This chapter talks about the naturalism and epistemic norms of inference. Norms of inference can be classified by analogy with the more familiar distinction between doxastic and propositional justification with respect to propositions. The chapter only considers the analog of doxastic justification for inferences, and token inferences. It focuses on the epistemic status of basic inferences, an inference whose epistemic status is not derived from those of the subject's other inferences or beliefs. However, versions of the Open Question Argument (OQA) are liable to be raised as objections to the naturalizing strategy under development. The strategy of appealing to a non-propositional insight offers a promising way to avoid the risks inherent in invoking epistemic reliance on something that looks too much like an additional premise. The chapter sketches the outlines of an epistemological account of how some basic inferential moves have the epistemic status of solidity.

The truism that adopting an unjustified belief does not put one in a better evidential position with respect to believing its consequences leads most philosophers to conclude that bare belief is insufficient for the having relation involved in subjective evidence. This chapter presents alternative explanation of PP, the truism that when a belief lacks propositional justification, it does not contribute to the propositional justification for its consequences. The assumption of a high bar on what it takes to have evidence, despite its overwhelming initial plausibility, has been complicating the dialectic about basic perceptual epistemology, and consequently the dialectic about foundationalism and coherentism, internalism and externalism, and rationalism and empiricism, for a very long time. Beliefs can be justified or unjustified because they fall under the reach of rational criticism, and they fall under the reach of rational criticism because they are states that we hold for reasons.