The Costs of Demon-Proof Justification

Internalist justification is standardly motivated by appeal to the New Evil Demon intuition. In this chapter it is argued that the Demon-proofing of justification comes at a great cost. Assuming that if S’s belief that p enjoys a ‘Demon-proof’ justification, then the strength of S’s epistemic position is no greater than the epistemically worst-off of S’s doppelgangers, the burden of the argument is to show that the Demon can wreak havoc on the epistemic robustness of S’s doppelgangers. In this way the trope of the Demon can be used to show how weak internalist justification actually is, when it is formulated so as to meet the constraint of the New Evil Demon intuition. This (admittedly familiar) point will be brought out in a distinctly metaepistemological fashion; hopefully, this will bring new light to a traditional topic, and will honor the seminal epistemological work of Richard Fumerton.