Two Pre-theoretic Counterexamples to Justification Holism in the Epistemology of Logic

Abstract An abductivist approach to the epistemology of logic has recently gained traction. A necessary component of logical abductivism is justification holism, asserting that claims of logical entailment can be justified only in the context of an entire logical theory, for example, classical, intuitionistic, and so on. One view that is incompatible with abductivism is an atomistic view on which individual entailment claims can be justified pointwise rather than in the context of a whole theory. This paper provides two atomistic counterexamples to justification holism in the epistemology of logic. Both examples appeal to pre-theoretic commitments of deductive validity. The main aim is to show that there are some foundational entailment claims for which we can have propositional justification independently of theory choice and outside the context of a whole logical theory. If one were to give up on these foundational claims, all semantic and syntactic accounts of deductive validity would be non-starters.