Abstract

Philosophers commonly speak of a person’s being justified in believing a proposition by one or more reasons he or she has for it. This phenomenon, often called inferential or indirect justification, seems so pervasive that some are tempted to count all epistemic justification as such, though even dessenters from this view can acknowledge that justification through reasons is central to wide domains of cognitive appraisal, e.g., in science and in law. A basic task for the epistemologist is to explain how an indirectly justified belief is related to the evidential belief by which it is justified. Here, I will address one aspect of this issue, namely, if S is indirectly justified in believing p by his belief that q must S also be justified in believing that q is a reason for p, or, in other words, that q confirms or supports p? An affirmative response imposes what can be called a requirement of a justified connecting belief or, as I shall speak, of a warranted connecting proposition upon indirect justification. Opinion is divided as to its necessity, with many reliabilists anxious to avoid it altogether. I propose to remove certain obstacles to its acceptance, even within a reliability framework, while attempting a more precise determination of what the requirement comes to.