Abstract
Professor Thayer's helpful queries provide a welcome opportunity to clarify my distinction of criteria of evidence versus guidelines for the conduct of inquiry, and my understanding of the contrasts personal/impersonal, individual/social, objective/subjective/relative. Articulating criteria of evidence differs from giving guidelines for the conduct of inquiry as articulating criteria of nutritiousness differs from giving directions for menu-planning [p. 203]-or as the project of the Meditations differs from the project of the Regulae. I see the conduct-of-inquiry project as even harder than the criteria-of-evidence project; while the desideratum of criteria of evidence, truth-indicativeness, is straightforward, there is potential for tension between the two aspects of the goal of inquiry, truth and substance (as between nutrition and palatability). Reliabilist theories of justification run the two projects together. The aspiration to explain justified belief as belief arrived at by a good procedure is Procrustean, distorting both justification and method. I was mainly concerned not with procedure or method, but with evidence, justification. Here the primary explicandum is personal and individual: "A is more/less justified...." For empirical justification depends ultimately on experience, which is had by individuals; and two persons may believe the same thing, one justifiedly, the other unjustifiedly. Whether, or to what degree, A is justified in believing that p depends, as my first approximation put it, on how good his evidence-his evidence-is [p. 74; cf. pp. 108-9]. The personal character of my explication goes deeper than its individual character. I acknowledged [p. 79] that in much of what one justifiably believes one relies on others; though how justified I am in believing what you tell me depends in part on how justified I am in believing you justified. And, far from denying, as Thayer says, that it is possible to make sense of talk of the degree of justification of a group of individuals, I suggested an explication: the degree of justification of a hypothetical individual whose evidence included all the evidence of every member of the group, discounted by some
