According to a widely held view epistemic justification is a normative notion. According to another widely held assumption, epistemic justification comes in degrees. Given that gradability requires a context-sensitivity that normativity seems to lack, these two assumptions stand in tension. Giving up the assumption of gradability of justification represents a lesser theoretical cost.

Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot tell us that we live in a plural world in which actions are justified in multiple ways. Moreover, Anne Marie Mol argues that things, certainly including animals, are always multiple, their very existence dependent on the particular practices in which they are implicated. Thus, animal welfare policies must be understood in light of both the ways in which animals are ‘practiced’ and the particular justifications provided for these practices. Such policies make claims based on the practices involved in animal-human interactions and are justified based on appeals to the scientific (industrial), civic, market, and domestic worlds, among others. Thus, animal welfare policies must necessarily involve compromises among both the multiple ways in which animals are ‘practiced’ and the multiple ways in which those policies may be justified.

Most prior research on the compromise effect has focused on single rather than multiple choices. This research investigates the potential effects of purchase quantity on the compromise effect. We propose that the share of the middle option in a trinary choice set decreases as the purchase quantity increases, because people tend to employ a balance heuristic to distribute their multiple choices among the available options to achieve a balanced state and to satisfy their variety-seeking tendency. Furthermore, we propose that the need for justification and an optimal stimulation level moderate the relationship between the number of purchase items and the compromise effect. These proposed hypotheses are supported by results from three experiments.

In this paper I use insights from exploratory analyses on large English language corpora to consider the extent to which there is a widely used ordinary notion of justification that attaches to beliefs. I will show that this has ramifications for one broad approach to theorising about justification – the folk justification approach. I will argue that the corpus-based findings presented pose a challenge to the folk justification approach insofar as they suggest that “justify” is not widely used talk about the justification of our beliefs. I will conclude by presenting the possible solutions to this challenge, and remarking on their feasibility.

There is now a significant body of literature on consequentialist ethics that propose satisficing instead of maximizing accounts. Even though epistemology recently witnessed a widespread discussion of teleological and consequentialist theories, a satisficing account is surprisingly not developed yet. The aim of this paper is to do just that. The rough idea is that epistemic rules are justified if and only if they satisfice the epistemic good, i.e., reach some threshold of epistemic value (which varies with practical context), and believing is justified if and only if it follows said rules.

I argue that this alternative to the implicitly established way of thinking in maximizing terms has significant advantages. First, maximizing epistemic value can be unreasonably demanding; second, a satisficing theory can make finding reasonable rules for belief formation and sustenance much more accessible; and third, a satisficing approach is a better alternative to both general subjectivist and maximizing objectivist attempts to spell out epistemic blame.

To address complex social problems, such as long-term unemployment, local authorities in many countries are developing “holistic” or “integrated” services, where multiple actors and professions collaborate with a view to better meet the needs of the individual citizen. By breaking with existing practices and regulations, collaborative services must be legitimized in new ways so as to appear acceptable not only in the eyes of the public and politicians, but also to caseworkers and the long-term unemployed persons. This article examines the multifarious and sometimes neglected efforts to make these collaborative services legitimate in the eyes of this plurality of stakeholders on multiple levels of governance. Our study indicates three distinct but mutually interrelated spheres of audience that require partly conflicting justification work. We also find that the narrow pursuit of justification work to ensure legitimacy with one audience may potentially jeopardize the justification work in the other two.

Knowledge is widely regarded as being incompatible with epistemic luck, but according to several philosophers, the same does not hold for understanding. This paper examines to what extent understanding is vulnerable to epistemic luck. After discussing the weaknesses of some of the cases that have been offered to support the conclusion that understanding tolerates environmental epistemic luck, I turn to a more recent one offered in favour of the opposite conclusion. I argue that this case does not manage to establish that understanding is vulnerable to environmental luck; this even if the fact that understanding comes in degrees is taken into account. Finally, I examine the vulnerability of understanding to intervening luck – the type of luck present in classical Gettier cases – and conclude that when such luck is present, one's understanding is necessarily sub-optimal; a conclusion that does not hold, according to what I argue, when it comes to environmental luck.

Justification theory is a general framework for the definition of semantics of rule-based languages that has a high explanatory potential. Nested justification systems, first introduced by Denecker et al., allow for the composition of justification systems. This notion of nesting thus enables the modular definition of semantics of rule-based languages, and increases the representational capacities of justification theory. As we show in this paper, the original characterization of semantics for nested justification systems leads to the loss of information relevant for explanations. In view of this problem, we provide an alternative characterization of their semantics and show that it is equivalent to the original one. Furthermore, we show how nested justification systems allow representing fixpoint definitions.

To resolve the lottery paradox, the “no-justification account” proposes that one is not justified in believing that one's lottery ticket is a loser. The no-justification account commits to what I call “the Harman-style skepticism”. In reply, proponents of the no-justification account typically downplay the Harman-style skepticism. In this paper, I argue that the no-justification reply to the Harman-style skepticism is untenable. Moreover, I argue that the no-justification account is epistemically ad hoc. My arguments are based on a rather surprising finding that the no-justification account implies that people living in Taiwan typically suffer from the Harman-style skepticism.

The evil-god challenge is a challenge for theists to show that belief in God is more reasonable than belief in evil-god. In this article, I show that whether or not evil-god exists, belief in evil-god is unjustified. But this isn't the case for belief in God: belief in God is probably justified if theism is true. And hence belief in God is (significantly) more reasonable than belief in evil-god, and the evil-god challenge has been answered.

People often use personal stories to support and defend their views. But can a personal story be evidence? A story tells us that a certain event can happen and has already happened to someone, but it may not always help us understand what caused the event or predict how likely that event is to happen again in the future. Moreover, people confabulate. That is, when they tell stories about their past, they are likely to distort reality in some way. When people who lack access to what motivated past behaviour are asked why they made a choice, they tend to offer plausible considerations in support of that choice, even if those considerations could not have played a motivating role in bringing about their behaviour. When people experience impairments in autobiographical memory, they tend to fill the gaps in their own story by reconstructing significant events to match their interests, values, and conception of themselves. This means that people often offer a curated version of the events they describe. In this paper, we argue that the pervasiveness of confabulation does not rule out that personal stories can be used as evidence but invites us to reflect carefully about what they are evidence of. And this is especially important in the context of digital storytelling, because stories shared on online platforms can exert even greater influence on what people think and do.

Informed by moral economy theories, this article presents a qualitative study of the normative construction of and contestation over a new in-work benefit in Hong Kong, the Low-income Working Family Allowance (LIFA). Using a policy stakeholder approach to examining the public’s ideas and justifications of LIFA, the findings reveal the eligibility-defined entitlement shared by claimants, scepticism towards long working hours conditionality required by LIFA, complex understanding of deservingness and self-reliance, and dissatisfaction with the closing gap between welfare and wages. This article connects moral economy theories to the normative basis of a social security system, offering insights for capturing the dynamics of consensus and controversies about social welfare. It also extends the research on morality and social welfare from Western countries to an Asian context. The case of Hong Kong evidences how policy stakeholders make moral sense of a new welfare in the absence of social right language.