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1. Various contemporary views hold that justification is the morefundamental concept—our understanding of knowledge depends uponour understanding of justification—and we will continue tosuppose that this is the case. It should be noted, however, that somehave argued that knowledge is the more fundamental concept, and thatvarious other epistemic concepts are best understood in terms ofknowledge. In a highly influential book, Timothy Williamson (2000)argues that knowledge is unanalyzable and that our evidence simplyconsists in everything we know. Justification may have foundations butonly because we end a regress of justification with propositions thatare known; the evidential foundation on which all justified beliefrests is knowledge (2000: 186).

2. Foundational knowledge or justified belief has also been called byfoundationalists direct knowledge (justification), immediateknowledge, intuitive knowledge (justification); and the truths knownhave been referred to as self-evident truths, directly evident truths,self-presenting truths, and the given. This last locution “thegiven” is, however, ambiguous as betweentruths thatare said to be known directly andfacts or features of theworld that are said to be immediately “before”consciousness.

3. Something like this motivation for PIJ is one that many internalistsabout epistemic justification are likely to offer, and, as we mentionin our discussion of the internalist-externalist debate, externaliststend to deny the PIJ. It is worth noting, however, that there is nological inconsistency in combining externalism about epistemicjustification with PIJ. Externalists who accept PIJ can coherently goon to disagree with the internalist about how to understandjustification. They may disagree with the access internalist, forexample, about whether justification for some proposition, includingone that expresses a probability relation, requires access to furtherreasons in favor of that proposition.

4. For present purposes let us construe entailment broadly so thatP may be said to entailQ ifP formally,analytically or synthetically entailsQ.

5. For a more detailed account and defense of an acquaintance theory ofnoninferential justification see Fumerton (1995). BonJour, once one ofthe leading coherence theorists of empirical justification, has in hislater work moved to a version of the acquaintance theory ofjustification. See BonJour (2000).

6. Most of what we say here is based on the early seminal paper“What is Justified Belief”. Goldman’s view changedquite dramatically in his bookEpistemology and Cognition,but shortly after publishing the book he returned to the earlieraccount for at least one conception of justification (strongjustification). See Goldman (1988).

7. We shall not concern ourselves with the difficulties thatreliabilists face defining the relevant notion of reliability—asthese few remarks might indicate, reliabilists will inevitably movebeyond actual frequencies and turn to propensities or counterfactualsin defining the concept of a reliable belief-producing process.

8. See, for example, Armstrong’s (1973) account of directknowledge. Though more complicated than a causal theory of knowledge,Nozick’s (1981) “tracking” account of knowledge alsoallows a distinction between beliefs which noninferentially trackfacts and beliefs which inferentially track facts.