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Chapter 4 - What Is Epistemic Entitlement?

Reliable Competence, Reasons, Inference, Access

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 July 2020

By
Peter J. Graham
Edited by
Christoph Kelp  and
John Greco
Christoph Kelp
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
John Greco
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington DC
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Summary

Tyler Burge first introduced his distinction between epistemic entitlement and epistemic justification in ‘Content Preservation’ in 1993. He has since deployed the distinction in over twenty papers, changing his formulation around 2011. His distinction and its basis, however, is not well understood in the literature. This chapter distinguishes two uses of ‘entitlement’ in Burge and then focuses on the contrast between justification and entitlement, two forms of warrant, where warrants consists in the exercise of a reliable belief-forming competence. Since he draws the distinction in terms of reasons, this chapter brings his account of reasons altogether in one place. The chapter introduces a decision-procedure for classifying warrants as justifications or entitlements. The distinction is not the same as the inferential vs. non-inferential distinction. Inference is distinguished from processing, thinking, reasoning, and critically reasoning. Burge’s new formulation of the distinction was driven by the recognition of non-accessible modular reasons. Three kinds of access are distinguished.

Keywords

Tyler Burgeentitlementjustificationreasonswarrantepistemic competencereliabilisminferenceaccess
Type
Chapter
Information
Virtue Theoretic Epistemology
New Methods and Approaches
 , pp. 93 - 123
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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