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Is justification easy or impossible? Getting acquainted with a middle road

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Abstract

Can a belief source confer justification when we lack antecedent justification for believing that it’s reliable? A negative answer quickly leads to skepticism. A positive answer, however, seems to commit one to allowing pernicious reasoning known as “epistemic bootstrapping.” Puzzles surrounding bootstrapping arise because we illicitly assume either that justification requires doxastic awareness of a source’s epistemic credentials or that there is no requirement that a subject be aware of these credentials. We can resolve the puzzle by splitting the horns and requiring a non-conceptual awareness of, or direct acquaintance with, a source’s legitimacy. Requiring non-conceptual as opposed to doxastic awareness halts the regress and avoids the skeptical results. On the other hand, requiring non-conceptual awareness also guarantees that we are aware of evidence for a source’s reliability prior to using that source to form justified beliefs; we thereby avoid the problem of allowing epistemic bootstrapping to generate the illicit gains in justification.

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Notes

  1. This is a sketch of process reliabilism. A fully developed reliabilism would distinguish between foundational and inferential justification, explain how defeaters work, address the generality problem, etc. See Goldman (1979, 1986, 1993, 2008), and Lyons (2009) for good developments and defenses of the view.

  2. Views closely resembling my sketch of PC have been defended by Foley (1983), Huemer (2001, 2006, 2007), McCain (2008, 2012), Pryor (2000), Skene (2013) and Tucker (2010). See Tucker (2013) for an anthology of papers both defending and criticizing these kinds of theories.

  3. Different epistemological theories deny JR in different ways. As such, these different theories will give different explanations of why the basketball’s looking orange provides me with justification for believing that it’s orange. On a process reliabilist view it’s because the color experience plays a crucial causal role in a belief forming mechanism that is in fact reliable. According to PC, my color experience provides this justification because the propositional content of a state with the ‘seeming phenomenology’ stands in a determinate-determinable relation to the content of the belief.

  4. This point is a bit tricky. Isn’t there some sense in which perception could turn on itself when you use the iterated reasoning to reach a conclusion about a source’s reliability? Couldn’t you look at an object and it perceptually seems to be square but when you look at the object again it perceptually seems to be a different shape? If you have background beliefs that physical objects are not constantly changing shape randomly then there is a sense in which the bootstrapping reasoning could turn on itself. In which case, we simply have to explain that someone without these background perceptual beliefs about physical objects couldn’t go through the bootstrapping reasoning and fail to reach the favorable conclusion.

  5. I need to be clear about what is problematic about bootstrapping. Saying that the justification is “too easy” has rhetorical pull but is vague. There are two ways to state the worry. First, we can know before going through the bootstrapping reasoning that it cannot fail to reach the favorable conclusion. That the reasoning reaches the favorable conclusion tells us nothing new about the accuracy or reliability of the source. However, given the way we’ve allowed basic sources, a subject can form justified beliefs in the premises of bootstrapping without being aware of anything that could provide justification for the reliability of that source. Secondly, reasoning transmits justification and so the conclusion of an argument is not ultimately based on the premise beliefs but on the premises’ bases. Premise beliefs serve to link their bases to the conclusion. Now consider visual perception. The basis for the bootstrapping premises is the visual perception of X itself, nothing more! A visual perception of X isn’t evidence for that perception’s accuracy. Since this is ultimately the only basis for the conclusion of the bootstrapping reasoning, one doesn’t seem to base the conclusion on anything that actually supports it! I’m not arguing that the problem with bootstrapping is circularity. Some forms of circularity might: (a) allow for the possibility of failure and (b) be consistent with an argument’s conclusion being ultimately based on things that actually support it. Consider an argument for memory’s reliability that relies on the fact that one has both a current apparent memory as of a previous seeming to remember X and a current apparent memory that X. Such an argument for memory’s reliability is circular in some sense. However, such a procedure could fail to reach the favorable conclusion. One could easily have a current apparent memory of previously seeming to remember parking one’s car in the west parking lot accompanied by a current apparent memory of the car having been in the east parking lot. Moreover, an apparent memory of X isn’t evidence of its own accuracy or reliability but the combination of an apparent memory of X with an apparent memory of a previous apparent memory of X is more plausibly construed as evidence of memory’s accuracy. Finally, I’m not claiming that bootstrapping generating justification for the conclusion is problematic! What is problematic is that, given the way we’ve rejected JR, the reasoning generates justification for the conclusion even though the ultimate basis for this conclusion fails to include anything that can plausibly be said to support it. One way to resolve our puzzle—my way—is to provide a way of allowing basic sources that still guarantees forming justified beliefs in the premises for bootstrapping requires that a subject uses materials that can act as adequate bases for believing the source is accurate/reliable.

  6. The regress is more vicious than I suggest in the main text. Even if we have an infinite supply of sources, the regress is vicious. If JR is true and we must appeal to an independent source in order to provide prior justification for a source’s reliability, there could never be an initial source to get the justificatory juices flowing.

  7. I don’t have the space to go into detail about why I reject other proposed solutions to bootstrapping. Nevertheless, there are interesting and important proposals that I should mention. First, Vogel (2008) attempts to avoid bootstrapping by adopting a principle that rules out rule-circularity. I admit that bootstrapping is rule-circular; the problem with Vogel’s proposal is that we can contrast bootstrapping with other rule-circular arguments where it’s obvious that the bootstrapping reasoning is worse than the other rule-circular arguments. Thus, rule-circularity doesn’t adequately capture what is problematic about bootstrapping. Second, there is Titelbaum’s (2010) diagnosis of bootstrapping as “no-lose investigations.” Fn. 5 suggests that I’m sympathetic with this diagnosis (with some qualifications). However, this is to tell us why bootstrapping is worrisome without providing a theory of justification that avoids the problem. Third, there is Weisberg’s (2010) appeal to a principle concerning defeaters that he calls the “no feedback principle.” Again, fn. 5 hints that I think Weisberg correctly identifies a problematic feature of bootstrapping, i.e. the bases of the premises of bootstrapping reasoning don’t by themselves constitute an adequate basis for (e.g. don’t make probable) the conclusion. Nevertheless, Weisberg’s no-feedback principle doesn’t adequately resolve our puzzle. I reject Weisberg’s no-feedback principle for the reasons given in Cohen (2010).

  8. The relevant notion of a basic inference is an epistemic and not a psychological concept. A basic inference is one that can confer justification absent a meta-belief about its reliability. What we might call a “psychologically basic inference” would just be an inference that we make absent any meta-belief about its reliability. An inference might be psychologically basic without being epistemically basic.

  9. IR is an inferential analogue of JR and similar to Fumerton’s (1995, 2004, 2006a, b) inferential internalism.

  10. See Fumerton (1995, 2004, 2006a, b) for additional cases motivating principles like IR.

  11. See Carroll (1895).

  12. This fact is often overlooked in the literature on the Lewis Carroll regress.

  13. Two anonymous reviewers rightly suggested that the regress for IR doesn’t arise as straightforwardly as I’ve suggested. The Carroll style regress assumes a subject must base her belief in the conclusion on the belief that the inference rule is reliable. IR says following an inference rule only transmits justification if one has justification for the meta-belief about the rule’s reliability, it doesn’t say that the subject must base the conclusion on the meta-belief. IR is a principle of a belief’s being propositionally justified. The Carroll style regress occurs at the level of doxastic justification (or well-foundedness). Justification for the meta-belief about the inference rule’s reliability is part of what provides justification for believing an output belief \(Q\). But in order for one’s belief to be justified (i.e. have doxastic justification) rather than merely to be justifiable (i.e. have propositional justification) one must base the belief on whatever it is that provides propositional justification. So, if IR is true, following an inference will transmit justification only if the subject bases the output belief on the relevant meta-belief. One possible maneuver here is to claim that the meta-belief isn’t providing propositional justification but is part of the basing relation itself. Such a view avoids the regress because the meta-belief is required for doxastic justification in virtue of being a component of the basing relation but, since the meta-belief isn’t providing propositional inferential justification, one needn’t base the inferred belief on the meta-belief. However, this response fails. If the meta-belief is merely meant to fulfill a basing requirement it isn’t clear why we should require that one needs justification for the meta-belief. IR construes the justification for the belief about the inference’s reliability as part of what provides the subject with assurance that the inferred belief is true. If it’s providing this assurance it looks like the meta-belief is providing propositional justification for the inferred belief, which leads to the relevant basing requirement. Moreover, imagine I have a justified belief \(P\) and that I have justification for believing that inference rule R is reliable. I form belief \(Q\) by applying rule R to my belief \(P\). However, if I don’t follow rule R because of my justification for the meta-belief (I follow the rule because I recently learned the name of the inference pattern and liked the sound of it) then, even though I have justification for the inferred belief, it doesn’t seem that the resulting belief is actually justified. Surely there is something epistemically problematic with my belief. This suggests that, if IR is true, doxastic justification would require basing an inferred belief on the justified meta-belief.

  14. Bootstrapping on MP may strike us as silly and irrelevant since we (i.e. ordinary humans) actually know a priori that reasoning in accordance with MP is reliable. There is no need for us to use the bootstrapping reasoning. Noting that MP’s reliability is knowable a priori doesn’t help to downplay bootstrapping worries. That we can know MP is reliable a priori only allows us to avoid using bootstrapping to generate the relevant justification; we must nevertheless permit such reasoning to generate justification. Just because one can have a priori justification for a belief doesn’t mean that one actually has that justification. In the case of the careless math student, algorithm A’s reliability is a necessary truth and surely know-able a priori. Bootstrapping is still problematic when we assume that the student doesn’t actually have this a priori justification. MP’s reliability may be obvious to us (normal humans) while the reliability of other more complicated deductively valid inference rules is not. Nevertheless, there are possible creatures where things are reversed. MP’s reliability is obscure and non-obvious to these creatures. If MP is a basic inference, we must permit these creatures to use bootstrapping to generate justification for beliefs about MP’s reliability. You might think that this just illustrates that MP isn’t justification conferring for us because its reliability is know-able a priori but because we actually have a priori justification for believing it’s reliable. MP isn’t justification conferring for the possible creatures under consideration because they don’t have the relevant a priori justification. Unfortunately, this is simply an appeal to IR and brings back the problems of over-intellectualization and Carroll style regress.

  15. Russell was the first philosopher to use term “acquaintance.” See Russell (1912). Recently, a variety of epistemologists have attempted to resurrect a kind of classical foundationalism by appealing to this notion of acquaintance. See Bonjour (2000, 2003, 2010), Fales (1996), Fumerton (1985, 1995, 2006a, b), Hasan (2013), McGrew and McGrew (2007), and Moser (1989) for attempts to resurrect an epistemology founded on the notion of acquaintance.

  16. As I mentioned in fn. 5, on my diagnosis bootstrapping is problematic but not because it’s circular. As such, it is perfectly consistent for me to say that bootstrapping is problematic while at the same time admitting that acquaintance with acquaintance could justify one in believing acquaintance exists.

  17. For discussions of the speckled hen see Feldman (2004), Fumerton (2005), Poston (2007), and Sosa (2009). Towards the end of his article, Feldman (2004) briefly mentions the solution via an appeal to a kind of attentive awareness that I prefer.

  18. I actually think it’s best to understand acquaintance not as attention itself but as a state being available for uptake by attention mechanisms. However, the reasons for this preference are tangential to my purposes in this paper. Nothing crucial will turn on whether we identify acquaintance with actually attending to a feature of my experience or that feature being available to attention.

  19. I’m not endorsing the view that acquaintance is a physical or natural relation. Rather, I’m merely pointing out that, when we identify acquaintance with attention, if one can give a naturalistic/physicalist explanation of mental states then there is no reason to think one can’t do the same for acquaintance.

  20. An anonymous reviewer suggested that the “only if” is too strong. Couldn’t a subject have a justified conceptual awareness of the fact that \(P\) supports \(Q\) without being non-conceptually aware of this fact (i.e. maybe a logician tells me that the inference is valid but I can’t “see” it directly myself)? Wouldn’t this be sufficient for me to be justified in inferring \(Q\)? I think something like this is possible. However, since one cannot actually directly see the connection between \(P\) and \(Q\), and one might even become justified in believing the connection is present when it isn’t, the justified meta-belief must be part of one’s basis for believing \(Q\). However, in such a case, part of what explains our justification for believing \(Q\) is our acquaitance with the fact that the beliefs that P and that there is an appropriate connection (entailment, reliability, etc.) between P and Q together support believing \(Q\). In this case the support relation between these premises and conclusion is so obvious to us (I’m not sure I can even imagine what it would be like to be aware of this combination of beliefs and fail to see that they jointly support believing \(Q\)) that we tend to ignore our awareness of it and fail to notice that it’s playing a crucial role in providing our justification.

  21. See Keynes (1921). See Fumerton (2004) for a detailed defense of identifying epistemic probability with something like the Keynesian notion of probability.

  22. The best one could do in an attempt to reduce facts about entailment to facts about relative frequencies is to reduce them to frequencies across all possible worlds. But even this proposed reduction will fail. The fact that \(P\) entails \(Q\) doesn’t obtain because of the fact that across all possible worlds \(Q\) is invariably true whenever \(P\) is true. We must remember that talk about possible worlds is metaphorical; the actual world is the one and only world and we must find truth-makers for claims about possible worlds in this world. What fact about the actual world acts as the truth-maker for the claim that across all possible worlds \(Q\) is invariably true whenever \(P\) is true? The best candidate is just the fact that \(P\) entails \(Q\). Thus, if anything, the relevant fact about relative frequencies across possible worlds holds because of certain facts about entailment relations. Facts about relative frequencies across possible worlds are reduced to facts about entailment not the other way around! Here I’m being somewhat cavalier in my dismissal of modal realism. See Lewis (1986) for a defense of modal realism. I’ll simply note that I hold the view that modal realism is quite implausible. Discussing the issue, however, would take us too far afield.

  23. See Cohen (1984) for the canonical presentation of the new evil-demon problem. Recently the new evil demon thought experiment is often used to motivate the idea that only current mental states (or perhaps only current conscious mental states) can provide epistemic support. However, the main lesson to learn from the new evil demon isn’t one about the states that can provide epistemic support but rather about the nature of the epistemic support relation itself.

  24. None of this commits me to saying that this is an easy task. Sometimes getting in a position where we “see” (i.e. are acquainted with) an epistemic support relation is incredibly difficult. In fact, in some cases it might be psychologically impossible for humans to become acquainted with an existing epistemic support relation.

  25. I use the term “evidence” in a way that some philosophers might find idiosyncratic. Evidence is in some sense a relational concept in that evidence is always evidence for some claim. Nevertheless, something’s being evidence doesn’t depend on its standing in any relation to an agent. On my usage, something can be evidence for believing a claim even if no one possesses that evidence. Having evidence is like having an apple. Something can be an apple even though no one possesses that apple. One consideration in favor of this conception is the idea that we can gather or find evidence to support various views or theories. We think of the evidence as being out there ready for us to find. But this presupposes that something can be evidence for a claim independently of our currently having that evidence. Some philosophers, however, might think that having evidence is more like having a golf partner. George cannot be a golf partner independently of someone having George as a golf partner (see Schroeder 2008).

  26. There is a difference between the way one’s awareness of the entailment relation provides justification for believing in the inference’s reliability absent the bootstrapping and with the bootstrapping. If one were to get justification for believing the conclusion absent the bootstrapping one would have a kind of foundational justification that depends on being acquainted with the entailment and acquainted with the fact that this entails the inference’s reliability (see Sect. 5’s acquaintance theory of foundational justification). However, when one goes through the bootstrapping one doesn’t (or at least might not) directly grasp the fact that the entailment entails reliability. Rather, one’s grasp of this support relation between the entailment and the reliability is had indirectly via one’s acquaintance with a chain of support relations. This is analogous to the following idea. Consider a necessarily true material conditional If P then Q. One might arrive at justification for believing this conditional in two different ways. First, one might be able to immediately see a priori that the entailment holds. Second, a person might be such that they cannot immediately see the connection between \(P\) and \(Q\). However, she might be able to see the connection between \(P\) and R, R and T, T and V, and V and Q in such a way that she can go through a conditional proof to arrive at justification for believing the conditional. Each is in a sense aware of the connection between \(P\) and \(Q\) but the former is directly aware of this connection and the latter is only indirectly aware of the connection via a chain of connections leading from \(P\) to \(Q\).

  27. As an anonymous reviewer correctly points out, given my distinction between evidence and justification, my view does have the result that while the bootstrapping doesn’t reveal new evidence for the reliability of MP it does produce new justification. However, I do not see this as problematic since, given how I’ve made room for basic sources, justified beliefs in the premises of the bootstrapping reasoning must be based on an acquaintance with the entailment. Thus, part of the ultimate basis for the conclusion of the bootstrapping reasoning is one’s acquaintance with the entailment relation. The fact that X entails Y is a good basis (or evidence) for the inference from X to Y being reliable. As such, I don’t see this result as problematic. The problem with bootstrapping is that the views considered earlier allowed an application of MP to transmit justification to \(Q\) when a subject had justified beliefs that \(P\) and if P then Q but lacked any awareness of the entailment. The ultimate basis for the conclusion that MP is reliable (i.e. the basis of the premises) didn’t have to include anything (e.g. the entailment) that actually supported this conclusion. This is the problem that I’ve avoided.

  28. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for mentioning this concern and pushing me to respond.

  29. It only makes sense to apply the concepts of infallibility or reliability to the beliefs that result from acquaintance. Clearly one’s belief that one is in pain is fallible. A person might base her belief on something other than her acquaintance with the relevant fact that she is in pain. In fact, someone’s justification via acquaintance might be fallible since, given the principle of foundational justification I present in Sect. 5, one might be acquainted with: (i) a non-doxastic state that merely makes probable (maybe it’s a seeming that they are in pain) the fact that they are in pain and (ii) the epistemic support relation itself. In such a case, one would have defeasible foundational justification for believing one is in pain. At this point you might ask what evidence we have that beliefs formed on the basis of acquaintance are reliable. Again I think this is to ask the wrong question. My acquaintance isn’t what reliably indicates or stands in an epistemic support relation to my belief that I’m in pain. It’s the object of my acquaintance that acts as evidence and epistemically supports my belief. My acquaintance is just part of what enables this evidence to be epistemically efficacious. Thus, the relevant question is what evidence I have for believing that the object of my acquaintance is a reliable indicator of my belief’s truth. We’ll see in Sect. 5 that the answer is that the epistemic support relation between my non-doxastic foundational evidence and my foundational belief is evidence with which I’m acquainted for the reliability of my non-doxastic foundational evidence.

  30. An anonymous reviewer pointed out another concern in this area. Even if acquaintance is factive there are cases where a subject believes she is acquainted with something that she isn’t. Why don’t we need evidence that we are reliable at distinguishing cases of genuine acquaintance from cases where we only falsely believe ourselves to be acquainted with some object. This is an incredibly interesting issue. However, it’s essentially an issue of how to respond to skeptical arguments from the possibility of deception but it’s somewhat tangential to dealing with the structural issue raised by bootstrapping. Moreover, one should (and many have) dedicate an entire paper to evaluating the implications of this skeptical possibility for the acquaintance theory. For nice discussions of the issue see Ballantyne (2012), Fumerton (1995, 2006b, 2010), Hasan (2013) [he doesn’t deal directly with the issue but his remarks are indirectly relevant], and Poston (2010). I think the correct response involves arguing that it rests on a level-confusion. Finding out that I’m acquainted with pain is relevant to justifying my belief that I’m justified in believing I’m in pain but not to justifying my belief that I’m in pain (an awareness of my awareness of pain doesn’t seem to provide any assurance in addition to that provided by my being aware of the pain). In order to be justified in believing I’m in pain I need only be acquainted with the fact that I’m in pain and the fact that this entails the truth of my belief that I’m in pain. I needn’t be justified in believing that I’m acquainted with my pain. The question of whether we can reliably distinguish genuine cases of acquaintance from illusory cases is relevant to assessing the higher-order belief that my belief is justified. Many acquaintance theorists have been adamant that one can appeal to acquaintance while rejecting access requirements on justification such as the JJ principle. I wish that I had time to say more about the challenge than I can say here. However, this issue is best tackled separately from the issue of bootstrapping since it’s best construed as a skeptical challenge from the possibility of deception rather than a worry about the structure of justification.

  31. This fact is the basis of Greco’s (1999) criticism that Fumerton’s principle of inferential justification fails to make a subject “sensitive” to a source’s reliability. What I say below can be used to respond to this kind of criticism. Also note that, as I mentioned earlier, things are different when we restrict our focus to the upper limit of a case where one’s evidence entails one’s belief. The fact that X entails Y itself entails that X is a reliable indicator of Y.

  32. One might be worried about how such a claim could be true given that there are an infinite number of possible worlds where each scenario holds. This arises from a skepticism that probabilities are well defined when the relevant event or fact belongs to an infinite class. However, I do think that we have an intuitive grasp on this idea. What we need is a measure on the worlds in order to determine the relevant ratio. What is the truth-maker that determines the proper measure and the resulting ratio? In my view the relevant truth-maker in the actual world is just the existence of the epistemic probability relation. In the same way that the existence of an entailment relation in the actual world is the truth-maker for certain claims about perfect reliability across all possible worlds. I actually take the fact that the non-reductive account of epistemic support can make sense of the claim that there are “more” possible worlds (when quantifying over all possible worlds) where the die lands without the 6-side face up than possible worlds where the die lands with the 6-side face up to be a mark in its favor.

  33. The examples from Hawthorne’s (2002) and Turri’s (2011) defense of the contingent a priori can also be modified so as to help illustrate this idea.

  34. The bootstrapping problem is a structural problem. I solve the structural problem by saying that if a non-doxastic state E supports \(P\) and one is acquainted with that support relation then one gets justification for the premises of the bootstrapping reasoning, but such reasoning isn’t problematic since it doesn’t produce justification for a claim for which we possess no evidence. Resolving the structural problem doesn’t require my defending the claim that a single perceptual experience as of \(P \)is in fact a basic source of justification that stands in an epistemic support relation to \(P\). One might suggest that it’s only when one has variety of experience as of \(P\) in multiple modalities (perhaps accompanied by non-doxastic memory experiences) that these experiences epistemically support believing \(P\). In which case, the basic source of foundational justification would be this set of non-doxastic experiences rather than any individual experience. If one adopted that view then my solution to the bootstrapping problem claims that in order for that set of experiences to provide foundational justification the subject must be acquainted with the set of experiences and acquainted with the fact that they support believing \(P\).

  35. This isn’t to say that moving up a level to a belief about a basic source’s reliability never improves one’s perspective on \(P\)’s truth. If we were to conclude that a basic source is reliable on the basis of an inductive argument that included independent checks on the source’s output, then this would improve our perspective on \(P\)’s truth. In this case we actually gain the additional evidence that different source’s outputs cohere with one another. This provides us with evidence for the basic source’s reliability of which we were not aware when first forming our belief via that source. Nonetheless, moving up a level via bootstrapping doesn’t improve one’s perspective on the first-level belief.

  36. FA and IA only state necessary conditions. A full account that gives necessary and sufficient conditions requires a ‘no-defeater’ clause. The general idea would just be that there is no larger set of facts \(f*\) with which one is acquainted such that \(f*\) doesn’t epistemically support the belief.

  37. See Fumerton (1995) for an example of a version of a strong acquaintance theory.

  38. Of course, there are stronger acquaintance theories that require a justified meta-belief about the truth-making relation even at the foundational level. See, for instance, Bonjour (2003) and Fales (1996). We might call these “super-strong” acquaintance theories. Such theories fall prey to the vicious regress objection. See Bergmann’s (2006) discussion of both Bonjour and Fales’ views for a particularly nice argument that these particular views fall prey to vicious regress.

  39. See Fumerton (1995, 2006a, b) and Leite (2008). Leite defends inferential internalism but makes no appeal to the traditional notion of acquaintance. He also attempts to defend an inferential internalism that is consistent with either a foundationalist or coherentist account of the structure of justification.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Richard Fumerton, Ali Hasan, Evan Fales, Gregory Landini, and David Cunning for their feedback while writing my dissertation during which time the ideas of this paper started to take form. I would also like to thank Ian MacMillan, Greg Stoutenburg, the anonymous reviewers, the audience at the 38th Midsouth Philosophy Conference, the audience at the 2014 Minnesota Philosophical Society Conference, and the audience at the 2014 Central States Philosophical Association Meeting for helpful feedback at various stages of this project.

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Taylor, S.A. Is justification easy or impossible? Getting acquainted with a middle road. Synthese 192, 2987–3009 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0697-1

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