The Holism of Doxastic Justification

I argue against the orthodox view of doxastic justification, according to which a belief of a given subject is justified for her just in case the subject has a good reason for the belief and she also bases the belief on that reason. The orthodox view is false, I maintain, because there might be unjustified beliefs that are based on the good reasons that support them. The fault lies with the ‘particularism’ of the orthodox view, which is why it cannot handle those cases where certain ‘holistic’ considerations render an otherwise justified belief unjustified. Accordingly, I argue for a holistic constraint on doxastic justification: whether a subject that bases a particular belief on a reason that supports it is justified in having that belief depends on what she does, cognitively speaking, with that reason vis-à-vis a considerable portion of her other beliefs.