Easily Justified

Once upon a time, only professional printers could fully justify text. Now, with word processors, we can easily justify our text and give it the look of a professionally printed document. After all, why would you want your text to look like typewriter text?

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So the justified text in the books we read might look great, but we all know justified text in a Word document often has unsightly gaps and spaces. So if you like justified text—the neat vertical margins—go ahead and justify. This function breaks words at the right margin as some of us used to do on a typewriter—remember? Turning on hyphenation gives Word another tool to help the text fit the line length, and it reduces gaps and spaces.

You should probably choose automatic hyphenation, not manual, and look through the other hyphenation options. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! What origins we bring to you and your kin. A word with surprisingly literal origins.

Do you feel lucky? How we chose 'justice'. And is one way more correct than the others? How to use a word that literally drives some people nuts. The awkward case of 'his or her'. Identify the word pairs with a common ancestor. Test your knowledge - and maybe learn something along the way. Synonyms for justify Synonyms excuse Visit the Thesaurus for More. Choose the Right Synonym for justify maintain , assert , defend , vindicate , justify mean to uphold as true, right, just, or reasonable.

Examples of justify in a Sentence He tried to justify his behavior by saying that he was being pressured unfairly by his boss. The fact that we are at war does not justify treating innocent people as criminals. Can They Be Saved? First Known Use of justify 14th century, in the meaning defined at transitive sense 1a.

As an example, Plantinga argues that if a person is raised in a religious community where the central religious claims he hears are corroborated by the community and none of those claims is undermined by contrary experience or argument, he is not violating any epistemic duty in believing that, say, God exists. This is a controversial view, not least because it either changes the discussion from justification to rationality or conflates justification and rationality. For another attempt to defend classical foundationalism against objections, see Timothy McGrew Foundationalism has remained competitive in the history of justification largely because of its intuitive advantages over competing views.

The most common argument for foundationalism is the positive argument that it explains how we actually form beliefs on the basis of evidence. I believe the sky is blue because I see that it is blue, not because I infer it from other beliefs about the sky. In addition to this positive argument, foundationalists offer the negative argument that no alternative account—skepticism, coherentism, or infinitism—has the resources to satisfactorily resolve the DIJ, that is, to avoid both skepticism and an infinite regress see BonJour and Sosa This is, perhaps, the more powerful of the arguments and merits some attention.

A Really Good Yarn: Easily Justified

Skepticism motivated epistemologists to inquire into justification in the first place, so the skeptical option is generally considered a loss. Quine calls it—that belief is justified. However, there is reason to believe that, since all beliefs stand in mutually supportive relationships, at least some beliefs perhaps all will play an indispensable role in their own support, rendering any coherentist argument viciously circular.

Since circular arguments are fallacious, if coherentism entails that justification is circular, coherentism cannot resolve the DIJ. Skepticism is avoided because every belief is justified by some other belief. Unfortunately, infinitism requires that we accept one of two questionable assumptions: The problem with the former assumption is that it seems to depend on faith that there is an infinite series of justifiers, which is not obviously better than having no justification at all.

And the problem with the latter is that it comes dangerously close to foundationalism, where the algorithm functions as a basic belief. If the infinitist cannot refute these objections, it cannot resolve the DIJ. These are simple concerns about coherentism and infinitism, and we consider more sophisticated objections in sections 3 and 4. But, if neither coherentism nor infinitism can provide an alternative means of resolving the original dilemma, foundationalism may be the most promising alternative to skepticism.

Unfortunately for foundationalists, even if they are right that some account of basic belief would adequately resolve the dilemma of inferential justification, it is not clear that such an account is currently available. Further, there are at least two other serious objections to foundationalism. First, there is some concern that foundationalism cannot be justified by its own account of justification, that is, foundationalism is self-defeating. Alvin Plantinga b offers a version of this objection. According to foundationalists, a belief is justified if and only if it is either basic or inferred from other justified beliefs.

This criterion, though, is not itself basic on any classical conception of basic beliefs indubitability, self-evidence, evident to the senses, or incorrigibility , and it is not clear how it could be supported by other justified beliefs. One straightforward response to this objection is that the arguments above the positive argument and the negative argument by elimination , do provide, contra Plantinga, inferential support for foundationalism. In fact, Plantinga ; expands his own notion of proper basicality precisely to avoid the self-defeat objection.

Further, if sophisticated reasoning strategies like induction could be justified on foundationalist grounds, then foundationalism itself may be justified on such grounds. For example, Laurence BonJour defends rational insight as a basic source of evidence and then argues that induction is justified by rational insight. If foundationalism is roughly correct and there are arguments grounded in rational insight that justify foundationalism, foundationalism might be vindicated. Of course, there remain concerns about the circularity of such arguments.

Other philosophers use an inference to the best explanation to defend a type of basic evidence, though these views may rightly be regarded as hybrids of foundationalism and coherentism. A second objection to foundationalism is the meta-justification argument. The idea is that basic beliefs cannot resolve the DIJ because, even if their justification does not depend on other beliefs, it does depend on reasons which themselves require reasons. If I believe a proposition because it is indubitable, then I must have some reason for thinking that indubitable beliefs are likely to be true.

To demonstrate this problem, Peter Klein asks us to imagine an argument between Fred and Doris, where Fred has come to what he regards as the basic belief on which his argument depends; call it b. According to Fred, b has autonomous justification, that is, is a type of basic belief. Doris happens to agree that b is autonomously justified but asks whether beliefs with autonomous warrant are likely to be true. As a foundationalist, the most plausible option for Fred is the following: If Fred is right, however, b only works as a justification for the rest of his argument precisely because he has added something to b.

What has he added? If this is right, basic beliefs do not stop the regress of reasons see also Smithies One response to this criticism comes from Laurence BonJour, who argues that it is plausible to think that understanding b includes a sort of built-in awareness of the content of those additional premises Klein mentions, such that understanding b constitutes, in and of itself, a reason to hold b BonJour and Sosa If it is possible to have an evidential state that includes, non-inferentially, all the content necessary for having a reason to believe a proposition is true, foundationalists may be able to describe a basic belief that stops the regress and avoids skepticism.

But explaining just what this state is remains a point of controversy. Another response is to construct an inference to the best explanation, as mentioned above in response to the self-defeat objection Elgin, ; Conee and Feldman, The result, again, is typically a hybrid view, which may be equivalent to giving up foundationalism. This raises questions about the merits of coherentism, to which we now turn.

Like foundationalists, coherentists attempt to avoid skepticism while rejecting infinitism. But they find a further problem with foundationalism. Every sensory state seeing red, smelling cinnamon, and so forth must be understood in a mental context, that is, one must have a set of background experiences, beliefs, and vocabulary sufficiently large for forming and understanding beliefs. This means that individual beliefs are not isolated bits of information that act as bricks in a building; they are nodes of information that depend for their meaning and support on a web of relationships with other beliefs.

Many coherentists accept the inferential assumption and argue that the result is not an infinite regress of inferences, but a non-linear system of support from which justification emerges as a property of the combination of inferences. Other coherentists reject the inferential assumption and argue that the result is a non-linear system of support from which justification emerges as a property of the set as a whole. The belief is not justified independently of relations to other beliefs. Regardless of whether coherentists accept the inferential assumption, they can allow that some beliefs are non-inferentially generated—for example, by experiences, intuitions, hunches, and so forth.

Construed in this way, coherentism is specifically a view about justification and should not be confused with coherentism about a truth. Some philosophers have held both coherentism about truth and justification Blanshard and Lewis , but many who hold coherentism about justification reject coherentism about truth see BonJour , ch. For instance, my belief that the cat is on the mat involves a complicated set of beliefs: I am seeing a cat, I am seeing a mat, I am seeing a cat on a mat, a cat is a particular kind of mammal, a mat is a particular type of floor covering, my vision is generally reliable under normal circumstances, these are normal circumstances, and so forth.

It is difficult to imagine arranging these in a linear, foundationalist fashion. In addition, it is not clear whether some of these beliefs are more basic than some others. Nevertheless, they all cohere, which means they are logically consistent with one another and with other beliefs in my belief set, and they mutually support one another.

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Whereas foundationalists employ the metaphor of a building or a pyramid, in some cases to explain justificational relationships, coherentists employ the metaphor of a web or, in some cases, a raft , according to which, each node or plank works alongside the others in a non-linear fashion to constitute a stable, interconnected whole see Figure 2, as well as Neurath , Quine , and Sosa There are four candidates for how the web or raft holds together: The first candidate, logical consistency, is generally regarded as necessary for coherence but too weak to stand on its own.

For example, the belief that P and the belief that probably not-P are logically consistent. But they are not coherent; if one of them is true, the other is not likely to be true BonJour , ch. Therefore, some early coherentists added that the relationship must also include logical entailment. Most coherentists now reject this relationship as overly strict, primarily because it seems possible to have two very different beliefs, neither of which entails the other and yet which are both justified. Because of the problems with mere consistency and consistency plus entailment, most coherentists allow that entailment is sufficient for coherence but not necessary.

To capture weaker relationships, they expand the notion to include inductive probability. Inductive probability coherentism is the view that a belief is justified just in case it is a member of a set each of whose members is entailed by or made more probable by a subset of the rest.

Not So Easily Justified

With their emphasis on inferential relations among beliefs, entailment and inductive probability coherentism attempt to resolve the DIJ by capturing the intuitive plausibility of the inferential assumption while avoiding the difficulties with basic beliefs. Unfortunately, inductive probability coherentism faces problems similar to those that face entailment coherentism. It seems plausible for a person to hold two justified beliefs without the antecedent probability of either increasing the epistemic probability of the other, even when conjoined with other beliefs in the set. Kennedy was shot in Imagine a set of beliefs, any 99 of which render the th member more probable than its antecedent probability.

This set passes the inductive probability test and is, therefore, coherent on this account, but it includes very few beliefs. This suggests that, in order to maintain coherence, we could arbitrarily expand or contract our set of beliefs at will to avoid loss of rationality. The only guideline is that we preserve strong inductive inferences. Unfortunately, such arbitrary sets ignore important differences in the sources of beliefs; we can imagine two inductively coherent sets, one that includes sensory beliefs and one that does not.

Inductive probability coherentism, without further qualification, implies that neither set is more rational than the other. A third prominent account of coherence aimed at avoiding this criticism allows that entailment and inductive probability can contribute to coherence but only insofar as they function in a plausible explanation of the set of beliefs. According to this view, known as explanatory coherentism , beliefs are justified just in case they explain or are explained by the other beliefs of the same type Harman and Poston This view is not committed to the inferential assumption and argues that justification is an emergent property of the explanatory relations among beliefs.

Explanatory coherentism takes its motivation from responses to a problem in philosophy of science that was similar to the problem that faces inductive probability coherentism Neurath and Hempel Not every proposition in a scientific theory is derived inferentially from others, and so there is some question as to whether such propositions could be believed justifiably. It turns out, though, that those propositions play an important explanatory role in the theory that organizes evidence and concepts in plausible ways, even if those propositions have no antecedent probability outside of the system.

This suggests that explanations can play a justifying role independently of inferential relations, thus lending plausibility to coherentism. Explanatory coherence avoids criticisms of earlier accounts in that it 1 maintains that consistency is an important constraint on a belief set, and 2 maintains that inferential relations contribute to explanatory power, while 3 also accounting for the intuitive connection of certain beliefs with sensory evidence and non-inferential coherence relations.

Nevertheless, some criticisms have led philosophers like BonJour , Lehrer ; , and Poston to add other interesting and influential conditions to coherence theories, though space prevents us from exploring them here. There are three prominent objections to coherentism. Since coherentism depends on mutual support relations, every particular belief will likely play an essential role in its own justification, rendering coherentist justification a form of circular argument see Figure 3.

The problem with circular justification is that it putatively undermines the goal of justification, which is to garner support for claim. In response, some coherentists argue that the circularity objection oversimplifies the view. While it is true that a belief will almost certainly play a role in its own justification, this is only problematic if we assume the justificational relationship is linear.

Properly understood, justification is a property that emerges from non-linear relationships among beliefs, whether inferential or non-inferential. For example, Catharine Z. Elgin tells a story about Meg adapted from a story by Lewis , whose logic textbook was stolen. There were three witnesses to the theft, but all are unreliable witnesses one is aloof, one has severe vision problems, and one is a known liar.

Nevertheless, all three witnesses agree that the thief had spiked green hair.

Despite the fact that no one of the witnesses is reliable, their independent testimony to a single, unique proposition increases the likelihood that the proposition is true. A second objection to coherentism is called the isolation objection. Even if a collection of beliefs could explain, and thereby justify, its members, it is not obvious how this set of beliefs is connected with reality, that is, with the content the beliefs are about.

In rejecting basic beliefs, coherentists reject privileging any particular cognitive state in the belief system, such as sensory experiences. All beliefs are treated equally and are evaluated according to whether they cohere with the belief set. But beliefs can cohere with one another regardless of whether their content expresses true propositions about reality. Coherence cannot guarantee that the set is not isolated from reality.

Some coherentists respond to this objection by making special provisions for beliefs that derive from coherence-increasing sources, such as sense experience. Others appeal to more abstract distinctions among types of justification. For example, Keith Lehrer distinguishes personal justification, which involves the traditional, internalist coherence requirement, from verific justification, which is an externalist requirement on coherence.

Another coherentist response to the isolation objection is to allow experience itself, not just beliefs about experience, to figure in the evaluation of coherence. Elgin argues that we have good reasons to privilege some perceptual experiences over very coherent sets of beliefs. She argues that this is because perception does not—contra foundationalists—work in isolation from other sorts of evidence. For a reply along these lines that maintains a more traditional version of coherentism, see Kvanvig and Riggs A third objection is called the plurality objection.

To show just how pernicious this problem is, Lehrer asks us to imagine one set of beliefs comprised of both necessary and contingent beliefs and then to imagine a second set created by negating all the contingent beliefs in the first set While we can arbitrarily construct probabilistically and explanatorily coherent sets, there is a non-trivial sense in which non-belief states explain our beliefs: A theory of explanation that includes the antecedent probabilities of the beliefs based on this evidence would be more coherent with our total evidence than an arbitrary set of beliefs that ignores them.

For more on coherentism, see Coherentism in Epistemology. Infinitism is an internalist view that proposes to resolve the dilemma of inferential justification by showing that Horn B of the DIJ, properly construed, is an acceptable option. In fact, argue infinitists, there are no serious problems with an infinite chain of justifying beliefs.

Inferential justification is said to transmit justification, not create it; therefore, an infinite chain of justifying beliefs would have no source of support to transmit. Similarly, since one could not hold an infinite number of beliefs or mentally trace an infinitely long chain of beliefs, infinitism betrays a common internalist intuition that a person must be aware of good reasons for holding a belief.

Infinitists claim these criticisms are misguided. In practice, justification is not as tidy as epistemologists would have us believe. The traditional idea that the regress must stop or bottom out in basic beliefs is unrealistic and unnecessary. Few of us attempt to draw inferences long enough to arrive at basic beliefs. We often stop looking for reasons when we are content that we have fulfilled our epistemic responsibility, not because the chain has actually ended Aikin Foundationalists and coherentists, then, are relatively unconcerned with ultimate justification in their own epistemic behavior and, therefore, to hold epistemic justification to such high standards renders very few of our beliefs justified.

To accommodate this messiness, infinitists might reject the inferential assumption, at least as classically understood. Like coherentists, infinitists may hold that justification is an emergent property of a set of beliefs and that justification comes in degrees such that, the longer the inferential chain, the stronger the degree of justification Klein There are two main lines of argument for infinitism.

The first is that foundationalism and coherentism cannot stop the structure of justification from regressing infinitely. For example, Peter Klein constructs a version of the meta-justification argument against foundationalism and argues that the most plausible version of coherentism emergent justification accounts , because of its appeal to a basic assumption about the reliability of coherent sets, is merely a disguised form of foundationalism. If these arguments hit their mark, and if externalism is ruled out, infinitism may be the only non-skeptical option available.

The second main line of argument for infinitism is that the classic objections to infinitism are aimed at overly simplistic versions of the view; they do not threaten suitably qualified versions. For example, Scott Aikin argues that concerns about the regress arise because of a conflict between two types of intuition: Aikin claims that infinitists take the demands of proceduralism more seriously than egalitarian intuitions, maintaining that justification and knowledge are very difficult to attain.

The more committed we are to following our chains of evidence, the more likely we are to attain our epistemic goals. However, we often stop far from what even foundationalists would take to be the end of those chains. And at every proposed stopping point, there is an infinite number of justificational questions about the appropriateness of the terms we are using, the reliability of our perceptions and concept attributions, and so forth.

If this is right, infinitism may be the most plausible implication of our epistemic intuitions. If this is right, then the process of inferring can create or produce original epistemic support, and we need not appeal to anything like basic beliefs for ultimate support. But we can also admit that those axioms can be challenged, and our reasoning could continue indefinitely. Infinitists simply argue that this is a standard feature of all justification.

Carl Ginet argues that even qualified infinitism is motivated on spurious grounds. One argument against foundationalism is that, even for basic beliefs, one needs a reason to believe they are true, and this initiates an infinite regress of reasons. Ginet objects, however, that this argument threatens foundationalism only if all reasons are inferential reasons. Of course, this is precisely what foundationalists reject.

If some non-belief reasons are justified independently of any additional reasons for thinking they are true, that is, if they are inherently reasonable, the infinitist argument against foundationalism is question-begging. In response, the infinitist might contend that, even if its critique of foundationalism is flawed, infinitism may yet be the more plausible alternative.

Are you justified?

If infinitism captures our intuitions about justification as adequately as foundationalism, and if it requires fewer controversial concepts basic beliefs , infinitism may be an attractive competitor. Another objection to infinitism is that, given our finite minds, we lack complete access to the infinite set of justifying beliefs. If a person has no access to his reason for belief, then infinitism is no longer internalist and, thereby, loses its means of defusing the DIJ.

As Ginet puts it: If this is right, a person may have a disposition to recognize further evidence for his justifying beliefs when prompted to do so. Nevertheless, even this mentalist-enhanced infinitism faces the concern that the process of justification is never complete. An assumption behind the DIJ is that, if for any belief, there is not a reason to believe it is true, that belief and any beliefs inferred from it are unjustified. If this is right, and the justification condition for infinitism is never actually met, then we are left with skepticism. A variation on this criticism is the idea that inferential justification can only transmit justification and cannot originate it.

Given this set of propositions, is S justified for us?

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That depends on whether P is justified. We still need to know whether N is justified Dancy If this is right, then no matter how long the chain of inference is—even if it is infinite—no belief is justified. This amounts to a rejection of the claim that inferential justification can only transmit justification and, therefore, that a justificational chain must be complete in order to be adequate recall Catherine Z. A worry for this response is similar to a worry for coherentism. Any criterion that implies the infinite set of beliefs is justified is either part of the set or independent of it, in which case, it, too, needs a justification.

If some sort of justification-conferring awareness is built into the increasingly large set, infinitism seems like foundationalism in disguise. A further worry is that, if infinitists do not require that a person actually have an infinite number of justifying beliefs or perform an infinite number of inferences, then infinitism seems committed to the idea that inference itself can create justification.

This, however, seems implausible. If inference cannot produce justification, it is unclear how a belief in an infinite chain of inferences comes to be justified. For a more detailed treatment of infinitism, see Infinitism in Epistemology. This view does not entail that all epistemic concepts are internal.

John Greco gives an example to demonstrate the difference: Subjectively, though, he is following his evidence to their rational conclusion. Since the reliability of his sources is beyond his ability to evaluate, the internalist says he has fulfilled his epistemic duty: For centuries, there was no serious alternative to internalism. This move to externalism also led to closer scrutiny of internalism, and new concerns about its adequacy arose.

I review just two of these here. But before doing so, it is helpful to distinguish two types of internalism: To have reflective access is to be directly mentally aware of reasons for holding a belief.

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Others hold the looser requirement that, as long as a person has had direct access to relevant justifying reason, she is justified in holding the supported belief. According to mentalists, reflective access may be sufficient for justification, but it is not necessary. All that is necessary for a belief to be justified is that a person has mental states that justify the belief, regardless of whether a person has reflective access to those states.

Mentalists allow that some non-reflectively accessible mental states can justify beliefs. Mentalism is supposed to have several advantages over accessibilism given the standard criticisms of internalism. For example, some have objected to internalism on the grounds that it cannot accommodate intuitive cases of stored or forgotten evidence. If, for example, you are driving and not thinking about whether Washington, D. If not, could we say that you know it is the capital? Accessibilists claim that a person must be able to access her evidence for a belief while she is currently thinking about it and presumably without prompting.

Few of us, though, hold or even could hold a belief with all its attendant reasons in mind at once. Similarly, it seems reasonable to imagine that a person is justified in believing a proposition for which she has forgotten her evidence. Mentalists can handle these cases by claiming that the ability to access stored facts can constitute dispositional justification, and that even in cases of forgotten evidence, it could still be the case that the fact that it is justified is consciously available, either occurrently or dispositionally Conee and Feldman The worry for mentalism is that, in allowing non-occurrent mental states to count as reasons, mentalism betrays its claim to be internalist.

For example, there may be a lot of evidence I could have that P is true if I were in the right place at the right time. But the existence of that evidence does not obviously justify P for me since being in such a place might be a matter of luck. Specifying just what it means for evidence to be available but not occurrent turns out to be quite difficult. Richard Feldman argues that in neither of these examples am I justified in believing that Washington is the capital and that a mental state counts as evidence if and only if one is currently thinking of P.

Despite these difficulties, the distinction between accessibilism and mentalism plays an important role in the debate over internalism. Here, I review only three. One of these lines is called the access problem. Traditional foundationalists have accepted some version of accessibilism. But what if the belief P that justifies my current belief Q is tucked far back in the recesses of my memory and would require more time than I currently have to access it? Am I still justified in believing Q? Or worse, imagine that I have forgotten P; there is no possibility that I can directly access it.

However, Q seems true to me, I remember that I had good reasons for believing it, and I do not have any reasons to doubt Q now. Am I justified in believing Q in this case? Without some modification, the internalist must say no in both cases—the relevant evidence is neither immediately nor reflectively available—though intuitively these are normal cases of justified belief. The standard response is two-fold. First, we must admit that justification comes in degrees: And second, the state of seeming to be justified or remembering that I am justified can, themselves, constitute reasons for belief.

Therefore, in these cases, the internalist might respond that, while the justifications are not as strong as we would prefer, they are, nonetheless, based on accessible mental states. A second, related objection to internalism is what, following John Greco, I will call the etiology problem. Internalism tends to make justification so easy that it is unclear how one is able to distinguish between good and bad reasons. Consider an example from Greco Charlie is a wishful thinker and believes that he is about to arrive at his destination on time.

He has good reasons for believing this, including his memory of train schedules, maps, the correct time at departure and at various stops, etc. However, none of these things is behind his belief—he does not believe what he does because he has these reasons. Rather, it is his wishful thinking that causes his belief. Accordingly, he would believe that he is about arrive on time even if he were not.