Justification, Truth, and the Structure of Knowledge

Having seen that knowledge requires justification and truth, we now examine what justification's structure looks like and what truth itself is. Two debates organize this lesson: the structure of justification (foundationalism versus coherentism, and internalism versus externalism) and the nature of truth (correspondence, coherence, and pragmatic theories). These questions decide what a fully worked-out theory of knowledge can be.

The regress problem

Justification appears to face a regress. If a belief is justified by another belief, that supporting belief must itself be justified, and so on. Either this chain goes on infinitely, or it circles back on itself, or it stops somewhere. The regress problem asks how justification can ever be completed. The main structural theories are answers to