Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 75, 2018

Theories of Knowledge and Epistemology

Contexts of Assertion and Degrees of Justification

In the paper, I present the basis for a pragmatic, contextualist and inferentialist strategy for understanding the concept of degrees of justification. I argue that each context has certain inferential criteria in order to do correct assertions, and that there are different standards of justification for an assertion to be regarded as highly, moderately or poorly justified in that context. What is a high, medium or low standard of justification is relative to the community in which certain inferential practices take place. Finally, I identify the methods of justification that in every social context confer different degrees of justification to certain assertions.