Here’s an argument that we cannot identify justified beliefs with blameless beliefs. I don’t think the argument is entirely original. The argument is really just an abstraction from an example at the end of an “old paper by Jim Pryor”:http://www.jimpryor.net/research/papers/Highlights.pdf (PDF), and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone else had given just this example. But I haven’t seen it before, which is enough to write it here!
The argument requires two assumptions.
A1. It is possible to have a justified but false belief that p.
A2. If one is blameless in believing that one is justified in believing that p, and on that basis one infers p, then one’s belief that p is blameless.
A1 seems hard to deny. It is a very widespread belief that some false beliefs are justified. And there seems to be no reason why beliefs about justification should be special in this respect.
A2 might be more controversial, but I think it’s also true. Obviously the inference from I’m justified in believing that p to p is not an entailment. But there are a lot of blameless ampliative inferences, and it is hard to think of an ampliative schema that is any less blameworthy than this one. So I think both assumptions are true.
Call the principle that justification is identical to blameless the J=B principle. I’m now going to derive a contradiction from A1, A2 and J=B.
# S justifiedly, but falsely, believes that she is justified in believing p. (Assumption – A1)
# On the basis of this belief, S comes to believe that p. (Assumption)
# S blamelessly believes that she is justified in believing that p (1, J=B)
# S blamelessly believes that p (2, 3, A2)
# S is justified in believing that p (4, J=B)
# It is false that S is justified in believing that p (1)
One of A1, A2 and J=B has to go. And I think it’s got to be J=B.
Note that this does not mean that justification is not a deontological concept. But the kind of deontological conception of justification that is left standing by this argument is quite different to J=B, and I think to existing deontological conceptions of justification. Here’s what it would look like.
First, we say that a belief’s being justified is not a matter of it being _blameless_, but a matter of it being in a certain way _praiseworthy_. Second, we say that the inference from I’m justified in believing that p to p is not praiseworthy if the premise is false. So if we tried to run the above argument against J=P (the premise that justified beliefs are praiseworthy) it would fail at step 4. This is inconsistent with very strong kinds of internalism, though it is probably consistent with _mentalism_ as Conee and Feldman define it.