The philosophy papers blog has been updated to reflect a paper that I missed this morning. (I’d been looking at the wrong page it seems. My bad.) Jim Pryor has posted a new paper on non-inferential justification which looks rather interesting. (Actually, it’s a new version of a paper that’s been up on his site for a while, but I missed the old versions too because, as said, I was looking at the wrong page.) Here’s the abstract for the paper.

[This paper] articulates a notion of immediate or “non-inferential” justification, cites some apparent examples of it, and then examines at length a familiar coherentist argument against the possibility of such justification. That argument was traditionally employed against “the Given Theory”; but it threatens to have much broader scope. It is driven by a principle I call the “Premise Principle,” which says that a belief in P cannot be justified except by other representational states whose contents are premises that inferentially support P. One can accept that Principle and still be a foundationalist, but many foundationalists will want to reject it. I argue that the Premise Principle is unmotivated.