Justification-Skepticism, Strong Truth-Conduciveness, and Epistemic Assurance

Todd R. Long

University of Notre Dame

Richard Fumerton has identified a radical strain of skepticism that has worried epistemologists at least since David Hume.  I call it justification-skepticism, the view that we cannot be epistemically justified, on balance, in believing (rather than disbelieving) propositions about the external physical world, the past, the future, and other minds.  It is a more radical form of skepticism than is knowledge-skepticism, since justification-skepticism implies that we cannot meet even a low standard of epistemic justification; accordingly, justification-skepticism implies that none of our target beliefs enjoys any positive epistemic status whatsoever.  A typical argument for justification-skepticism runs as follows:  Suppose your sensory experience SE with respect to proposition p (there is a tree in front of me) just is your evidence with respect to p; (1) You have no good reason to believe that SE entails p; (2) You have no good reason to believe that SE makes probable p; (3) If (1) and (2), then you are not epistemically justified in believing p; (C): You are not epistemically justified in believing p.  My paper attempts to satisfy three goals:  first, to show that Fumerton's diagnosis of a solution to the justification-skepticism challenge renders the skeptical account of epistemic justification easier to satisfy than it actually is; second, to provide good reasons to think that the arguments for justification-skepticism support skeptical conclusions only on an interpretation of premises (2) and (3) that assumes an epistemic assurance condition on epistemic justification, as well as what I call the strong truth-conduciveness thesis (i.e., necessarily, an epistemically justified belief is more likely to be true than false).  I argue, however, that the conclusions that follow from the relevant interpretation fail to support the claim that our beliefs cannot enjoy any positive epistemic status.  Hence, the arguments for justification-skepticism do not give us good reason to believe that we cannot be epistemically justified, on balance, in believing the target kinds of propositions.