Inference, Logical Omniscience, and Fortunate Fallacies

Having justification for inferring a conclusion from some premises is independent of seeing how to make that inference. But if you do make the inference, then your belief in the conclusion is justified based on those premises. These natural thoughts about inference and justification generate two puzzles. One concerns logical omniscience, and the other concerns inferences to correct conclusions via fallacious rules. In this paper I introduce and develop what I call the Inferential Parsing Hypothesis as a way of resolving these two puzzles. The hypothesis recruits an analogy between inferential processes and syntactic parsing processes to motivate novel epistemic theses about the nature of inferential basing.