Oxford University Press Justification as Ignorance: An Essay in Epistemology

Justification as Ignorance offers an original account of epistemic justification as both non-factive and luminous, vindicating core internalist intuitions without construing justification as an internal condition knowable by reflection alone. Sven Rosenkranz conceives of justification, in its doxastic and propositional varieties, as a kind of epistemic possibility of knowing and of being in a position to know. His account contrasts with recent alternative views that characterize justification in terms of the metaphysical possibility of knowing. Instead, he develops a suitable non-normal multi-modal epistemic logic for knowledge and being in a position to know that respects the finding that these notions create hyperintensional contexts. He also defends his conception of justification against well-known anti-luminosity arguments, shows that the account allows for fruitful applications and principled solutions to the lottery and preface paradoxes, and provides a metaphysics of justification and its varying degrees of strength that is compatible with core assumptions of the knowledge-first approach and disjunctivist conceptions of mental states. About the Author Sven Rosenkranz is ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona. Since 2014 he has been coordinator of the consolidated research group in analytic philosophy LOGOS, and from 2019 until 2021 serves as PI of the research project 'Justification, its Structure and Grounds'. In 2018 he was elected member of the Academia Europaea.