalism, infinitism and coherentism—is reviewed. We then recall recent results proving that an influential argument against infinite regresses of justification, which alleges their incoherence on account of probabilistic inconsistency, cannot be maintained. Furthermore, we prove that the Principle (...) of Inferential Justification has rather unwelcome consequences—formally resembling the Sorites paradox—as soon as it is iterated and combined with a natural Bayesian perspective on probabilistic inferences. We conclude that strong versions of foundationalism and infinitism should be abandoned. Positively, we provide a rough sketch for a graded formal coherence notion, according to which infinite regresses of epistemic justification will often have more than a minimal degree of coherence. (shrink)

According to a widely held view epistemic justification is a normative notion. According to another widely held assumption, epistemic justification comes in degrees. Given that gradability requires a context-sensitivity that normativity seems to lack, these two assumptions stand in tension. Giving up the assumption of gradability of justification represents a lesser theoretical cost.

This analysis investigates whether solidarity is an appropriate concept for thinking about justifications for a just distribution of bioethical goods in the international arena. This will be explored by looking at the national origins of the idea of justifying solidarity in the form of the health care that welfare states offer. Following that, ‘life’ and ‘health’ will be placed within a philosophical context by focusing on the main arguments of John Rawls and Amartya Sen and the role of solidarity in (...) these two theories of justice will be analysed. It will be shown that these theories assume that solidarity is not a prerequisite for just international structures. Finally, the possibility will be discussed, that there is a degree of uncertainty surrounding justifications for fair distribution in the international context that can result when the concepts of solidarity and justice are handled imprecisely. (shrink)

The term “deductive justification” is used either in the relative or absolute sense. In the first case, a sentence is deductively justified with respect to a class of premisses and may be more or less probable, depending on the degree of justification (eventually non-deductive) of the premisses. In the second sense, a sentence justified deductively in a language to which it belongs, is necessarily true, provided only the meaning postulated by the semantical rules of its expressions can be (...) realized (i. e. if the denotata assigned to the expressions by the semantical rules do exist); in this second case, the statement justified deductively is analytic in the given language. Thus the explication of the latter concept of deductive justification requires an explication of the concept of an analytic statement in a language. (shrink)

Whether the justification at stake is ethical or juridical, all attempts to argue for the welfare principle in Kant’s metaphysics of morals are unsuccessful. This principle cannot be justified a priori in Kant’s context. However, it is not only possible but also necessary to argue for a certain degree of social welfare in politics as the practice of right; otherwise, Kant’s project of political practice, with enlightenment as its core concept, will inevitably fail. Enlightenment requires that the state be (...) committed to reducing the impact of an unequal social structure on individuals so as to preserve the possibility of their enlightenment. However, it also imposes limits on state-sponsored social welfare because excessive social welfare could lead to a general minority. (shrink)

Can a hearer be rationally justified to have beliefs based on testimony alone when the source of his information is known to have conflicting epistemic goals? When it comes to belief justification, existing theories either recommend avoiding epistemic conflicts of interest or ignoring them. This is an important epistemological limitation. A theory that comes in degrees, capable of explaining what beliefs we are justified to hold and why, despite epistemic conflict of interest, is still lacking. Building on a (...) game-theoretical approach, I suggest such a theory and argue that the hearer can justify some beliefs on testimony alone. This justification relies on an equilibrium concept, which is only reached in the long run. In addition, the hearer’s justified beliefs will always be less accurate than those held by the original source. For instance, assume the speaker is a climate scientist who has good reasons to believe that a 2∘\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$^{\circ }$$\end{document}C increase in temperature will lower the current global GDP by 10 percentage points. Under epistemic conflict of interest, a hearer will typically be justified to a belief close to that value, but not equal to it. The smaller the epistemic conflict of interest, the closer, on average, the hearer’s and speaker’s belief. These results highlight the importance of scientific norms which, in practice, are the embodiment of these equilibrium mechanisms and thus of scientific credibility. (shrink)

A new justification of probabilism is developed that pays close attention to the structure of the underlying space of possibilities. Its central assumption is that rational numerical degrees of bel...

My starting point is what I 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. (shrink)

Propositional justification pertains to propositions: it is the sort of justification that a proposition enjoys for an agent when the agent is epistemically justified to believe it. By contrast, doxastic justification is justification of beliefs, i.e., of doxastic states actually instantiated by an agent. The ‘orthodox’ view of the relationship between propositional and doxastic justification is that the latter should be explained in terms of the former, so that an agent’s belief is (doxastically) justified just (...) in case (i) it is a belief in a proposition that is (propositionally) justified for the agent and (ii) it is held on the basis of that which (propositionally) justifies its content. This view has been challenged by John Turri in his paper ‘On the Relationship between Propositional and Doxastic Justification’ (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 80, 2010, pp. 312–326). There he offers two putative counterexamples to the orthodoxy and goes on to argue that the order of explanation should be reversed: it is propositional justification that should be explained in terms of doxastic justification, and not vice versa. Though I share Turri’s feeling that there is something amiss with the way a number of contemporary epistemologists talk of propositional and doxastic justification, I do not believe he has managed to put his finger on the real trouble. So the first point I make is that his counterexamples fall short of refuting the orthodox view, which I argue should be maintained. Then I try to diagnose the real source of the trouble. It lies, I suggest, in the way a number of recent epistemologists talk of propositional justification, a way which commits them to the questionable view that the basis upon which facts concerning propositional justification supervene does not include facts concerning the doxastic states of agents, but only facts concerning the evidence to which agents have access. So I observe that there are different degrees of idealisation involved in judgments of ‘propositional justification’, propose to distinguish what an agent is propositionally justified to believe given his overall doxastic state from what an agent is propositionally justified to believe irrespective of his overall doxastic state, and argue that, whenever it is the former relation that is at stake, an agent can be propositionally justified to believe a proposition p at time t only if it is reasonably easy for him to form a doxastically justified belief in p at t. It is most likely an awareness of this fact, or of some fact in the vicinity, that encourages the belief that propositional justification should be explained in terms of doxastic justification. But I suggest that this fact, far from being evidence that the notion of doxastic justification is in any sense more fundamental than that of propositional justification, can be accounted for by paying attention to the relationship that links the relevant sort of (epistemic) justification to (epistemic) responsibility. So I conclude that there is an important sense in which facts concerning epistemic justification supervene not merely on facts concerning the evidential states of agents, but on facts concerning their overall doxastic states. (shrink)

Conceptions of acceptability-based moral or political justification take it that authoritative acceptability constitutes, or contributes to, validity, or justification. There is no agreement as to what bar for authoritativeness such justification may employ. The paper engages the issue in relation to (i) the level of idealization that a bar for authoritativeness, ψ, imparts to a standard of acceptability-based justification, S, and (ii) the degree of discursive purchase of the discursive standing that S accords to people when (...) it builds ψ. I argue that (i) and (ii) are interdependent: high idealization values entail low discursive purchase, while high degrees of purchase require low idealization values. I then distinguish between alethic conceptions of justification that prioritize ends that commit to high idealization values, and recognitive conceptions that favour high discursive purchase. On this basis, I argue for a moderately recognitivist constraint on idealization. To render the recognitive discursive minimum available to relevant people at the site of justification, S should set ψ low enough so that it is a genuine option for actual people to reject relevant views in ways that S recognizes as authoritative. (shrink)

Is a human more conscious than an octopus? In the science of consciousness, it’s oftentimes assumed that some creatures (or mental states) are more conscious than others. But in recent years, a number of philosophers have argued that the notion of degrees of consciousness is conceptually confused. This paper (1) argues that the most prominent objections to degrees of consciousness are unsustainable, (2) examines the semantics of ‘more conscious than’ expressions, (3) develops an analysis of what it is (...) for a degreed property to count as degrees of consciousness, and (4) applies the analysis to various theories of consciousness. I argue that whether consciousness comes in degrees ultimately depends on which theory of consciousness turns out to be correct. But I also argue that most theories of consciousness entail that consciousness comes in degrees. (shrink)

Policies are often justified to the public with reference to factual claims that most people cannot easily verify or scrutinise because they lack relevant knowledge or expertise. This poses a challenge for theories of public justification which require that laws are justified using reasons that all can accept. Further difficulties arise in cases such as the response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic where the factual base of knowledge used to justify policies is limited, subject to a high degree of (...) disagreement amongst experts, and marked by rapid changes. This paper reviews some strategies that public justification theorists might draw on to address the question of how to justify policies that depend on this kind of expert knowledge. Whilst such strategies cohere with existing theories of public justification, they do not yield intuitively attractive recommendations. Ideally, theories of public justification would provide criteria by which to evaluate expert testimony such that it guides and informs, but does not lead, policy making. However, in cases like the pandemic response, theories of public reason currently tend towards recommendations that are intuitively unattractive: either requiring citizens to defer to ‘experts’ in a fairly uncritical way or being overly permissive of most factual claims. (shrink)

Compared to standard liberal approaches to public reason and justification, the asymmetric convergence model of public justification allows for the public justification of laws and policies based on a convergence of quite different and even publicly inaccessible reasons. The model is asymmetrical in the sense of identifying a broader range of reasons that may function as decisive defeaters of proposed laws and policies. This paper raises several critical questions about the asymmetric convergence model and its central but (...) ambiguous presumption against coercion. By drawing on the theory of structural coercion, a main conclusion of the paper is that the asymmetric convergence model ultimately encounters the very incompleteness problems that its proponents often associate with more familiar consensus models of public justification. The paper also develops an alternative, Rawlsian-inspired account of public justification that includes elements of both convergence and consensus but not asymmetry. The Rawlsian model enables us to understand how democratic decisions may possess a degree of procedural, but still morally significant, liberal legitimacy under conditions of pluralism even when citizens fail to agree fully about either the premises of or conclusions to their political arguments. (shrink)

In Artemovʼs Justification Logic, one can make statements interpreted as “t is evidence for the truth of formula F.” We propose a variant of this logic in which one can say “I have degree r of confidence that t is evidence for the truth of formula F.” After defining both an axiomatic approach and a semantics for this Logic of Uncertain Justifications, we will prove the usual soundness and completeness theorems.

In this paper, I take a critical stance on the emerging field of nanoethics. After an introductory section, “Conceptual Foundations of Nanotechnology” considers the conceptual foundations of nanotechnology, arguing that nanoethics can only be as coherent as nanotechnology itself and then discussing concerns with this latter concept; the conceptual foundations of nanoethics are then explicitly addressed in “Conceptual Foundations of Nanoethics”. “Issues in Nanoethics” considers ethical issues that will be raised through nanotechnology and, in “What’s New?”, it is argued that (...) none of these issues is unique to nanotechnology. In “It’s a Revolution!”, I express skepticism about arguments which hold that, while the issues themselves might not be unique, they nevertheless are instantiated to such a degree that extant moral frameworks will be ill-equipped to handle them. In “What’s Different?”, I draw plausible distinctions between nanoethics and other applied ethics, arguing that these latter might well identify unique moral issues and, as such, distinguish themselves from nanoethics. Finally, in “What Now?”, I explore the conclusions of this result, ultimately arguing that, while nanoethics may fail to identify novel ethical concerns, it is at least the case that nanotechnology is deserving of ethical attention, if not a new associative applied ethic. (shrink)