epistemic deontologism a duty-based view of the nature of epistemic justification. A central concern of epistemology is to account for the distinction between justified and unjustified beliefs. According to epistemic deontologism, the concept of justification may be analyzed by using, in a specific sense relevant to the pursuit of knowledge, terms such as ‘ought’, ‘obligatory’, ‘permissible’, and ‘forbidden’. A subject S is justified in believing that p provided S does not violate any epistemic obligations – those that arise from the goal of believing what is true and not believing what is false. Equivalently, S is justified in believing that p provided believing p is – from the point of view taken in the pursuit of truth – permissible for S. Among contemporary epistemologists, this view is held by Chisholm, Laurence BonJour, and Carl Ginet. Its significance is twofold. If justification is a function of meeting obligations, then it is, contrary to some versions of naturalistic epistemology, normative. Second, if the normativity of justification is deontological, the factors that determine whether a belief is justified must be internal to the subject’s mind. Critics of epistemic deontologism, most conspicuously Alston, contend that belief is involuntary and thus cannot be a proper object of obligations. If, e.g., one is looking out the window and notices that it is raining, one is psychologically forced to believe that it is raining. Deontologists can reply to this objection by rejecting its underlying premise: epistemic obligations require that belief be voluntary. Alternatively, they may insist that belief is voluntary after all, and thus subject to epistemic obligations, for there is a means by which one can avoid believing what one ought not to believe: weighing the evidence, or deliberation. See also EPISTEMOLOGY , JUSTIFICATION. M.St.