Empirical Justification

by Paul K. Moser

Broadly speaking, this is a book about truth and the criteria thereof. Thus it is, in a sense, a book about justification and rationality. But it does not purport to be about the notion of justification or the notion of rationality. For the assumption that there is just one notion of justification, or just one notion of rationality, is, as the book explains, very misleading. Justification and rationality come in various kinds. And to that extent, at least, we should recognize a variety of notions of justification and rationality. This, at any rate, is one of the morals of Chapter VI. This book, in Chapters I-V, is mainly concerned with the kind of justification and rationality characteristic of a truth-seeker, specifically a seeker of truth about the world impinging upon the the so-called empirical world. Hence the book's title. But since the prominent contemporary approaches to empirical justification are many and varied, so also are the epistemological issues taken up in the following chapters. For instance, there will be questions about so-called coherence and its role, if any, in empirical justification. And there will be questions about social consensus (whatever it is) and its significance, or the lack thereof, to empirical justification. Furthermore, the perennial question of whether, and if so how, empirical knowledge has so-called founda­ tions will be given special attention.

258 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 1985

About the author

Paul Moser is an American analytic philosopher who writes on epistemology and the philosophy of religion. He is professor and chair of the Department of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago and editor of American Philosophical Quarterly. He is the author of many works in epistemology and the philosophy of religion, in which he has supported versions of epistemic foundationalism and volitional theism. His latest work brings these two positions together to support volitional evidentialism about theistic belief, in contrast to fideism and traditional natural theology. His work draws from some epistemological and theological insights of Blaise Pascal, John Oman, and H. H. Farmer, but adds (i) a notion of purposively available evidence of God’s existence, (ii) a notion of authoritative evidence in contrast with spectator evidence, and (iii) a notion of personifying evidence of God whereby some willing humans become salient evidence of God's existence.