Peter Dennis (LSE): “What is Interpersonal Justification?”

Abstract: We seek not only to be justified in our beliefs, but also to justify our beliefs to one another. While traditional epistemology has focused on the former kind of justification (viz. personal justification), it is through the latter kind (viz. interpersonal justification) that our most successful forms of enquiry make progress. Contrary to the received view, I argue that interpersonal justification cannot be analysed in terms of personal justification. Instead, it is a form of collective deliberation which allows us to place one another under irreducibly second-personal intellectual obligations. Epistemology must therefore reckon with it directly if it is to be relevant to our best epistemic practices.