Recently some epistemologists have approached the question whether epistemic justification comes in degrees from a linguistic perspective. Drawing insights from linguistic analyses of gradable adjectives, they investigate whether epistemic occurrences of ‘justified’ are gradable and if yes what type of gradability they involve. These authors conclude that the adjective passes standard tests for gradability, but they classify it as belonging to different categories: as either an absolute or a relative gradable adjective. The aim of this paper is to further clarify the question of what kind of gradability is instantiated by epistemic uses of ‘justified’, and to investigate the consequences that this may have on epistemological theorizing. In particular, we challenge the alleged evidence provided by Siscoe (2021: 517–59) for the relative gradability of ‘justified’ and we provide positive arguments for the claim that ‘justified’ is a specific kind of absolute gradable adjective (a totally closed scale absolute with default minimal reading). We consider some important philosophical implications of these results. We also argue that the scale type of ‘justified’ is ordinal, and we consider which other properties typically associated to justification possess a similar type of scale. We argue that several popular contemporary models of graded justification, such as probabilistic and reliabilist accounts and various kinds of Lockean views, do not fit well with our results about the gradability of ‘justified’. Linguistic data rather favour normalcy and plausibility accounts of graded justification.

最近，一些认识论者从语言学的角度探讨了认知论证是否有一定程度的问题。从对可分级形容词的语言学分析中汲取见解，他们研究了“合理”的认知出现是否可分级，如果是，它们涉及什么类型的可分级性。这些作者得出结论，该形容词通过了可分级性的标准测试，但他们将其归类为属于不同的类别：作为绝对可分级形容词或相对可分级形容词。本文的目的是进一步阐明什么样的可分级性被“合理的”的认知使用所实例化的问题，并研究这可能对认识论理论化产生的影响。特别是，我们质疑 Siscoe (2021: 517-59）对于'justified'的相对可分级性，我们为'justified'是一种特定类型的绝对可分级形容词（默认最小阅读的完全封闭量表）的说法提供了积极的论据。我们考虑了这些结果的一些重要的哲学含义。我们还认为“合理化”的量表类型是有序的，并且我们考虑通常与合理化相关的哪些其他属性具有类似的量表类型。我们认为，几种流行的当代分级证明模型，例如概率论和可靠性论以及各种洛克观点，与我们关于“证明”的分级性的结果不太吻合。语言数据更倾向于对分级理由的常态性和合理性的解释。