Justification, Truth, and Reliability

There are two quite different strands in the concept of justification, its normative character and its connection with truth. There is a tendency to take one of these as fundamental. That may explain why recent treatments of justification have often been dominated by one or the other of two contrasting views: epistemic deontologism,' which takes a belief to be justified provided the subject (S) meets his epistemic obligations relevant to that belief; and reliabilism, which conceives a belief's justification as determined by the reliability roughly, the tendency to yield true beliefs of the processes) by which it is produced or sustained. This paper develops a third account of justification. The account has affinities to both views, but it aims at a better integration of the apparently disparate central strands in justification. My starting point is the relation between justification and truth.