Peter Dennis: "What is Interpersonal Justification?"

On April 7 Peter Dennis (LSE) gave a talk on the interpersonal justification problem at HSE English Philosophy Colloquium

We seek not only to be justified in our beliefs, but also to justify our beliefs to one another. While traditional epistemology has focused on the former kind of justification (viz. individual epistemic justification), it is through the latter kind (viz. interpersonal epistemic justification) that our most successful forms of enquiry make progress. Contrary to an influential reductionist view, I argue that interpersonal epistemic justification cannot be explained in terms of individualistic epistemic concepts such as (individual) justification or knowledge. Instead, it is a form of collective deliberation which allows us to place one another under irreducibly second-personal epistemic obligations.