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Essay on Epistemic Justification
W. Jay Wood is the name of prolific writer and scholar who has produced a number of literary and philosophical masterpieces. The book under reviewed book titled as ‘Epistemology: Becoming Intellectually Virtuous (Contours of Christian Philosophy)’ is another feather in his cap. In this paper, we are going to delineate 5th chapter of this book not excluding the all three theories as widely presented and wisely discussed in this chapter.
The 5th chapter of the book “Epistemic Justification” is somewhat expression of Jay Wood unconscious mind that have formed itself into words. Here writer asserts that our knowledge of the past, like much of our knowledge of the present, is based on evidence, the informational link between the observable and the interesting. But evidential claims must themselves be justified, and a thorough epistemology of history or of science must describe both the role of evidence as supplier of justification and the need by evidence to be justified. In what follows the author addresses the second of these responsibilities, the accountability of evidence as per Evidentialism and Coherentism. The analysis follows two paths toward the same goal, first a conceptual study of textual evidence in the abstract, and then a more empirical argument from the use of Keith Lehrer’s Coherence theory as evidence. The goal is to understand and evaluate how textual information of the distant past comes to be deemed accurate and reliable.
But in my opinion, it is misleading to force a choice between justification as based on a kind of coherence or on an appeal to evidence, a choice that roughly mirrors the distinction between rationalism and empiricism in traditional epistemology. It is misleading because an appeal to historical evidence is itself an appeal to coherence since evidential claims acquire epistemic authority from other historical claims. Alluding to the claim that scientific observations are theory-laden, Jay Wood has said of history that "All data descriptions are 'narrative-laden.'".......
