One of the central debates in 20th Century epistemology concerns the concept of justification. This article gives a brief overview over some major theories in the field.
Introduction
We all have opinions, but some of us also look for a good justification as to why our opinions should be accepted as true. They think that it is unsatisfactory to just exchange points of view without further inquiry into which ones should be adopted and why. Just wherein a good justification consists, however, has been subject to century-long philosophical debate. The present article attempts a brief overview over various internalist theories of justification. What they all have in common -- and this is why they are called "internalist" -- is that they regard beliefs as justified solely on the basis of other beliefs, so that (since beliefs are within the minds of people) a chain of justification will always remain internal to the realm of the human mind.
The Major Problem of Internalism
Due to this assumption that only beliefs can justify beliefs, internalism faces a major problem: If every belief requires another (possibly conjunctive) belief in order to be justified, then this yields either an infinite chain of reasons or a circle in which the belief to be justified serves at the same time as a justifying belief at an earlier stage of the reasoning process. Both alternatives, however, appear to be short of providing genuine justification: The first, because it seems impossible for one individual to follow up an infinite chain of beliefs in order to be aware of the basis of her justification, and the second, because it appears just as intrinsically averse to cogent reasoning as a question-begging argument (an argument that assumes or presupposes its conclusion in one of its premises).
Foundationalism, Infinitism, and Coherentism
There are three traditional attempts to solve this problem within an internalist framework. Foundationalists characteristically hold that there must be some basic beliefs that are justified in some other way than by other beliefs in order for justification to be possible at all. (In order to remain internalists, they must assume or argue that those foundational beliefs justify themselves, or at least that whatever else justifies them is still within the realm of the human mind.) Infinitists share with foundationalists an aversion to circular reasoning but, in contrast to the latter, do not find fault with the idea of an infinite regress of reasoning and endorse the view that justification is always only provisional. Finally, a crude version of coherentism regards circular reasoning as legitimate, provided that the circles are wide enough.
Holistic Accounts of Justification
What those traditional positions have in common is not only internalism but also the view that justification is a linear process involving a one-dimensional sequence of beliefs along which justification is passed on from the earlier to the later beliefs .
In opposition to this, more sophisticated proponents of coherentism – like Laurence BonJour and Jonathan Dancy – have rejected the linear picture of justification and adopted a holistic one instead. The main idea of a holistic picture of justification is that, in BonJour’s words, “beliefs are justified by being inferentially related to other beliefs in the overall context of a coherent system” . Thus, given a belief set containing the members P, Q R, and S, we do not infer P from Q, Q from R, R from S, and then again S from P; rather, each single belief is inferred from the conjunction of the rest. In this way, it seems, a linear -- and arguably vicious -- circle of justification can be avoided without our having to adopt either foundationalism or some kind of infinite regress of justification. Thus, the coherentist claims that both the regress argument and the traditional attempts to solve it are all wrong in working with a linear, non-holistic concept of justification itself.
Sources:
Bonjour, Laurence, The Structure of Empirical Knowledge, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Dancy, Jonathan, “Coherence Theories” in Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology, Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1986.
