Abstract

Those accustomed to the thoroughness, exactitude, and incisiveness of Alston’s epistemological forays will not be disappointed by this work. Once more, Alston takes a keen-edged scalpel to various central issues such as externalism versus internalism, reliabilism, foundationalism, coherence, truth-conduciveness, epistemic virtue, skepticism, contextualism, and epistemic probability. However, his central thesis is that researchers should replace the notion of “justified belief” with a series of positive distinctively epistemic features of beliefs, called “epistemic desiderata” or “EDs.” He maintains that philosophers have been bamboozled by focusing on the question of when a belief is justified. The field is much more crowded. Although not every petitioner warrants entrance, a number of candidate EDs deserve consideration.