Abstract

I begin by drawing the distinction between normative and descriptive epistemology. Certain portions of recent work in cognitive science are then brought forward, and it is argued that if work in cognitive science is taken into consideration in the development of an epistemology, the resulting epistemology would be more descriptive than normative. I claim that within normative epistemology there are currently two major sorts of theories of epistemic justification, namely foundationalism and coherentism. I then argue that a third sort of theory of justification--contextualist--might be developed with a reliance on work in cognitive science as well as previous work in philosophy, and I contend that this sort of "theory of justification" would be more descriptive than normative. ;As the work proceeds I examine the extant normative theories of justification, antecedent to the development of my own descriptively oriented contextualized theory. The extant theories are examined both qua normative theory and from the standpoint of our intuitions about the enterprise of epistemic justification. From such examination I conclude that they are lacking on both counts; the way is then paved for a theory which is more successful from the latter standpoint. I then draw on material from cognitive science and certain lines of argument in philosophy of language; I adduce a contextualized descriptive theory of epistemic justification and defend it. It is understood that since the theory is not normative it is not intended to fulfill normativist sorts of tasks, e.g., responding to the problems posed by Gettier examples. The theory relies on the notion of an epistemic interchange and determination of justificatory sets by verbal output and response to verbal output for most of its thrust