Justification (II). From Reasons to Reasoning

Workshop organized as part of the ANR KNOWJUST research project (Knowledge, metacognition and modes of justification, scientific manager : Claudine Tiercelin), in collaboration with the Institut Jean Nicod.

In the twentieth century, epistemology developed in a climate of relative indifference to the investigation of mental processes. By putting the essential link between reasons (to believe, to act) and reasoning back at the center of questioning, the workshop hopes to enrich our understanding of the notion of justification with contributions from cognitive science and evolutionary psychology.

Presentation

Despite the close connection of epistemology and psychology until the end of the^19th century, epistemological inquiries about the justification of knowledge have been led quite independently of our explanations about the way the mind actually works. Lately, a unifying tendency may nevertheless be noticed in some questionings common to epistemology and philosophy of mind. The aim of the workshop is to bring those attempts together in raising the question of the mental nature of justification. How do the epistemological and psychological approaches of justification relate to one another? Post-Gettier epistemology developed a rather abstract concept of justification based on the existence of (internal or external) reasons. The workshop wonders how such reasons are implemented in our actual reasoning processes, once cognitive psychology has shown them to be much more complex than in the Aristotelian model. The hypothesis is that, on the one hand, what it is for an agent to be justified in holding a given belief commits to a certain conception of what cognitive processes are or should be like, and that, reciprocally, our concept of the mind commits to certain accounts in our epistemology of knowledge. In slipping from reasons to reasoning, traditional normative matters of epistemology are expected to give way to new, fruitful approaches.