Mortini, Dario2025-07-232025-07-2320241742-3600https://hdl.handle.net/2445/222528Recent experimental epistemology has devoted increasing attention to folk attributions of epistemic justification. Empirical studies have tested whether lay people ascribe epistemic justification in specific lottery-style vignettes (Friedman and Turri 2014, Turri and Friedman 2015, Ebert et al. 2018) and also to more ordinary beliefs (Nolte et al. 2021). In this paper, I highlight three crucial but hitherto uncritically accepted assumptions of these studies, and I argue that they are untenable. Central to my criticism is the observation that epistemic justification is a philosophical term of art mostly foreign to lay people: as such, it is not suitable for direct empirical testing without being previously introduced. This point reveals a folk conceptual gap between the subject matter of these experimental studies and the conceptual repertoire we can reasonably expect lay people to possess. I elaborate on this worry, and I end on a cautiously optimistic note: after suggesting better strategies to survey folk attributions of epistemic justification, I conclude that the challenge raised by the folk conceptual gap remains difficult but can in principle be addressed.16 p.application/pdfengcc by (c) Mortini, Dario, 2025http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/Justificació (Teoria del coneixement)FilosofiaEpistemologia genèticaTeoria del coneixementJustification (Theory of Knowledge)PhilosophyGenetic epistemologyTheory of knowledgeinfo:eu-repo/semantics/article7490792025-07-23info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess