AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

One site of agreement among several proponents and opponents of the knowledge norm of justified belief (KNJ) is that some senses of justification ought to be unified. Consider the deontic sense of justification, whereby one’s belief itself is justified just in case it follows the norm of belief, and the hypological sense of justification, whereby the believer herself is justified in their belief just in case her epistemic performance in so believing is positively evaluable to a sufficient degree. Littlejohn, for instance, leverages the equation of these two senses – i.e., one’s belief is deontically justified if and only if one is hypologically justified in so believing (DHJ) – to undermine non-factive norms of justification. 
Now, DHJ does not suffice to establish KNJ, but I argue that the most plausible way to do so is by an infallibilist interpretation of DHJ, called DHJ-i: infallible hypological justification just is infallible deontic justification. I also argue that DHJ-i is a more defensible principle than DHJ. Therefore, given that DHJ is independently plausible outside of KNJ’s truth-value, this spells trouble for opponents of KNJ: they must either deny their very position or commit to a problematic denial of this way of unifying justification’s different senses.