Epistemic Justification and Higher-Order Requirements

Traditionally, many have imposed higher-order requirements on epistemic justification. That is, many have argued that for a belief to be epistemically justified, it not only needs to satisfy first-order requirements, such as being formed via a reliable process or supported by sufficient evidence, but also some higher-order requirement that bears on the way the belief is formed. For example, BonJour (1980) has famously argued that a clairvoyance belief, however reliable, is not justified unless one also has a justified belief that one’s beliefs formed via clairvoyance are reliable. More recently, some have argued for higher-order requirements for inferentially justified beliefs. That is, for example, that inferential beliefs are only justified if we take the reasons for which those beliefs are formed to support the belief. While there is a common underlying theme, these proposals differ with respect to the kind of higher-order state they require. Some proposals require (justified) higher-order beliefs, while others require higher-order evidence or higher-order awareness. This paper sets out to systematically discuss different kinds of higher order requirements and the objections they face. While I will argue that there are good reasons to think that epistemic justification needs a built-in higher order requirement, I will argue that only so-called evidential requirements are able to guard off well-known objections. In particular, I will demonstrate that the evidentialist no-defeater clause I recently proposed in Graf (2025), can be understood as a general higher-order requirement which does not only explain the intuitions motivating such requirements, but also enables us to avoid common objections.