Justified Belief and Epistemically Responsible Action

ne of the central projects of epistemological theorizing is the task of discovering the rules of ideal reasoning, both deductive and nondeductive. Another project involves appraising the beliefs of particular agents, or of particular communities. One obvious way to carry out this second project, assuming that the first has been completed, is to compare the manner which the subject under study arrived at the belief question with the rules of ideal reasoning. If the inferences made by the subject are licensed by the rules, then the belief is justified; if they are not, the belief is unjustified. Here we take a God's-eye view and hold our subject up to the highest standard of good reasoning. Setting our standards this high is often precisely what we wish to do. It is often useful and interesting to see the extent to which a subject's patterns of reasoning differ from the ideal. In this kind of evaluation, we remove our subject from his historical context and compare his reasoning with that of an ideal subject, out of time, whose reasoning is uninfluenced by the fads and fashions of a community, and informed only by objectively right principles of reason. By appraising subjects' beliefs this way, we are able to see the extent to which individuals or communities progress toward the ideal. This is not, of course, the only standard by which one might reasonably appraise a subject's beliefs. Many subjects will, of course, fall short of the ideal. More importantly, subjects will often fall short of the ideal through no fault of their own. Rules of ideal reasoning are not easily come by, and it does not always show some shortcoming on the part of the subject that his reasoning was less than ideal. Sometimes we wish to know whether a subject was reasoning as best he could, where this does not simply mean in accord with rules of ideal reasoning; we want to know whether the extent to which the subject departed from the ideal was his own fault.