Judgment as a Guide to Belief

The chapter investigates the way in which our conscious judgments can be a guide to our beliefs, a topic discussed by Gareth Evans, Richard Moran, Christopher Peacocke, and Alex Byrne, among others. The chapter argues that our conscious judgments can give us a kind of justification to self-ascribe beliefs which is (i) distinctively first-personal, (ii) non-inferential, and (iii) fallible. The chapter then defends my view from a challenge from ‘constitutivist’ views in the epistemology of introspection, defended by philosophers such as Sydney Shoemaker, according to which only our beliefs themselves give us justification to self-ascribe beliefs.