I have a PhD student working on justification in epistemology. He just got started a few months ago, so for now we are sort of ‘sniffing around’ before we define a more precise focus. (He wrote his Master’s thesis on John Norton and the justification of induction.) Now, by a nice twist of fate, last week I received a Google Scholar citation alert which put us on a very promising track: Rawls’ notion of justification. (My book Formal Languages in Logic was cited in this Pitt dissertation, in the same section where there is a discussion of Rawls on justification. The dissertation, by Thomas V. Cunningham, looks very interesting by the way.)
Here is the crucial passage as quoted in the dissertation:
Justification is argument addressed to those who disagree with us, or to ourselves when we are of two minds. It presumes a clash of views between persons or within one person, and seeks to convince others, or ourselves, of the reasonableness of the principles upon which our claims and judgments are founded … justification proceeds from what all parties to the discussion hold in common … thus, mere proof is not justification … proofs become justification once the starting points are mutually recognized, or the conclusions so comprehensive and compelling as to persuade us of the soundness of the conception expressed by their premises…[C]onsensus…is the nature of justification. (Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1999 ed.), 508-509).
Readers who recall my posts on ‘philosophy as conversation’ and the value of ‘virtuous adversariality’ for intellectual inquiry will probably immediately see the connections between my ideas and Rawls’ conception of justification as involving debate and persuasion, so this seems like a very promising avenue to be pursued. One difference is that I attribute these properties to proofs as well, contrary to what Rawls seems to suggest here. But other than that, this conception of justification seems to me to be spot-on (hum, I should probably go back to A Theory of Justice…).
I am aware that similar ideas have been recently defended by e.g. Robert Brandom, in particular his idea of discursive practices as ‘games of giving and asking for reasons’. However, my student and I would welcome further literature suggestions. Has Rawls’ decidedly social conception of justification been more widely explored in the literature on justification in epistemology specifically? (i.e. outside ethics) As a non-epistemologist supervising an epistemology dissertation, I could definitely use some help from the philosophy hive here, so thanks in advance!
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