General Remarks on Justification and Justified Belief

Abstract

In the last part we have given an explication of the concept of inference in general, and of monotonic and nonmonotonic inference in particular. In this part we will define what it means to say that an inference (monotonic or nonmonotonic) is justified, where the premise beliefs of the inferences that we think of are either perceptual beliefs or occurrent central state beliefs. This first chapter of part II is devoted to some introductory remarks concerning the topic of justification in general, and the topic of justified belief in particular. Chapter 6 presents our theory of justified inference informally, chapter 7 discusses the notion of reliability that is presupposed by our theory. Chapter 6 and 7 together motivate the formal details of chapter 8, where our theory of justified inference is finally stated.