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Citations to Sosa’s paper will be provided once Sosa’s paper is published.
Goldman’s, 1979 essay “What is Justified Belief?” emphasizes the “historical” character of justification precisely because Goldman recognized this as one of the chief innovations of his account of epistemic justification. The influence of Goldman’s work has been so pervasive that many epistemologists today don’t recognize the contestability of the assumption that doxastic justification involves a causal process of belief formation or sustenance.
See Pryor, 2000, page 519.
To the extent that it’s possible for us to interpret Moore’s remarks on knowledge or certainty as implicitly involving views about “justification” (a topic that Moore himself never discusses or even mentions in any of his writings), Moore’s commitment to the epistemological view just stated in the text is pretty clear throughout his corpus. Consider, for instance, the following comment from his 1910 lectures Some Main Problems of Philosophy (Moore, 1966b, page 65): “our knowledge of the existence of material objects by means of the senses must be analogous to memory at least in this: it must consist in our knowing that there exists something different from any sense-datum or image which we are directly apprehending at the moment.” Furthermore, towards the end of his late lecture “Certainty” (Moore, 1966a, page 245), Moore makes clear that our knowledge of this material object comes not merely from our various and sundry sensory experiences, but also from our memories of the immediate past.
Moore, 1966a, page 148.
See Carnap, 1962, xvi, in the Preface to the Second Edition. I use the term “affirmation” in the text in order to avoid a variety of subtle questions concerning the particular attitude that we are entitled to have towards a proposition when that proposition is absolutely confirmed by our total body of evidence. (For instance, is it the attitude expressed by unqualified assertions of the proposition? Or is it some weaker attitude? Is this attitude answerable to a knowledge norm? What role does the attitude play in the rational explanation of action? And so on.). I use this term because, so far as I know, it has not yet been pressed into the service of controversial epistemological theories in the way that terms like “belief” and “acceptance” have been, and I want to avoid the use of terms that invite philosophical controversy that’s not relevant to our present purposes.
See Moore, 1966b, page 30.
This “access internalist” condition on justification is never made explicit by Moore, since Moore himself never discusses or even mentions justification, but only discusses knowledge and certainty. Nonetheless, if we are willing to read Moore’s discussion of knowledge as implicitly committed to a view about doxastic justification, then there is ample evidence that Moore accepted such an access internalist condition on doxastic justification. Consider, for instance, Moore’s claim at the end of “Four Forms of Scepticism” (Moore, 1966a, page 222), that our knowledge of such propositions as that “this is a pencil” rests on “analogical or inductive argument”, or his claim at the end of “Certainty” that our knowledge that we are not dreaming rests on the combination of our various sensory experience along with our knowledge of the immediate past. What could explain his acceptance of these claims – indeed, his regarding them as obvious – if not some tacit acceptance of an access internalist requirement on doxastic justification? For a defense of such an access internalist requirement on doxastic justification, via a defense of an access requirement on the basing involved in doxastic justification, see Neta, 2019.
References
Carnap, R. (1962). Logical foundations of probability. University of Chicago Press.
Goldman, A. (1979). What is justified belief? Justification and knowledge. ed. Pappas (Dordrecht.
Moore, G. E. (1966a). Philosophical papers. George Allen and Unwin.
Moore, G. E. (1966b). Some main problems of philosophy. George Allen and Unwin.
Neta, R. (2019). The basing relation. Philosophical Review, 128, 179–217.
Pryor, J. (2000). The skeptic and the dogmatist. Nous, 34, 517–549.
Sosa Ernest. Forthcoming. Dawning Light Epistemology.
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Neta, R. Classical foundationalism and the dawning light. Philos Stud (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02277-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02277-6
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