Our Errant Epistemic Aim

Abstract

Often the first issue addressed by a theory of justified belief is the aim, goal, purpose, or objective of epistemic justification.' What, in short, is the point of epistemic justification?Or, to put it a bit differently, why value justification: why is it worth having or pursuing?2Prominent epistemologists, including both externalists and internalists, have proposed (or sometimes just assumed) the following answer: the ultimate aim of epistemic justification is to maximize true belief and minimize false belief.This answer specifies what I'll call the "nominal aim," an aim that gets endorsed (sometimes with qualifications) by a number of well-known accounts of justification.William Alston, an externalist with certain internalist scruples,3 is among the most explicit champions of the nominal aim: Epistemic evaluation is undertaken from what we might call the "epistemic point of view."That point of view is defined by the aim at maximizing truth and minimizing falsity in a large body of beliefs.... [Ojur central cognitive aim is to amass a large body of beliefs with a favorable truth-falsity ratio.For a belief to be justified is for it.. to be awarded high marks relative to that aim.... [A]ny concept of epistemic justification is a concept of some condition that is desirable or commendable from the standpoint of the aim at maximizing truth and minimizing falsity....4 I will be using "goal," "aim," "purpose," "point," and "objective" interchangeably, since I take the concept I have in mind to be captured by any of those terms.Just the same, I am happy to speak instead of the "value of justification" or the "reason that justification is valuable," in case one finds talk of the "aim of justification" uncongenial (see note 2). 2In correspondence, William Alston has objected to the notion that justification, i.e. the status of being justified, has an aim, since, unlike activities, statuses do not typically have aims.I'm therefore content to speak of the value of justification and to understand claims about its aim as claims about its value.For details on Alston's hybrid view of justification, see "An Internalist Externalism," in Alston (1989), 227-45.In the remainder of this paper I will focus on Alston's theory of justification, not because I find it uniquely problematic but principally because Alston is such an explicit proponent of the nominal aim; his theory, then, serves as a natural illustration of its perils.4