Intellectual Responsibility

This is a thesis in epistemology that I wrote in 2008 while studying for a BPhil in Philosophy at Oxford University. It was successful, thanks in no small part to my supervisors, Professor John Hawthorne and Dr. Ralph Walker, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. Any comments are very welcome. -- Thomas Ash

Summary of the arguments

In this thesis, I develop an account of justified belief as intellectually responsible belief, and employ it to judge various philosophical claims about justification. In Chapter 1, I explicate the concept of intellectual responsibility. I identify intellectually responsible belief with belief that the believer has tried hard enough to ensure is accurate, in a sense which I develop over the course of the first section. I then argue that the concept of intellectual responsibility is relatively unrelated to that of knowledge, but is identical with one historically prominent concept of justification. Finally, I examine whether this is in any sense an internalist concept of justification.

In Chapter 2, I describe a test which I employ in the remainder of the thesis to judge claims that certain beliefs cannot be justified. I use it to refute claims that beliefs with deviant causal histories, or without what Laurence BonJour calls a ‘metajustification’, cannot be justified. In the course of doing so, I further illustrate what intellectual responsibility involves.

In Chapter 3, I employ my test to refute a familiar argument for radical scepticism, which proceeds from the premise that we lack evidence for the belief that certain ‘sceptical possibilities’ do not obtain. I argue that this belief could be justified even so, when we understand justification as intellectual responsibility. In Chapter 4, I develop this conclusion to cover other beliefs for which we lack evidence, exhibiting some of the other implications of this understanding of justification.

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