The Knowledge View of Justification and Excuse

This chapter criticizes the conception of evidence to which the infallibilist is committed—a factive conception of evidence on which knowledge is sufficient for evidence. As is well known, this view has the counterintuitive result that certain pairs of subjects who are intuitively equally justified, e.g. a person and a BIV, are not equally justified. Defenders of this view of evidence have attempted to reply to this objection by distinguishing whether a belief is justified from whether the subject is blameless or excused for holding it. They endorse the knowledge view of justification according to which a belief is justified if and only if it meets the fundamental norm of belief which they take to be knowledge. This chapter argues against the knowledge view of justification that it has difficulty explaining the propositional and graded senses of justification. It also argues that the knowledge view of justification fails to provide an adequate account of blameless belief.