Anna-Sara Malmgren (Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences), "Goodness, availability, and argument structure"
Synthese, 2021
By Anna-Sara Malmgren
This is probably my best paper yet — well, my most original idea anyway. Would love to know what’s wrong with it. Here’s the abstract:
According to a widely shared generic conception of inferential justification—‘the standard conception’—an agent is inferentially justified in believing that p only if she has antecedently justified beliefs in all the non-redundant premises of a good argument for p. This conception tends to serve as the starting-point in contemporary debates about the nature and scope of inferential justification: as neutral common ground between various competing, more specific, conceptions. But it’s a deeply problematic starting-point. This paper explores three questions that haven’t been given the attention they deserve, that complicate the application of the standard conception to cases, and that reveal it to be underspecified at the core—in ways that aren’t resolved but inherited by more specific (extant) versions of it. The goal isn’t to answer the questions, but to articulate them, explain what turns on them, and invite a critical re-examination of the standard conception.
Would love to be able to read it.
It's a great paper! But I don't completely agree with your view. My deepest disagreement is that, in my opinion, your view is still too close to the standard conception. In my judgment, the standard conception is mistaken at a more fundamental level: fundamentally, it's a kind of foundationalism, which I believe to be ultimately indefensible, and so it needs to be replaced with a more radically different conception of rational inference.