Justificatory

Justificatory is an adjective describing something that provides justification or serves to justify a claim, action, or belief. It is used across disciplines to label reasons, arguments, explanations, or theories that aim to establish why something is warranted or acceptable.

In philosophy and related fields, justificatory comes up in discussions of justification itself. Epistemology often distinguishes justificatory reasons or grounds—reasons that count in favor of a belief as rational or warranted—from other kinds of reasons, such as explanatory or causal explanations. A belief is said to be justified when it rests on adequate justificatory support, given the standards of evidence and the agent’s epistemic framework. The term also appears in debates about the sufficiency and nature of justification, including how justificatory power should be assessed and what counts as a good justificatory argument.

Outside of theory, justificatory is used in legal, rhetorical, and argumentative contexts to describe defenses, explanations, or motives offered to render an action permissible, warranted, or understandable. For example, a justificatory defense in law argues that the actor’s conduct was legally justified under specific circumstances, such as necessity, self-defense, or defense of others.

Usage tends to be formal or technical, and the word often appears alongside nouns like reasons, grounds, explanation, and theory. As a stylistic note, many writers reserve justificatory for contexts where the central issue is whether a claim or act can be properly justified.