Jiusi Guo
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
The reliabilist theory of justification has it that there exists a justification-truth link: Roughly, a person S is justified in believing that p iff S’s belief that p is produced by a process that tends to output true beliefs over false ones. Stewart Cohen disagrees. In his “Justification and Truth” (1984), Cohen proposes the New Evil Demon problem to debunk the justification-truth link by showing that an agent may have justified beliefs even though her belief-producing processes are unreliable. The theoretical doctrine behind Cohen’s argument is to explicate epistemic justification as a normative phenomenon realized in psychologically ideal circumstances. In this paper, I argue that epistemic justification cannot be explicated in this manner because such a move would invite anti-justification skepticism. Accordingly, the New Evil Demon problem, as a thought experiment constructed upon a skepticism-conducive interpretation of epistemic justification, does not posit any epistemological challenge to reliabilism and can be dismissed by reliabilists.
Chair: Sebastián Sánchez Martínez
Time: September 6th, 15:20-15:50
Location: SR 1.004
SOPhiA 2026 