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Justification is potentialknowledgeJonathan Jenkins Ichikawaa

a Philosophy Department, University of BritishColumbia, Vancouver, CanadaPublished online: 06 Jun 2014.

To cite this article: Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa (2014) Justification ispotential knowledge, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 44:2, 184-206, DOI:10.1080/00455091.2014.923240

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00455091.2014.923240

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Justification is potential knowledge

Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa*

Philosophy Department, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

(Received 26 March 2013; accepted 25 April 2014)

This paper will articulate and defend a novel theory of epistemic justification;I characterize my view as the thesis that justification is potential knowledge(JPK). My project is an instance of the ‘knowledge-first’ programme,championed especially by Timothy Williamson. So I begin with a briefrecapitulation of that programme.

Keywords: epistemic justification; knowledge; knowledge first; epistem-ology; internalism

1. Knowledge first

It is relatively uncontroversial that knowledge is a topic of significant

epistemological interest; there is considerably more disagreement about what

kind of role knowledge can and should play in epistemic theorizing. An assumption

of the dominant tradition in twentieth-century analytic epistemology was that we

should aim to understand knowledge by reference to more fundamental epistemic

states, such as true belief and justification. Knowledge, according to this tradition,

is a fundamental explanandum in epistemology. The post-Gettier ‘analysis of

knowledge’ literature provides paradigms of this stance: we seek to explain what

knowledge is, helping ourselves to notions such as belief, justification, evidence and

defeater, but always with the constraint in place that we must not allow knowledge

itself into our analysis, on pain of circularity.

The ‘knowledge-first’ programme reverses this traditional order of

explanation. Knowledge is taken, not as explanandum, but as explanans – we

use our antecedent understanding of knowledge to explain other states of interest.

The most significant explication and defence of the knowledge-first programme

is Williamson’s (2000) Knowledge and Its Limits, which characterizes belief,

evidence and assertion in terms of knowledge; other projects that suggest

significant theoretical roles for knowledge provide support for the knowledge-

first stance as well. Williamson does not extend the knowledge-first programme

to a theory of epistemic justification, although he does argue that knowledge is

relevant for justification, saying that that which justifies – i.e. evidence – is

q 2014 Canadian Journal of Philosophy

*Email: ichikawa@gmail.com

Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2014

Vol. 44, No. 2, 184–206, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00455091.2014.923240

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knowledge. My view, following those of Sutton (2007) and Bird (2007), will be

an application of the knowledge-first approach to justification.

The knowledge-first thesis may be understood either as a claim about

metaphysical priority or about conceptual priority.According to the former,what it is

to be, e.g. belief, is to stand in a certain relation to knowledge; according to the latter,

our understanding of belief, mediated via our concept BELIEF, is provided in

some sense in terms of knowledge.Williamsonmaybe interpreted as defending both

theses; I amprimarily interested in themetaphysical thesis in this paper. Iwill suggest

a metaphysical reduction of justification in terms of knowledge.1 A case might be

made for the corresponding conceptual claims, but I will not attempt that here.

Onefinal caveat, beforemovingon to discussionof justification inmore detail: as

I understand it, the claim that knowledge is ‘first’ should be read as a claim about

relative priority; knowledge is prior to the salient alternate states that one might be

interested in. I shall suggest that knowledge is metaphysically prior to justification.

There is no commitment to the stronger claim that there is nothing prior to

knowledge. As I understand it, the ‘knowledge-first’ stance is consistent with, e.g.

physicalism, according to which atoms are prior to knowledge. Other possible views

are not as obviously categorizable; ‘knowledge first’, like most terms, admits of

vagueness. For example, I have argued elsewhere that Fregean senses are primitive

epistemic properties (Ichikawa and Jarvis 2013, chap. 5); it is open to debate

whether this is consistent with any view deserving the name ‘knowledge first’. This

terminological debate does not interest me here; as I use the term, a proponent of the

knowledge-first programmewill think that knowledgewill appear relatively early as

one builds higher levels of one’s theory of the world; by the level in which

psychological explanations haveemerged, at least, knowledgewill beplayingcentral

roles. My present concern involves the priority of knowledge over justification.

This is, I trust, a view easily recognizable as being in the ‘knowledge-first’ spirit.

2. Justification

As we know, some beliefs are justified, and some are not. If I flip a coin and

believe on the basis of a hunch that it will land heads, my belief is unjustified;

in typical circumstances, when I look outside and see a tree and, taking my

experience at face value, form the belief that there is a tree outside, my belief is

justified. The task of a theory of justification is to posit general principles to

explain which beliefs are justified and which are unjustified.

I am concerned in this paper with doxastic justification, a property of beliefs.

Doxastic justification should be distinguished from propositional justification;

the latter is a matter of whether a subject has sufficient reason to form a particular

belief, whether she does so or not.2 I shall offer a theory of doxastic justification;

I seek a theory that will tell, of a given belief, whether it is justified.3

A brief review of a few canonical approaches to justification, and their

characteristic advantages and shortcomings, will help to identify desiderata for a

theory of justification.

Canadian Journal of Philosophy 185

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On a certain form of classical foundationalism, justified beliefs are those

which ultimately rest on internal states to which a subject has infallible access.

The main problems with this traditional view are that (a) few if any internal states

do seem to be such that one can infallibly recognize their presence or absence,

and (b) few if any of our intuitively justified beliefs about the external world seem

to be sufficiently well supported by any decent candidates for such internal states.

As a theory of justification, classical foundationalism is too stingy; it denies

justificatory status to too many beliefs that are intuitively justified.

A less stingy approach in the neighbourhood of classical foundationalismwould

relax the requirement of infallible access. For example, Fumerton (1995) develops a

form of internalist foundationalism according to which foundationally justified

belief requires, not infallibility, but direct acquaintance with the fact believed. In

many cases of intuitively justified belief, Fumerton suggests that such acquaintance

obtains; for unjustified beliefs, there is no such acquaintance. Acquaintance is

understood not to entail infallibility, so Fumerton’s view is less stingy than the

classical approach; this is an advantage. Nevertheless, many epistemologists,

including myself, find the approach deeply unsatisfying, absent a further theory of

what acquaintance consists in. Fumerton suggests merely that it is a sui generis

relation and offers some examples of its extension; this is not, to my mind,

sufficiently clarifyingof either acquaintanceor justification.A theoryof justification

should be illuminating; it should improve our understanding of justification.4

On a contrasting family of approaches, justification is not wholly a matter

of a subject’s internal states, but can depend on the external features of her

environment; perhaps even features of which she is unaware. For example,

according to a simple form of reliabilism, a belief is justified if and only if it is

produced by a reliable mechanism – a mechanism that tends to produce true

beliefs rather than false ones.5 One of the appealing features of reliabilism is that

it unifies and explains what many of our intuitively justified beliefs have in

common and distinguishes them from many of our intuitively unjustified beliefs.

Moreover, the notion of reliability appealed to, by contrast with Fumerton’s sui

generis ‘acquaintance’, is easily understood. It is also a plausible candidate for a

state that enjoys ontological priority over justification. Furthermore, reliabilism

fares better than does classical foundationalism with respect to stinginess: it is

plausible that many of our belief-forming mechanisms are actually reliable. So on

reliabilism, it is plausible that many of our ordinary beliefs are justified, even if

they are not derived from infallible beliefs.

One problem for reliabilism and other ‘externalist’ views is that they run

afoul of the ‘New Evil Demon’ intuition (see Cohen 1984). If whether a belief

is justified depends even in part on how things are outside the agent, then

two intrinsic duplicates can differ with respect to the justification of their

corresponding beliefs; but this is thought by many to be very counterintuitive. For

example, supposing that my perceptual beliefs are actually reliable, reliabilism

has it that my perceptual beliefs – e.g. my present belief that it is sunny, based on

my perceptual experiences – are justified. But my counterpart, the unfortunate

J.J. Ichikawa186

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victim of an evil demon, made to have misleading experiences of sunniness that

are internally like mine, is not justified in believing that it is sunny. Although

externalists have offered many attempts to soften the blow of denying the New

Evil Demon intuition,6 having to do so remains a cost; a theory of justification

will have a mark in its favour if it can respect this and kindred internalist

intuitions. (Relevant kindred internalist intuitions include, for example, that

anyone who is just guessing, or proceeding according to wishful thinking, no

matter how reliably, fails to have justified beliefs.)

Another challenge to reliabilism and other forms of externalism concerns the

apparent respect in which justified beliefs reflect well on the subject who believes

them; intuitively, justification is in some sense normative. Critics of reliabilism

have charged that reliabilism is inconsistent with the plausible principle that

justification is a credit to the believer (e.g. Zagzebski 1996, 300–303). A theory

of justification should explain – or at least be consistent with – the fact that

justification is a normative status.

Here, then, are four desiderata for a theory of epistemic justification that have

emerged in this section:

1. It should not be too stingy; at least a decent proportion of our ordinary

beliefs should be counted as justified.

2. It should be given in appropriate terms; it should be offered in terms of

notions we understand, and which are plausible candidates for

metaphysical priority over justification.

3. It should be internalist in the sense that justification supervenes on the

internal; it should have it that subjects of radical sceptical scenarios can

have many justified beliefs and that no external factors like reliability are

sufficient for justification.

4. It should explain why justification is a credit to the believer.

A theory that meets all of these criteria would be worthy of serious

consideration – few if any of the views in the extant literature do so. The view

I will develop is, I think, such a view. I do not include on a list of desiderata

that a theory of justification should be given in ‘non-epistemic’ terms. I see no

particular motivation to respect Alvin Goldman’s constraint, articulated thus:

I want a set of substantive conditions that specify when a belief is justified. Comparethe moral term ‘right’ . . . Normative ethics tries to specify non-ethical conditionsthat determine when an action is right. A familiar example is act-utilitarianism . . .[Its] necessary and sufficient conditions clearly involve no ethical notions.Analogously, I want a theory of justified belief to specify in non-epistemic termswhen a belief is justified. (Goldman 1979, 1)

I do not attempt to reduce the epistemic to the non-epistemic; I do not consider it

obvious that it is possible to do so.7 It is consistent with the ‘relative priority’

interpretation of the knowledge-first programme that some sort of reduction

might ultimately be possible – perhaps, for instance, knowledge is ultimately

explicable in physicalist terms – but this is not among my commitments. Nor is

Canadian Journal of Philosophy 187

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it circular to characterize justification in terms of knowledge, once we reject

the traditional programme of attempting to characterize the latter in terms of the

former.8

3. Justification in terms of knowledge

With this background in place, I am now prepared to develop my positive

proposal. The starting point is this: one important dimension of evaluation for

beliefs concerns whether they achieve knowledge. A knowledgeable belief is in

an important sense epistemically good, and an ignorant one is in a similar sense

epistemically bad.

A simple view embracing the knowledge-first approach would stop here: a

belief is epistemically good just in case it is knowledge. As justification just is the

epistemic goodness of a belief, a belief is justified if and only if it is knowledge:

J 5 K S’s belief that p is justified if and only if S knows that p.

This view has been embraced by Sutton (2007). It is an instance of a

knowledge-first approach to justification, and it performs reasonably well with

respect to some of the criteria indicated in the previous section – for example, it

is illuminating in the sense that it characterizes the explanandum in terms of a

notion we understand well, namely knowledge.9 Moreover, given a plausibly

antisceptical approach to knowledge, it is not radically stingy the way the

classical foundationalist approach is. Still, it must be admitted that J ¼ K is a

stingier view than our intuitive verdicts about justification would prefer. As there

are no false knowledgeable beliefs, J ¼ K has it that there are no false justified

beliefs. But it is plausible that there are some justified false beliefs – when we

respond properly to sufficiently misleading evidence, our beliefs are justified, but

mistaken. Furthermore, it is a consequence of J ¼ K that the epistemological

consensus about Gettier cases – namely, that they constitute justified true belief

without knowledge – is incorrect. The equation of justification with knowledge

also flies dramatically in the face of the New Evil Demon intuition.

The problem with J ¼ K is not that it characterizes justification in terms of

knowledge; it is that it collapses a distinction. Our ordinary epistemic judgements

respect a distinction between knowledge and non-knowledge justified belief; to

argue that this is an error would require arguing, not only that some belief norms

do not distinguish between the two, but that none do so. Such a universal claim

carries a significant burden; it would be more prudent to allow that there is a

distinct category of justification – even if we are agnostic with respect to how

theoretically interesting this notion will end up being. Many epistemologists

have thought that justification will play central roles in the normative parts of

epistemology; to accept the knowledge-first programme is to think that

knowledge will play central roles – this does not require legislating in advance

that no distinct notion of justification may also play significant roles.

J.J. Ichikawa188

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An alternative knowledge-first approach to justification does less intuitive

violence to our intuitions about justified beliefs. It is the view I will defend in this

paper, which I call ‘JPK’ for ‘Justification is Potential Knowledge’.

JPK S’s belief is justified iff S has a possible counterpart, alike to S in all relevantintrinsic respects, whose corresponding belief is knowledge.

The notion of S’s ‘counterpart’ at play here is just that of a possible individual

with the relevant intrinsic state. There is no commitment to the idea that the

properties of my counterpart correspond to genuine possibilities for me.10

My approach has the direct implication that justification is an internal matter;

JPK is ‘mentalist’ in the sense of Feldman and Conee (2001). However, it retains

a deep connection to knowledge: according to JPK, a belief is justified if and only

if it is sufficiently similar to knowledge; the respects of similarity at issue are

internal ones. The hedge ‘relevant’ is to rule out demanding that the possible

knowers be alike to the justified believer with respect to features concerning the

content of the belief, but irrelevant to its cognitive realization – for example, JPK

should not require that my relevant counterparts be duplicates of me in all bodily

respects; if it did, JPK would have the implication that I cannot have justified

false beliefs about my body. Suppose, for example, that I have misleading

evidence suggesting that my hand has been chopped off. On the interpretation of

JPK dismissed here, I could not have a justified belief that a hand had been

chopped off, as all of my possible intrinsic duplicates would have two hands, so

none of them would know that a hand has been chopped off. Similarity with

respect to hands is not relevant in the sense of JPK. The intuitive idea is that the

‘relevant intrinsic respects’ pick out all of the relevant features qua believer, but

do not necessarily include the features of the subject qua subject of belief. If, as

philosophical orthodoxy has it, we can make sense of a brain in a vat for whom

things are just as they are for me ‘from the inside’, that brain in a vat shares all

relevant intrinsic features with me. (If, contrary to orthodoxy, we cannot make

sense of such shared properties, then JPK will have the result that, contrary to

orthodoxy, the brain in a vat does not have justified beliefs.) I do not identify the

relevant with the mental – in part, because the problem just described generalizes

(is it impossible to have justified false beliefs about one’s mental states?), and in

part, because as I will discuss later, I leave open the possibility that knowledge is

a mental state. I take it that the notion of ‘relevant intrinsic state’ I am invoking is

intuitive enough that its use is legitimate in this context.11

The idea behind JPK is that a subject’s belief is justified just in case her

intrinsic state is consistent with her having knowledge. It is trivial on JPK that all

cases of knowledge are cases of justified belief. So JPK captures the right-to-left

direction of J ¼ K, and thus meets a weak version of the the ‘not-too-stingy’

desideratum, on the hypothesis that we have a significant amount of knowledge.

But it does not accept the left-to-right direction, which ran so starkly against the

New Evil Demon intuition. Subjects in radical sceptical scenarios are among

those who have justified beliefs that fall short of knowledge. My deceived

Canadian Journal of Philosophy 189

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counterparts with misleading experiences may be intrinsic duplicates of me; if so,

their perceptual beliefs are justified, because mine is knowledge. So JPK meets

the New Evil Demon desideratum. Similarly, JPK delivers the intuitive verdict

that subjects in Gettier cases have justified beliefs – had the external world

cooperated more fully, their internal states would have realized knowledge.

JPK also meets the illumination desideratum, as it does not posit any mysterious

sui generis states or relations. Moreover, the viability of the knowledge-first

programme makes the suggestion that knowledge is metaphysically prior to

justification a plausible one.

The extension JPK offers to justification is reasonably intuitive. As just

indicated, many ordinary perceptual beliefs, including some that fall short of

knowledge, are justified. But JPK also places plausible constraints on justification:

intuitively unjustified beliefs are typically such that the subject’s internal state

precludes knowledge. For example, if I flip a fair coin and confidently predict on

the basis of a mere special feeling that it will land tails, my belief is intuitively

unjustified, whether or not it is true.12 The present view delivers that verdict, as

anyone intrinsically identical to me would be forming beliefs irresponsibly in a

way inconsistent with their coming to knowledge; however, the coin may land.

What of credit? It is widely accepted that knowledge is a particularly

creditable kind of belief (see e.g. Sosa 2007; Greco 2010). If so, then JPK has

reasonably strong prospects for explaining why a justified belief is similarly

creditable to a subject who holds it. It is plausible that any intrinsic duplicate of

someone who performs in a way deserving of credit for success is at least in some

derivative sense herself creditable. On the plausible assumption that knowledge

entails some property in its possessor that is both intrinsic and a credit to the

subject, JPK explains why justification itself is creditable.

4. Alexander Bird

Bird (2007) offers an account of justification similar to JPK. Here is Bird’s view:

JuJu If in world w1 S has mental states M and then forms a judgment, that judgmentis justified if and only if there is some world w2 where, with the same mental statesM, S forms a corresponding judgment and that judgment yields knowledge. (84)

Bird’s view is like mine in that it is one according to which, in his words,

‘justified judging is a certain kind of approximation to knowledge’ (85). The most

important difference between Bird’s view and mine is that his view requires

sameness ofmental states, whereas JPK requires sameness of internal states. This

is also why Bird’s is an essentially diachronic condition – as Bird agrees with

Williamson that knowledge is a mental state, requiring sameness of mental states

upon forming the judgement would entail the problematic left-to-right direction

of J ¼ K: anyone with the same mental states as someone who knows that p must

herself know that p. This diachronic feature of Bird’s view places substantive

constraints on justification; Bird’s view cannot allow that concurrent or future

mental states can bear on justification. But it is not at all clear that a theory of

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justification should rule this out; suppose Dennis has total mental state M at time

t1 in worlds w1 and w2. In each world, Dennis goes on to form the judgement that

p at subsequent t2. Suppose that in w1 this judgement achieves knowledge, but in

w2, it is false. Bird’s view has it that in w2, Dennis’s belief is justified, regardless

of what other judgements he has at t2. But it is consistent with these stipulations

that in w2, (but not in w1), Dennis went on to form other beliefs at t2 that were in

significant tension with p. These might well undermine B’s justification for p, but

Bird’s diachronic approach cannot allow this; JPK, by contrast, does permit this

verdict, by requiring the sameness of all relevant internal states at t2. If B has new

beliefs that undermine his justification, then the relevant A too has new beliefs,

which plausibly undermine his knowledge.13

Another potential concern about Bird’s view derives from content

externalism. The contents of beliefs depend in part on one’s external environment.

As a result, requiring sameness of mental states places stronger constraints than

requiring sameness of intrinsic states does. For example, anyone with beliefs

about Hesperus is limited in mental-state duplicates to subjects thinking about

Venus.14 This feature of Bird’s view, like its diachronic nature, derives from

emphasizing sameness of mental state instead of sameness of internal state.

Moreover, as in the previous case, it leads to counterintuitive consequences.

Suppose that someone believes on the basis of misleading evidence that

Hesperus is not Phosphorus. Bird’s view does not straightforwardly entail

that this belief cannot be justified, as it may be based on antecedent mental states

that are consistent with having come to a knowledgeable belief, had the external

world been sufficiently different. These antecedent beliefs, we may suppose, are

all possible; they do not include the impossible conclusion that Hesperus is not

Phosphorus.15 But it threatens to imply that none of her subsequent beliefs can be

justified; suppose one is in this position and also learns that Hesperus is Venus.

If she inferred that Phosphorus is not Venus, then on plausible assumptions,

Bird’s view has it that this belief cannot be justified. For Bird’s view is that it is

justified only if a possible subject with the same antecedent mental state comes

to knowledge. But the antecedent mental state includes the belief that Hesperus

is not Phosphorus, which is necessarily false. If inference from a false belief is

inconsistent with coming to knowledge, no one with those antecedent mental

states will come to know. Of course, it is controversial whether one can come

to know by inference from a false belief,16 so perhaps Bird can avoid the

objection by taking a controversial stance on this question, but it is at least a cost

of his view that he would have to. For my own part, I am pretty well convinced by

the traditional thought that one cannot get knowledge from false premises,17

so I consider this conclusive reason to reject JuJu.

A third respect in which my JPK looks preferable to Bird’s JuJu is that the

latter is limited in scope to judgements – the formation of beliefs.18 It is silent on

stored, perhaps implicit beliefs; JPK has a unified story to tell about all beliefs.

To be sure, one might attempt to extend JuJu to stored beliefs; one could say, for

instance, that a belief is justified if and only if it was formed by a justified

Canadian Journal of Philosophy 191

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judgement, as characterized by JuJu. However, even this may not be satisfying,

for two reasons. First, it may be that defeaters for stored beliefs may arise after

their corresponding judgements, rendering them unjustified; this augmented form

of JuJu would wrongly predict such beliefs to be justified. Second, it may be that

not all of our justified beliefs begin their lives as judgements – if, for example,

we have any innate justified beliefs, the augmented JuJu cannot explain this fact.

(Presumably, someone who believes in innate knowledge should think this.)

A fourth problem for JuJu, if one is sympathetic to internalism, is that it is not

internalist enough. Although Bird claims that his view captures many of the

motivations of internalism, McGlynn (2012, 365–366) argues convincingly that

this is not so: it is ‘mentalist’ only in a sense thoroughly divorced from

internalism, and it does not respect New Evil Demon intuitions. By contrast, JPK,

as a genuinely internalist view, has a strong claim to respecting internalist

intuitions.

So although Bird’s view is very similar to JPK in spirit, I believe that JPK is

preferable in detail. To complete the case, however, we must consider more

carefully how JPK deals with necessary falsehoods. This is done in Sections 6 and 7.

5. An objection

Here is an objection to JPK that I have heard a number of times.19 It has to do with

the significance of the property of justification, given JPK. (I shall address other

objections about the extensional adequacy of JPK shortly.) The objection runs

like this: epistemic justification, as traditionally conceived, is in some sense an

epistemic credit to the subject; when we describe someone as holding a justified

belief, we are assessing her in a positive way. But according to JPK (the objection

continues), what makes someone’s belief justified is not anything about the

subject herself; instead, it is that some other person, in another possible world,

has knowledge. But why should we care about whether somebody else has

knowledge, if we are interested in an epistemic assessment of this individual?

There are three things to be said in response to this objection. First, there is a

similarity between the objection and Kripke’s ‘Humphrey’ complaint against

Lewis’s counterpart theory: although Humphrey cares that he might have won the

election, he ‘could not care less whether someone else, no matter how much

resembling him, would have been victorious in another possible world’ (Kripke

1980, 45). If these kinds of Kripkean worries about counterparts are motivating

the worry, then the simplest thing for me is to sidestep them; one can run JPK in

terms of transworld identity just as well if one prefers:

JPK S’s belief is justified iff there is a possible world where S is the way S actuallyis in all relevant intrinsic respects, where S’s corresponding beliefs is knowledge.

As I do not find Kripke’s worries about Lewisian counterpart theory

convincing, I do not work with this version of the view, but so far as I can see, no

significant difficulties would arise from doing so.

J.J. Ichikawa192

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Second, a fairly obvious point, but one that we should not forget to

appreciate: if I satisfy the conditions of JPK, and so have a possible counterpart of

the relevant sort who has knowledge, it is to a significant degree in virtue of my

own (intrinsic) features that this is so. So it is misleading at best to complain of

JPK that it has the implication that it is my counterpart, rather than me, who is

being evaluated.

Third, thinking about the second point in the context of the objection points to

a useful theoretical framework JPK invites; it also points to a broader class of

potential kindred views. My approach to justification has it that justification is a

certain kind of approximation to knowledge; if one is intrinsically just like one

who has knowledge, then one is worthy of the positive epistemic assessment with

which I have identified doxastic justification. This invites the question, what if

anything is significant about this intrinsic aspect of knowledge? Why is this the

respect emphasized by JPK? Other kindred views, emphasizing different respects

of similarity, are available. (At an extreme, one can demand similarity in all

respects, thus endorsing J ¼ K.) Bird’s JuJu can also be understood as a view in

this family, emphasizing a certain complex mental similarity. Why have I chosen

to focus on the intrinsic? I offer two answers. First, JPK, understood in my

internalist way, seems to me to get the cases right. I am motivated in part by

finding a reasonably theoretically significant category, and in part by doing a

good job with the intuitive extension of justified belief,20 and as outlined above,

the competitor views that come to mind seem to me to do a rather poor job with

the latter. Second, I think that the internalist commitment of JPK encodes a kernel

of truth about the normative dimensions of epistemology that I find in some of the

central internalist figures of the twentieth century. There is, I think, something

right in the idea that justification is a kind of epistemic blamelessness, and also in

the idea that the kind of blame has to do only with the intrinsic features of the

subject. I am wholly convinced by the arguments in the literature that it would be

a mistake to attach blame only to that over which a subject has voluntary control

(Alston 1988), or to suppose that we have some kind of privileged access to all

and only the internal (Williamson 2000); nevertheless, it does seem to me to be a

significant epistemic achievement to have done everything right from the inside.

Perhaps, there remains at least one sense in which the internal does comprise a

‘cognitive home’ – even though we cannot control every aspect of it, and even

though we do not have infallible access to its properties, we retain a particular

normative responsibility to keep our own homes in order. Or so it seems to me, at

any rate. I certainly think it worth exploring other views in the family that

emphasize different respects of similarity to knowledge. I shall continue to

explore this internalist one in the remainder of this paper.

6. Impossible knowledge, content externalism and JPK

Knowledge requires truth; nothing false is known. Consequently, nothing

necessarily false is even possibly known. A potential worry for JPK, then, is that

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it may have the implication that necessarily false beliefs cannot justifiably be

believed. There is no possible subject who knows that Hesperus is not Phosphorus;

therefore, according to the worry, JPK implies that no one can justifiably believe

that Hesperus is not Phosphorus. This would be a counterintuitive consequence.

The discovery that Hesperus is identical to Phosphorus is attributed to Pythagoras;

several of his astronomical observations led him to this conclusion. But it is not

difficult to imagine his having made different, misleading observations instead,

which would intuitively have justified him in believing the necessarily false

proposition that Hesperus is not Phosphorus.

It should perhaps be pointed out that there is precedent for accepting

counterintuitive consequences concerning mental states towards necessary

propositions. Stalnaker (1981) says everyone believes every necessary truth;

Lewis (1996) says that everyone knows every necessary truth. Their views are not

dismissed out of hand for these features, and the many attempts to explain away

the relevant intuitions may apply as well to JPK as to these views. Even still, it

cannot be denied that these are counterintuitive consequences. Does JPK have

these implications? It does only if S’s justified belief requires S to have a possible

intrinsic duplicate with knowledge of the very same content as S’s belief. But this

requirement is not included in JPK. Here, again, is JPK:

JPK S’s belief is justified iff S has a possible counterpart, alike to S in all relevantintrinsic respects, whose corresponding belief is knowledge.

Suppose that Pythagoras believes, on the basis of strong but misleading

evidence, that Hesperus is not Phosphorus. JPK can allow that Pythagoras’s

belief is justified, by pointing to a possible intrinsic duplicate of Pythagoras, in a

world with two distinct heavenly bodies, which Pythagoras’s duplicate knows to

be distinct. Twin-Pythagoras knows that twin-Hesperus is not twin-Phosphorus;

this knowledgeable belief is the one corresponding to Pythagoras’s justified

belief that Hesperus is not Phosphorus.

Unlike in the case of Bird’s approach, making further inferences from this

justified but necessarily false belief poses no special problems, given JPK.

If Pythagoras, justifiably believing Hesperus and Phosphorus to be distinct, goes

on to infer that Phosphorus is not Venus, this belief can be justified in exactly the

same way: he has a possible intrinsic duplicate who knows that twin-Phosphorus

is not Venus (or that it is not twin-Venus, depending on how the case is spelled

out). Bird’s JuJu, by contrast, may have the implication that no judgement that

follows a necessarily false belief can be justified, for the reason offered in Section

4. So externalism about content can play an important role in rendering JPK’s

particular internalist approach to justification plausible.

At this point, it is natural to wonder about the relevant counterpart relation

that is invoked between beliefs. As just indicated, JPK ties the justification of a

given belief to the knowledge of a given counterpart belief. But if it is not

sameness of content in general that establishes a given counterfactual belief

as the counterpart one, what is it? A thorough answer here would require an

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involved theory about the relationship between the brain and a given belief; I will

not essay such a story. Here instead is a brief sketch, which I hope will illustrate

that this important question is likely to have a satisfactory answer. The matter is

relatively simple if it turns out that beliefs correspond to physical objects or

events in the head. If they do, then S’s belief that p is associated with a neural

state B, which will be shared by S*, who is S’s intrinsic duplicate. State B in S*

will realize the belief that corresponds to S’s belief that p; given content

externalism, this might be a belief in content other than p. If for any such S*, this

belief amounts to knowledge, JPK has it that S’s belief that p is justified.

If we drop the assumption that S’s belief that p corresponds to a particular

brain state, the story is more complex, but not obviously insuperably so. Suppose

that S believes that p by virtue of p’s playing a distinctive functional role in S’s

total psychology. It is reasonable to assume that S’s intrinsic duplicate, S*, will

have a similar total psychology, with representational elements isomorphic to

those of S’s psychology. As we can single out S’s belief that p by reference to a

node in this common structure, we can identify which of S*’s beliefs is the

relevantly corresponding one for the purpose of JPK. This is admittedly far short

of a full answer to the question about what it is in virtue of which a given belief in

S’s intrinsic duplicate is the one corresponding to S’s belief that p, but I take it

there is a sufficiently clear intuitive sense at work; the prospects for a more

comprehensive story, given further commitments about the relation between

beliefs and the brain, seem strong.21

7. A-priori impossible knowledge

The strategy just sketched shows how JPK is consistent with the possibility of

justified beliefs in necessary falsehoods; beliefs in necessary falsehoods can have

true counterparts in intrinsic duplicates. Howwidely does this strategy generalize?

It is straightforward to apply the approach to allow for justified beliefs in

other necessarily false identity claims (Clark is not Superman) and natural kind

essence claims (water contains no hydrogen). What these saliently have in

common is that they constitute the canonical Kripkean necessary a posteriori.

Can JPK allow for justified belief in a priori necessarily false contents? It can if

externalism about content extends to a-priori contents. In particular, it can if it is

possible for X and Y to be intrinsic duplicates with counterpart beliefs B(x)

and B(y), where x is a priori false, but Y knows y. Standard arguments for social

anti-individualism about content do support this possibility.

Consider Burge’s (1979) case of Oscar and his arthritis. Oscar has what Burge

calls ‘partial understanding’ of the concept ARTHRITIS. His understanding is

sufficient for us properly to attribute to him beliefs about arthritis, but not

sufficient for him to rule out from the armchair that he has arthritis in his thigh.

An intrinsic duplicate of Oscar, living in a society that categorized ailments

differently (or where different ailments are present), might know that it is possible

to have twin-arthritis in his thigh, or even that he actually had twin-arthritis in his

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thigh. So Oscar’s belief that he might, or does, have arthritis in his thigh could

well be the justified counterpart of this possible knowledge. It is plausibly a priori

that one cannot have arthritis in one’s thigh. (If it were a posteriori, it would not be

at all clear why Oscar’s misapprehension would require him to have at best partial

understanding.)

So JPK allows that subjects with partial understanding, in Burge’s sense, can

have justified beliefs in a-priori necessarily false contents. Only if one’s intrinsic

states were sufficient to fix a given content would justified belief in an a priori

falsehood have to be counted impossible. However, it is by no means obvious that

there are any such cases. Kripke’s (1982) interpretation of Wittgenstein, for

example, provides strong reason to think that any subject’s intrinsic states would

not even guarantee that an arithmetic belief has the particular content it does; if

so, JPK can even allow for one to have justified false arithmetic beliefs. It is true,

for example, that 58 £ 17 ¼ 776. Actually, this is not true; but perhaps you

believed me for a moment when I said that it was, and perhaps you were justified

in doing so. JPK can accommodate this possibility by allowing that you were the

intrinsic duplicate of someone whose identical brain state constituted testimonial

knowledge of some other content. As the class of cases in which content

supervenes on the internal is at best extremely small, and possibly non-existent,

saying that, in such cases, justified a priori false belief is impossible is not a

significant intuitive cost.

All that said, it should of course be admitted that the anti-individualistic

approach to content in such realms is controversial. It is my own considered view

that it should be embraced – Benjamin Jarvis and I explore it more fully in

Ichikawa and Jarvis (2013, chap. 4). But this paper is not the place to make that

case. If someone wants to insist that anyone intrinsically alike to someone who

has a false arithmetical belief shares that arithmetical belief, then he should

conclude that JPK has the implication that false arithmetical beliefs are never

justified. Although this is somewhat revisionary, it does not strike me as beyond

the pale, for at least two reasons. First, as I have argued at length elsewhere

(Ichikawa and Jarvis 2013), there is strong reason to suppose that no one ever has

propositional justification for false arithmetical propositions; once this point is

fully appreciated, it may feel more natural to say the same about the doxastic

justification that is the subject of this paper. Second, as mentioned above, many

views that are rightly taken seriously deliver surprising results about necessary

truths and falsehoods. Although I would prefer mine not to be among them – and

I do think that anti-individualism provides the necessary escape – I do not think

that failure to capture pre-theoretic intuitions here should provide the definitive

word against the view.

8. Is JPK too liberal?

As the previous sections show, JPK’s focus on sameness of intrinsic state, as

opposed to JuJu’s invocation of sameness of mental state, affords JPK with

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considerable room for manoeuvre in showing how a given belief could be shown

to be justified. A subject’s belief is justified if there is any possible intrinsic

duplicate – who might be accepting rather a different content – who has

corresponding knowledge. The argument of the previous sections is that, given

content externalism, it is often easier than one might expect to find such an

intrinsic duplicate. The content flexibility that JPK allows makes it a relatively

liberal view about justification.

It is natural to wonder at this point whether this flexibility renders JPK too

liberal. Are there cases of intuitively unjustified belief that fall under the

extension of JPK, thanks to the flexibility of the content in the relevant beliefs?

In particular, one might worry that the flexibility I exploit in content has the

implication that very crazy beliefs might end up justified, because they might be

realized by intrinsic states that are consistent with knowledge in very different

social environments. By a ‘very crazy’ belief, I mean a belief whose content is so

implausible, it would usually be better to attribute to a subject who seemed to

express it a deviant meaning. To take Burge’s (1979) example:

If a generally competent and reasonable speaker thinks that ‘orangutan’ applies to afruit drink, we would be reluctant, and it would unquestionably be misleading, totake his words as revealing that he thinks he has been drinking orangutans forbreakfast for the last few weeks. Such total misunderstanding often seems to blockliteralistic mental content attribution, at least in cases where we are not directlycharacterizing his mistake. Burge (1979, pp. 90–91)

The reason it is usually preferable to attribute linguistic confusion instead of

very crazy beliefs is that to attribute the very crazy belief would be to attribute a

radically unjustified one. So it might be a problem if my view ended up saying

that such beliefs are justified.

Suppose that Emily is at the breakfast table, drinking orange juice, and

expressing what appears to be the very crazy belief that she is drinking

orangutans. For example, she says, in a tone of voice not at all suggestive of

joking, ‘I try to drink orangutans every morning, because they are high in vitamin

C.’ Does JPK have the implication that her very crazy belief is justified? Here is a

line of reasoning that suggests that it does.22 There is nothing intrinsic to Emily

that guarantees that her linguistic community does not use ‘orangutan’ to refer

to orange juice. Consider her intrinsic duplicate, Emily*, in a world where

everybody else treats the word ‘orangutan’ as referring to orange juice. Emily*

speaks and believes truly, expressing the belief that she is drinking orange juice.

If Emily*’s belief constitutes knowledge, then JPK has it that Emily’s is justified.

Notice that for a JPK theorist to avoid this implication, it is not enough to

point to a possible version of the case in which Emily*’s belief falls short of

knowledge – this would be easy. According to JPK, Emily’s belief is justified if

at least one of her possible intrinsic duplicates has knowledge. So to avoid the

conclusion that very crazy beliefs like Emily’s are justified, the JPK theorist must

argue that none of Emily’s possible intrinsic duplicates know.

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Let us consider further what Emily and Emily* must be like. Part of what

makes Emily’s belief so very crazy is that she is so out of touch with her linguistic

community. On the most natural way of filling out the case, Emily sometimes

encounters uses of the word ‘orangutan’ that ought to strike her as very strange.

As she thinks that orangutans are a kind of fruit juice, she does not really know

what to make of the plaque that says ‘orangutans’ at the zoo, next to some Asian

primates. That sign seems to Emily to suggest that these apes are orange juice!

Perhaps she thinks it is an error, or a prank. Or she may suppose it is a sign not for

the exhibit, but for some unseen orange juice nearby. On this most natural way of

understanding the case, Emily has lots of evidence that her way of understanding

‘orangutan’ is wrong. This evidence impacts her internal state; each of her

intrinsic duplicates also has evidence suggesting that ‘orangutan’ does not mean

what she thinks it does.23 There is, it seems to me, every reason to consider this

evidence to be a defeater to those duplicates’ knowledge. Even though Emily*

expresses a truth when she says to herself, ‘orangutans are a kind of fruit juice,’

she has lots of evidence that this is false. That evidence prevents Emily* from

knowing; so JPK need not say that Emily’s very crazy belief is justified.

However, the analysis of the previous paragraph relied on a particular

interpretation of the case. Although I said it is the most natural one, there are

other possibilities. What if we suppose that Emily has no internal evidence

against the correctness of her bizarre use of ‘orangutan’? In this case, Emily*

need have no defeater; might she therefore have knowledge? It depends, I think,

on how each came to use the term in her respective way. Suppose that, although

‘orangutan’ functions as it actually does in Emily’s linguistic community, she has

never been taught the word. She spontaneously decided, for no particular reason,

to use the term to refer to orange juice, and it is just a coincidence that it happens

to be the same word as that used in the wider community for orangutans. We can

suppose that she is encountered the word from time to time, but in impoverished

contexts which provide no reason to suspect that her usage is incorrect. For

example, she sometimes overhears people saying ‘I like orangutans,’ without the

additional context that would cue her into supposing this to be anything other

than an expression of predilection for orange juice. (We include this limited

contact to render it plausible that she is using the public term.) In this case, Emily

has formed beliefs about the meaning of a public term rather irresponsibly; this

fact will be reflected in her intrinsic state. So Emily*, too, will have come

irresponsibly to believe that ‘orangutan’ means orange juice; even though her

belief is true, it is not knowledge. So on this version of the case, too, the JPK

theorist can avoid attributing justified belief to Emily.

If instead we suppose that Emily thinks that orangutans are orange juice

because of misleading evidence to the effect that ‘orangutan’ means orange juice,

then her belief looks like it might well have been formed responsibly. So there is

no obvious obstacle to suggesting that Emily* has knowledge. So in this case, it

looks like JPK will suggest that Emily’s belief, very crazy though its content is, is

justified after all. But in this case, the strikes me as the correct result; it is a

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familiar kind of instance of a false belief that is justified on the proper basis of

misleading evidence.

So it seems to me that JPK does not have problematically liberal implications

about the justification of very crazy beliefs. For many of the most plausible

versions of very crazy beliefs, they will come along with intrinsic features that are

inconsistent with knowledge; for those that do not, it is intuitively plausible to

attribute justified belief.

9. Further choice points

In this final section, I will identify a number of questions on which this paper is

officially neutral; various possible answers to them would develop JPK in

different directions. This is intended both in order to identify what seem to me to

be interesting questions that warrant further study, and to indicate some respects

in which JPK can be accepted by epistemologists with diverse commitments.

9.1 Lotteries

Contemporary epistemological orthodoxy has it that special evidence being

absent, owners of lottery tickets that have some small chance of winning cannot

know that their tickets will lose.24 Even if my ticket is in fact a loser, as the

evidence against its winning is exactly parallel to the evidence against each

ticket’s winning, including the winner’s, I cannot know that my ticket will lose.

Given this orthodoxy, JPK suggests that an ordinary owner of a lottery ticket

cannot have the justified belief that her ticket will lose, as any intrinsic duplicate

of someone who is in the lottery situation will also at least seem to be in the

lottery situation, which seems to preclude knowledge. In my opinion, this is

exactly the right result. One cannot be justified in believing that an arbitrary

lottery ticket will lose.25 (In fact, I agree with Clarke (2013) that ordinary people

do not typically hold such beliefs, whether or not they are justified.)

I do occasionally encounter philosophers who consider it obvious that we can

have justified beliefs in lottery propositions. Such philosophers will of course be

unhappy with the combination of JPK and the orthodoxy that one cannot know

lottery propositions. Fortunately for these detractors, however, there is also

philosophical space to deny said orthodoxy; some epistemologists have argued

that there can sometimes be knowledge in lottery cases (e.g. Hill and Schechter

2007; Reed 2010). Those who insist on justified beliefs in lottery propositions

should, I think, join them.

The requirement of JPK is that justification and knowledge be systematically

related, but it is silent on the extent of each. The only combination of views that is

problematic for JPK is that which holds that there can be justified beliefs in

lottery cases, but there cannot be knowledge.26 If one is so confident in that

conjunction that one is willing to reject an otherwise appealing view on that basis,

then there is probably not much I can say to make one change one’s mind.27 I will

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note only that I do not recommend resting a lot of argumentative weight on pairs

of intuitions about tricky lottery cases.

9.2 History

Consider the ‘problem of forgotten evidence’, which Alvin Goldman offers

against internalist theories of justification:

Many justified beliefs are ones for which an agent once had adequate evidence thatshe subsequently forgot. At the time of epistemic appraisal, she no longer possessesadequate evidence that is retrievable from memory. Last year, Sally read a storyabout the health benefits of broccoli in the ‘Science’ section of the New York Times.She then justifiably formed a belief in broccoli’s beneficial effects. She still retainsthis belief but no longer recalls her original evidential source (and has neverencountered either corroborating or undermining sources). Nonetheless, herbroccoli belief is still justified, and, if true, qualifies as a case of knowledge.Presumably, this is because her past acquisition of the belief was epistemicallyproper. But past acquisition is irrelevant by the lights of internalism . . . . All pastevents are ‘external’ and therefore irrelevant according to internalism. (Goldman1999, 280)

Goldman’s argument is that facts about the subject’s past can be relevant for

justification – had Sally read the story in the National Enquirer and then

forgotten the source, she would now be unjustified – so internalism must be

mistaken. Whether the relevance of the subject’s history is inconsistent with

internalism depends on just how one understands internalism.

It is open to the internalist to characterize internalism as the supervenience of

justification on the intrinsic properties of the subject over the course of her life,

rather than only at the time considered. The effect would be a broadening of the

supervenience base, which could accommodate Goldman’s intuition about this

case.

A JPK theorist who goes this way will require, for a subject S to have a justified

belief, there to be a possible subject S*, alike to S not only in relevant intrinsic

present respects, but also in past ones, who has knowledge. So suppose that some

time ago, Linus read that p in the New York Times, while Lucy read that p in the

National Enquirer. Now each retains the belief that p, but neither remembers

where he or she heard it. Assume with Goldman that Linus’s past activity was

epistemically appropriate, and Lucy’s was not – this, presumably, because Lucy

had encountered evidence indicating that the Enquirerwas not to be trusted. A JPK

theorist who wanted to accommodate Goldman’s intuitions can say that (whether or

not p is true) Linus’s current belief is justified, and Lucy’s is not, because Linus has

a possible counterpart, alike to Linus in all relevant respects – including those

intrinsic epistemic virtues he displayed in the past – who has knowledge, while

Lucy does not.28 The epistemic virtues in question have to dowith the processing of

internal evidence.29 Linus has a counterpart who trusts a knowledge-conferring

source about nutrition and so comes to knowledge. (Indeed, Linus himself may be

that counterpart.) But Lucy does not – all of her counterparts trusted a source in the

face of some evidence that it was unreliable.

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This choice point is also relevant for the question of whether a ‘swampman’

could have justified beliefs. Following Davidson (1987), imagine that a

molecule-for-molecule duplicate of some person spontaneously appears as a

result of random combinations of particles in a swamp. Suppose that this

‘swampman’ appears now and is at this moment intrinsically identical to my own

current time slice. If the JPK theorist requires the relevant counterparts to match

over their histories as well as at the time in question, then she need not say that the

swampman has justified beliefs corresponding to my knowledgeable ones, as

Swampman does not match me in the relevant historical respects. It is of course

consistent with JPK that it does – as the view that a Swampman could have

knowledge is consistent with JPK – but it is not required.

If a JPK theorist instead limited the respects of similarity to those at the

time under consideration, the way Goldman suggests all internalists should,

then Linus’s belief and Lucy’s will be alike with respect to justification. This

JPK theorist will also have more reason to think that Swampman must have

justified beliefs, although even he is not strictly committed to this conclusion.

It is, after all, open for such a JPK theorist to deny that Swampman has beliefs

at all.

9.3 Reliabilism

At first blush, it may appear as if JPK is a competitor to reliabilism in

epistemology, as the latter is typically characterized as a theory of justification

(e.g. Goldman 1979). However, it is worth remembering that justification is

not the only access point into epistemology for reliabilism, and various views

that are rightly characterized as reliabilist theories of knowledge have also been

proposed – see Goldman (2011, Section 1) for a catalogue. (Some of these,

e.g. that of Dretske (1981), were explicit in denying that the reliabilist component

was meant to have to do with justification.) The present view about justification is

consistent with reliabilist approaches to knowledge; indeed, it is consistent with

all approaches to knowledge.

Consequently, although JPK certainly fits well with the orthodox position that

reliably produced belief is in general insufficient for justification – the position

according to which, for example, Lehrer’s ‘Mr. Truetemp’ or Bonjour’s

clairvoyant Norman do not have justified beliefs – this is not mandatory for a

JPK theorist who wishes also to endorse a reliabilist approach to knowledge.

If one wants to bite the bullet for reliabilism and say that cases like these can be

cases of knowledge and are typically cases of justified belief, there is nothing in

JPK preventing one from doing so.

Although JPK is compatible with a variety of approaches to knowledge, it is

of course a substantive view that rules out many theories of justification.

In particular, as noted, JPK entails the supervenience form of internalism about

justification. So it is inconsistent with externalist approaches to justification,

including reliabilism.30

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10. Conclusion

JPK is consistent with a variety of diverse epistemic positions – in particular, it is

consistent with all approaches to knowledge. Consequently, it should be

acceptable to epistemologists with a wide variety of commitments, so long as

they do not hold out the hope of analysing knowledge partly in terms of

justification. Combined with what I have suggested above – that JPK performs

very well with respect to many of the desiderata for a theory of justification,

including its intuitive extension – this suggests that there is a strong case to be

made in its favour. It deserves serious consideration as a theory of justification.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to two anonymous referees for helpful comments on versions of this paper. Thanksalso to Jon Altschul, Derek Ball, Alexander Bird, Jessica Brown, Kenny Easwaren, JeremyFantl, Jeremy Goodman, Allan Hazlett, Torfinn Huvenes, Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins,Masashi Kasaki, Ned Markosian, Aidan McGlynn, Rachel McKinnon, Chris Mole, AdamMorton, David Plunkett, Bryan Renne, Kateryna Samoilova, Joshua Schechter, DanieleSgaravatti, Chris Stephens, Chris Tillman, John Wigglesworth, Timothy Williamson,Chase Wrenn and various audiences at the several conferences, workshops and seminarswhere I presented versions of this material.

Notes

1. The weaker thesis that, necessarily, all and only justified beliefs satisfy thecharacterization in terms of knowledge that I will go on to offer is also interestingand worthy of consideration. But the official view offered is the reductive one.

2. See Turri (2010) for one version of the distinction. Ichikawa and Jarvis (2013) arguethat both of these notions should also be distinguished from ex ante justification,which is roughly being in a position to form a doxastically justified belief. Note thattalk of ‘having sufficient reason’ should be understood as consistent with the ideathat, in some cases, the null set of reasons constitutes ‘sufficient’ reason.

3. Smith (2010) gives an approach to propositional justification in terms of knowledge,although Smith’s relationship to the knowledge-first stance is somewhat complex;see McGlynn (2012, 366) for a discussion.

4. Arguably, a canonical statement of Conee and Feldman’s ‘evidentialism’ also fallsshort with respect to illumination, albeit less extremely than does Fumerton’s theory.According to Feldman and Conee (1985), a subject is justified in believing that p ifand only if belief is the attitude towards p that fits the subject’s evidence. (This is inthe first instance a theory of propositional justification; their approach to doxasticjustification is more complex – Feldman and Conee 1985, 24.) As Conee andFeldman (2008, 84) admit, evidentialism thus stated is at best

the bare sketch of a full theory of epistemic justification. Among the things needed todevelop the theory more fully are accounts of what evidence is, what it is for a personhave something as evidence, when a body of evidence supports a proposition, and whatthe basing relation is.

(The basing relation is relevant because their move from propositional to doxasticjustification invokes it.) Thanks to Ned Markosian for discussion here.

5. In his seminal paper on reliabilism, Goldman (1979) endorses a more complex,recursive form of reliabilism that distinguishes methods that rely on beliefs as inputs

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(e.g. inference) from those that do not (e.g. simple perception). These details are notrelevant here.

6. E.g. Goldman (1988), Engel (1992) and Sosa’s (pp. 159–161) contribution toBonJour and Sosa (2003).

7. Ichikawa and Jarvis (2013, chap. 5) defends the view that at least some epistemicproperties are primitive.

8. A referee asks the following very sensible question: given the increasinglyappreciated fact that reductive definitions in general seem rather hopeless, whyshould we hope that – or be interested whether – one is available for justification?I offer two replies. First, I am offering a metaphysical theory about the nature ofepistemic justification; it is not intended as anything like a definition of any word oran analysis of any concept. And I see no in-general grounds for scepticism aboutsubstantive metaphysical explanations of one phenomenon in terms of another.Second, as will emerge, my theory is non-reductive in a crucial way; I will refer to‘relevant’ respects of similarity, without any particular explanation of what suchrelevance consists in. So my theory of justification would probably not satisfyproponents of what we might call the ‘old-fashioned’ project of conceptual analysis.The point of JPK is not to allow someone with no antecedent understanding ofjustification to be guaranteed a method for calculating, from facts stated in simplerterms, whether a belief is justified; rather, it is to illuminate what is interesting aboutjustification, and to show how the category fits into our broader epistemologicalinterests.

9. See Nagel (2013) for a summary of empirical evidence about pre-philosophicalunderstanding of knowledge.

10. For example, I have ‘counterparts’ in the relevant sense who have different ancestorsthan I do; this is consistent with the necessity of origin. Thanks to Chris Mole here.

11. One might consider the relevant intrinsic respects to be the phenomenal respects.This view does not seem disastrous, but I do not embrace it, in part because I do notwish to rule out the possibility that there could be distinct zombies, in the sense ofChalmers (1997), who differ with respect to justification.

12. A certain kind of thorough-going reliabilist – one prepared to bite the bullet on caseslike Lehrer’s ‘Mr. Truetemp’ – might disagree, arguing that such a special feelingcould issue into knowledge if it were reliable. I shall discuss reliabilist approaches toknowledge in Section 9.3.

13. As Jessica Brown pointed out to me, one natural suggestion at this point on Bird’sbehalf would be to modify JuJu to include a ‘no defeaters’ clause, to the effect that asubject’s S’s judgement is justified if and only if, first, a suitable counterpart makes acorresponding judgement that is knowledgeable, and, second, S has no new defeatersfor her judgement. This may help some with the intuitive extension, but at the cost ofcomplicating the theory of justification with the yet-unexplained notion of a‘defeater’. (On this approach, defeaters could not be characterized in terms ofjustification, on pain of circularity.) Another option on Bird’s behalf, suggested to meby a referee, would be to abandon the diachronic nature of the view, and simply insistthat the knowledgeable counterparts also share the same subsequent mental states asthe subject. Bird does not go this way because of his commitment that knowledgeitself is a mental state. See Bird (2007, 85) for discussion. A third strategy, suggestedto me by two referees, would add to JuJu a requirement that the counterfactualknowledgeable subject make allmental changes corresponding to those of the actualjustified believer. The challenge for this view is to articulate just what the relevantly‘corresponding’ mental states are; if one emphasizes the internal, the result will bevery similar to my JPK.

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14. Bird and I both assume that mental states have their contents essentially. Thanks to areferee for pointing this out.

15. See Bird (2007, 87) for his own treatment of this point.16. See e.g. Warfield (2005). Note, however, that even if some falsehoods can provide

knowledge, this may only be in special circumstances that might well be lacking inthe present case. The view of Feit and Cullison (2011), for example, appears to me torule out knowledge in the case at issue here, even though it allows for somefalsehoods to support knowledge. They have it that if the denial of the false claim inquestion would be a defeater for the conclusion, then that conclusion is noknowledge; but if our subject infers that Phosphorus is not Venus on the grounds that(a) Hesperus is Venus, and (b) Hesperus is not Phosphorus, denial of the latter wouldundermine the conclusion.

17. Ball and Blome-Tillmann (forthcoming) give strong arguments for this view.18. Bird may not fully appreciate this distinction; he writes at times as if his theory

applies to belief in general, referring repeatedly to questions about the justificationof ‘judgements and beliefs’. His brief discussion of the distinction is in his pages96–97. His remark on page 85 that typically, we ‘think that a belief is justifiedbecause of the way in which it came to be formed’ suggests that he may be inclinedtowards the extension of JuJu suggested in the main text following.

19. Allan Hazlett was the first person to raise this objection to me; thanks also to ananonymous referee for a particularly sophisticated version of it.

20. See Weatherson (2003) for a generalized description of the methodologicalapproach.

21. As Keith DeRose pointed out to me, even Timothy Williamson seems committed tosome kind of counterpart relation for beliefs like the kind I describe here; see forinstance Williamson (2000, 162) for his discussion of sceptical scenarios and thecorresponding good cases. Presumably, the latter involves a counterpart true belieffor the false one in the former.

22. Thanks to Jessica Brown for pressing a version of this line of thought to me.23. I do not assume that the evidence in question need be internal; only that the evidence

entails something internal that will serve as a defeater. To illustrate this point, supposethat all and only one’s knowledge is among one’s evidence, and Emily, having read thesign, knows that the plaque says ‘orangutans’, which serves as a defeater for her beliefthat orangutans are orange juice. Emily*, therefore, may or may not know that theplaque says ‘orangutans’, but shewill share the internalistically individuated perceptualexperiences with Emily, and these experiences too will serve to prevent her true belieffrom being knowledge.

24. Hawthorne (2004) gives an extended defence of this intuitive claim.25. For defence, see Littlejohn (2012), Sutton (2007, 48–50), and Nelkin (2000). Bird

(2007, 101) also agrees with me on this point.26. McGlynn (2012) accepts this conjunction, but only reluctantly; he endorses a theory

of justification that has the implication that lottery beliefs are justified. Although herecognizes that this represents a bullet to be bitten, he argues that it is not conclusiveagainst his view.

27. Here is possible strategy for reconciling JPK with this pair of intuitions: perhapsgenuine lotteries preclude knowledge that a given ticket will lose, but fake lotteries –lottery-like schemes that look just like lotteries, but are secretly rigged so that everyticket always loses – do allow knowledge. If this were true, then JPK could respectthe intuitions in question, as a holder of a ticket in a genuine lottery will be theintrinsic duplicate of a holder of a ticket in a fake lottery. I do not embrace thisstrategy, because (1) the claim about knowability just looks ad hoc, and (2) I think

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the implication that lottery beliefs are not justified just is the right result. But again,one can disagree with me about knowledge, consistent with agreeing about JPK.

28. As a referee points out, one cost of going this way is that the restrictions of ‘relevant’respects become increasingly complicated. We do not want justification to beinconsistent with any false beliefs about past intrinsic features. JPK can handle thisby limiting the intrinsic properties to the relevant ones, but the broader the internalbase, the less intuitive grip we have on this somewhat fuzzy notion of ‘relevance’.

29. So (contra Goldman) it is an assumption that the difference in responsibility betweenLucy and Linus is not purely a matter of reliability; if each of them had nointernalistically available evidence favouring the Times over the Enquirer, then theywould have been equally responsible.

30. It is, however, interesting to note that only some versions of reliabilism areexternalist in the supervenience sense. The view considered in Goldman (1979, 17),for example, according to which processes that are reliable in the actual world yieldjustified beliefs, will allow for supervenience of justification on the internal on theassumption that the processes in question are internally individuated. So given asuitable theory of knowledge, JPK could be consistent with that form of reliabilism.

Notes on contributor

Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa is a professor in the philosophy department at the University ofBritish Columbia, and research fellow at the Northern Institute of Philosophy at theUniversity of Aberdeen. He has published widely in epistemology, with a focus on theepistemology of the a priori, and on knowledge and knowledge attributions. In 2014, heand Benjamin Jarvis published The Rules of Thought, a monograph on mental content andapriority, with Oxford University Press.

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