The aim of this talk is to clear space for a new account of the value of epistemic justification. I argue that there are two constraints on such an account: it must explain both the motivational force of justification-considerations and their normativity. None of the existing accounts, I show, meets both constraints: pragmatic and moral accounts breach both, while concept-of-belief accounts breach the normative. So, we should look elsewhere for the value of epistemic justification. A fruitful place to look, I suggest, is agency, in particular David Velleman’s proposal that the hallmark of agency is our drive for explanatory coherence. This drive, I argue, plausibly sources both the motivational and normative force of justification-considerations, while also making sense of the recent move in epistemology toward understanding justification in terms of normalcy.
