Suing One's Sense Faculties for Fraud: 'Justifiable Reliance' in the Law as a Clue to Epistemic Justification

Abstract

The law requires that plaintiffs in fraud cases be 'justified' in relying on a misrepresentation. I deploy the accumulated intuitions of the law to defend externalist accounts of epistemic justification and knowledge against Laurence BonJour's counterexamples involving clairvoyance. I suggest that the law can offer a well-developed model for adding a no-defeater condition to either justification or knowledge but without requiring that subjects possess positive reasons to believe in the reliability of an epistemic source.

Keywords: law and epistemology, Laurence BonJour, clairvoyant examples, externalism, internalism, justification, justified reliance, justifiable reliance, fraud