Epistemic Justification by Richard Swinburne
(
David Mackie
'Justified' is
one of a number of closely related terms in epistemology, including
'reasonable', 'rational', and 'warranted'. Epistemologists' concern is with
what it takes for a person's belief to be justified. Of course, beliefs are
also evaluated for their truth or falsity, and justification is not wholly
unrelated to that area of evaluation: we want our beliefs to be true, and
typically (at least) the value of epistemic justification is that a belief's
being justified makes it more likely to be true. Still, a belief's being true
is not the same thing as its being justified: for a person may justifiably
believe what is false, and a person may believe what is true but without
justification.
In the standard
debate, two main distinctions are usually made. First, there is the distinction
between foundationalists and coherentists:
foundationalists hold that epistemic justification
has a tiered structure, with some beliefs being 'basic'—that is, standing in no
need of support from other beliefs—while other beliefs are justified in virtue
of being supported by more basic beliefs. Coherentists,
by contrast, deny that any beliefs are basic, and say that beliefs are justified
insofar as they form a system of mutually-supporting beliefs. Secondly, there
is a distinction between internalists, who hold that
what makes for justification is something internal to the believer, and
accessible to him by introspection, and externalists, who maintain that what
makes for justification are states of affairs that need not be mentally
accessible to the believer (typically, this view is that a belief's being
justified is a matter of its being produced by a process of the right kind).
Swinburne's book is intended
mainly as a guide to the various different accounts of epistemic justification
that are current in the literature. The book falls naturally into two parts. In
chapters 1 to 5, Swinburne leads the reader through
the relevant notions that appear in different accounts of epistemic
justification. Belief is discussed in chapter 2. Next, since justification of
belief is often elucidated in terms of the belief's being probable, chapter 3
offers a detailed account of distinctions between different senses of
'probability', which leads to the conclusion that externalist accounts of the
adequacy of grounds for belief will need to be spelled out in terms of
'physical' or 'statistical' probability (and more plausibly only the latter),
whereas internalist accounts will need to be spelled
out in terms of some form of 'inductive' probability. Chapter 4 then
concentrates on one form of inductive probability, which Swinburne
calls 'logical probability'. This terms denotes the measure of inductive support
that would be reached by a logically omniscient being (one who knew all the
relevant logical probabilities, what they entailed, and had correct inductive
criteria). Chapter 5 discusses the foundationalist's
notion of a basic belief, and more generally the notion of one belief's being
based on another. The remaining three chapters build on this material,
discussing the value of justification (chapters 6 and 7) and knowledge (chapter
8), which is of course linked to the main subject-matter in that knowledge is
supposed to be something of the same kind as, but somehow superior to,
justified belief.
The main
conclusion of the book is that what often purport to be rival theories of
epistemic justification are not in fact genuine rivals, at most one of which
could be correct, for the title 'the correct account of epistemic
justification'. As Swinburne claims, there is no
single concept at work here; rather, there is a range of more or less closely
related concepts of 'justification', and the different accounts that
philosophers have offered are really no more than accounts of various different
kinds of justification. That conclusion, even if it is not particularly
striking or surprising, is admirably supported by the wealth of detailed and
carefully presented distinctions that are provided, especially in the first
five chapters. Here there is a huge amount of carefully yet economically
presented detail, elucidating the interplay between the mains types of theory
of justification and the different understandings of the central concepts of
probability, evidence, and 'basing'.
But Swinburne also goes further, notably in two additional
areas of discussion. For he goes on, in chapters 6 and 7, to
give an account of the value of particular kinds of justification. The
discussion here includes two important distinctions—the distinction between
synchronic justification (justification that a belief has at a time) and
diachronic justification (justification resulting from a belief's being based
on adequate investigation over a period of time), and (within synchronic
justification) between subjective and objective justification. In chapter 8,
which is in some ways the most accessible and the most likely to be of
immediate use to undergraduates following a typical course in epistemology, Swinburne offers a discussion of knowledge in which, as
well as critically analysing certain aspects of various contemporary accounts
of knowledge, he explains with considerable plausibility how it is that the
different accounts of knowledge largely coincide to a greater degree than do
the different accounts of justification.
In its intended
role as a guide through the main theories of justification, Swinburne's
book serves superbly well. I was left with a greatly improved understanding of
the complex interplay between different theories and their correspondingly
different understandings of the relevant underlying concepts. Swinburne's hope that the main text will be comprehensible
by the average undergraduate, however, may be a little optimistic. Although it
is true that Swinburne has consigned a lot of the
finer and more technical points to an Appendix and a series of Additional
Notes, quite a lot of fairly difficult material remains in the main text (and
the probability that most of the students I have taught would simply despair
when confronted with the formula on p. 161, for example, must be, if not
actually 1, quite close to it).
In this context,
it is a slight pity that Swinburne's generally very
clear exposition is sometimes marred by the kind of infelicities that a firmer
editorial hand might have eliminated. In addition to a number of trivial
typographical errors, there is the odd howler ("But if you take a bit
wider region…" (p. 202)), and the following incomprehensible sentence on
p. 140, which delayed me for several minutes: "Now, it is plausible to
suppose that the very fact of my believing that some proposition being forced
upon me by my experience or by the deliverance of reason is as such reason for
me to believe it to be true." My most general minor irritation arose from Swinburne's strangely uncertain handling of gerunds (of
which there are many in the book), which veers back and forth between treating
them as if they were really participles and as nouns (and the usage is, on more
than one occasion, inconsistent even within a single sentence (e.g. on pp. 76
& 204)). But these are minor quibbles which do not seriously affect the
reader's understanding of what is overall an exceptionally useful, thorough,
and interesting guide to the subject.