From Epistemic Basing to Epistemic Grounding

Epistemic basing concerns the non-primitive conversion of propositional justification into doxastic justification. When your belief that p is properly based, you have a justificatory reason r to believe p and r is the reason for which you believe p, where basing is typically understood in terms of satisfying complex causal conditions. Assuming doxastic justification is necessary for knowledge, your knowledge that p thus causally depends on r as its basis. But that is distinct from the ground on which your knowledge metaphysically depends. The base, as a result of which you know, backs causal explanation of knowledge, whereas the ground, in virtue of which you know, backs metaphysical explanation of knowledge. This chapter develops a notion of epistemic grounding, arguing that only a specific, fine-grained, grounding relation can do useful explanatory work in epistemology. The determination relation is a case in point. On the resulting view, epistemic grounding is a non-primitive relation of asymmetric metaphysical dependence between knowledge and its epistemic ground.