The Notion of “Justification”. A Dual Concept?

Abstract

Epistemic “internalism” and “externalism” have been two dominant positions within justification theories. Intuitions underlying these positions are held to be contradictory and, thereby, it is not possible to make them converge into a unified theory. I will show that this is not only possible, but necessary. In order to do this, I will appeal to the Dual System Theory, and I will argue that if, (1) as this theory asserts, our reasoning abilities are structured into two different systems, then (2) we have good reasons to assert that the normative status that the notion of “justification” provides to our beliefs is dual, i.e., it offers evaluation criteria that should be differentially used for different kinds of beliefs, which are the result of each of our reasoning systems.