Epistemic Justification——from The Debate Between Internalism And Externalism To The Group Justification

The topic of this paper is about the justification theory in contemporary epistemology. Since the Gettier Problem was presented, the traditional JTB theory had to face a bunch of serious challenges. Usually people will choose a way in the following scheme:the first choice is to stick to the traditional epistemology, but at the same time they need to make some modifications in traditional concept of justification; another way is more subversive, that will lead to abandoning the traditional concept of justification, even they keep the word "justification" in their theoretic system. What we mentioned above is the background of the debate between the internalism and externalism.This paper focuses on the debate between the internalism and externalism with reviewing the theories of Laurence Bonjour, Alvin Goldman, Michael Williams, Ernest Sosa, Roderick Chisholm, John Greco, Richard Foley and etc. The theories which will be reviewed include the way which tries to combine the epistemic responsibility and reliability from the view of epistemic justification’s construction, and the virtue theory which treats virtue more important than justification, and contextualism which treats context as a central factor, and virtue contextualism that want to combine the virtue theory and contextualism together.With the analysis of these theories, the author thinks that the central topic in the debate between internalism and externalism is about which is more essential for epistemic justification, epistemic responsibility or reliability? The author thinks the reasonableness of contextualism, virtue contextualism and group knowledge theory shows that we can rethink the epistemic responsibility and reliability from the view of sociality. In this point of view, the author thinks that the contradiction between internalism and externalism can to be solved. The way that the author appeals to is group justification. As the author think, the traditional JTB structure should not be abandon, only if we understand the justification is a kind of group justification, then we can get many benefits:we can keep the important position of epistemic responsibility, while the difficult of internalism is avoided; we can get the advantage of reliability, while the transcendent reliability is not necessary; we can give prominence to the epistemic agent, while the agent virtue is not necessary; we can stuck skepticism in a small jail, while the most (if not all) of knowledge we have will not lost.