Why Pluralism About Epistemic Justification is the Worst of Both Worlds

Epistemologists often debate whether we ought to be internalists or externalists about epistemic justification. Internalists say that whether an agent's belief is justified depends on facts internally accessible to the agent, and externalists deny this. But what if internalists and externalists could both be right? This would be a pluralist view of epistemic justification. You might think that a pluralist view would be plausible because it would allow us to explain why we have different intuitions in different cases, and it would allow us to use different concepts for different purposes. In this paper, I argue the pluralist view has several serious flaws that make it much less plausible than it might initially seem. I show that pluralists run into even worse problems than monists when trying to vindicate intuitions about cases. They also run into problems when trying to specify a singular concept of epistemic justification to use for a certain purpose. It is therefore unclear what reason we would have to adopt a pluralist stance. I conclude that we ought to be monists about epistemic justification.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Philosophy

Department dc:contributor.department

Philosophy

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Hirshland, Samantha Jane

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Hoek, Daniel

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Parker, Wendy
• MacKenzie, Jordan

• Epistemology
• Justification
• Pluralism

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:34563

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/111188