Dario Mortini: Epistemic Justification and the Folk Conceptual Gap

Tuesday March 12 2024 @13:00 (CEST)
Sala B, Edificio de Humanidades, UNED & online

Abstract
Recent experimental epistemology has devoted increasing attention to folk attributions of epistemic justification. Empirical studies have tested whether lay people ascribe justification in specific lottery-style vignettes (Friedman & Turri 2014, Turri & Friedman 2015, Ebert et al. 2018), and also to more ordinary beliefs (Nolte et al. 2021). In this talk, I highlight some crucial but hitherto uncritically accepted assumptions underlying these studies, and I argue that they are untenable. Central to my criticism is the observation that epistemic justification is a philosophical term of art foreign to lay people: as such, it is not suitable for direct empirical testing without previously being introduced. This point reveals a folk conceptual gap between the subject matter of these experimental studies and the conceptual repertoire we can reasonably expect lay people to possess. I elaborate on this worry, and I end on a cautiously optimistic note: after suggesting better strategies to survey folk attributions of epistemic justification, I conclude that the challenge raised by the folk conceptual gap remains difficult but can in principle be addressed.

Bio
Dario Mortini is a postdoctoral researcher at the Barcelona Institute of Analytic Philosophy (BIAP), and a senior member of LOGOS. His research lies at the intersection of epistemology and the philosophy of (evidence) law.