What does it take to “have” a reason?

Abstract

The truism that adopting an unjustified belief does not put one in a better evidential position with respect to believing its consequences leads most philosophers to conclude that bare belief is insufficient for the having relation involved in subjective evidence. This chapter presents alternative explanation of PP, the truism that when a belief lacks propositional justification, it does not contribute to the propositional justification for its consequences. The assumption of a high bar on what it takes to have evidence, despite its overwhelming initial plausibility, has been complicating the dialectic about basic perceptual epistemology, and consequently the dialectic about foundationalism and coherentism, internalism and externalism, and rationalism and empiricism, for a very long time. Beliefs can be justified or unjustified because they fall under the reach of rational criticism, and they fall under the reach of rational criticism because they are states that we hold for reasons.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 134 citations exist upstream.