Epistemic Justification — In epistemology, justification is the property that turns a mere true belief into knowledge, or at least into an epistemically responsible belief. The classical analysis of knowledge as “justified true belief” (JTB) traces back to Plato (Theaetetus) and remained canonical until Edmund Gettier showed, in a brief and celebrated 1963 article, that it is insufficient: there are cases in which an agent holds a justified true belief without possessing knowledge (the so-called “Gettier cases”). The debate about the nature of justification is organised around three rival theories. Foundationalism gives justification a hierarchical structure: there are basic beliefs, justified without depending on others, on which the rest rest by inference — Descartes’s classical foundationalism locates them in indubitable truths (the cogito), whereas Roderick Chisholm’s moderate foundationalism allows fallible basic beliefs. Coherentism denies that any belief is basic and holds that every belief is justified by its coherence with the total system, a position defended by Laurence BonJour; its classical problem is that a system can be internally coherent yet false. Reliabilism holds that a belief is justified if it is produced by a reliable belief-forming process, one that regularly yields truths — Alvin Goldman’s thesis in “What Is Justified Belief?” (1979). This contrast feeds the deepest axis of the debate: internalism versus externalism. The internalist (BonJour, Chisholm) requires that the justifying factors be internally accessible to the subject; the externalist (Goldman) allows that external factors, such as the causal reliability of the process, justify the belief even without the subject’s access. At bottom, subjective epistemic responsibility is set against the objective connection to truth.
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