Justification and Inquiry: Resolving the Easy Knowledge Problem

ABSTRACT Bootstrapping and the easy knowledge problem can be understood as puzzles about conflicting intuitions. On one hand, each step of the inference seems correct, but on the other, the overall process seems unacceptable. These puzzles will be resolved by establishing two distinctions. First, untargeted cognitive processes of belief formation must be distinguished from processes of intentional inquiry. Second, conditions on justification transmission must be distinguished from conditions on rationality understood as an internal criterion of coherence. Bootstrapping as a process of settling the question about the reliability of a source violates internal criteria of rationality, but this does not entail that justification cannot transmit via bootstrapping reasoning. The intuitive defectiveness of bootstrapping can be explained in terms of the violation of rules of rationality in contexts of inquiry without being committed to accepting the general defectiveness of bootstrapping in all contexts.