University of Arkansas Press

The Indispensability of Internalism

Author(s): Laurence BonJour
Source: Philosophical Topics, Vol. 29, No. 1/2, The Philosophy of Alvin Goldman (SPRING
AND FALL 2001), pp. 47-65
Published by: University of Arkansas Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/43154358
Accessed: 19-11-2016 21:05 UTC

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PHILOSOPHICAL TOPICS

VOL. 29, NOS. 1 & 2, SPRING AND FALL 2001

The Indispensability of Internalism

Laurence Bonjour
University of Washington , Seattle

Alvin Goldman has been one of the most important figures in epistemol
ogy and related areas for the past several decades and, in light of his con-
tinuing creativity and productivity, seems likely to remain so for the
foreseeable future. Among other things, he is more responsible than any-
one else for the development of the externalist approach to epistemolog
and of reliabilist views in particular, and is also by far the most important
contributor to - indeed the main creator of - the rapidly developing field
of social epistemology. I have benefited enormously from his writings and
from discussions with him and expect to continue to do so.
But as philosophers, we show our respect for the work of other philoso-
phers mainly by engaging and criticizing it. And despite my enormous
admiration and respect for Goldman's work, our main intellectual relation
over the years has been as opponents in the ongoing controversy between
internalist and externalist epistemological views: Goldman as the leading
proponent of externalism, and I as one of the proponents of internalism. I
is to that controversy that I want to return in this paper. Goldman has
recently added a new installment to his criticisms of internalism. In his
paper "Internalism Exposed,"1 he argues that both internalism and the mai
arguments in its behalf are, when carefully examined, "rife with problems.
He concludes: "I see no hope for internalism; it does not survive the glare o
the spotlight" (293). It will perhaps not surprise anyone (including Goldman

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himself) that I do not find his arguments for this conclusion entirely con-
vincing. Some of the problems he raises seem to me in fact to result from
misunderstandings of internalism and of its fundamental rationale, while
others, though real enough, are in my view simply genuine epistemological
problems that arise in the context of certain genuine issues and have no ten-
dency to show that the epistemological approach that highlights them is
somehow misconceived or untenable.
Part of my aim in the present paper is to offer a critique of Goldman's
arguments along these lines, though I will not have room to consider every
point that he raises. But I also want to make some effort to sort out and clar-
ify the by now rather tangled contours of the overall internalism-external-
ism dispute, beginning by setting aside some popular ways of formulating
or motivating the central issue that now seem to me in the end misleading
and unhelpful. As will emerge, I also have come to think that there are some
perfectly genuine and important epistemological questions for which an
approach that is partially or perhaps even wholly externalist in character is
entirely reasonable and appropriate, and I will try to specify in a general
way what those are. But the upshot of the discussion will be that there are
also genuine and important epistemological questions in relation to which
an internalist approach is quite indispensable. Sorting out the issues in this
way will put us in a position to clarify both the basic rationale and the essen-
tial nature of the internalist position, making it possible to see what is
wrong, in my view, with Goldman's view of these matters and putting us
then in a position to consider and evaluate his further arguments against
internalism. My conclusion will be mainly an effort at reconciliation: I think
that there is room in epistemology for both internalist and externalist views
and that it would be unfortunate if either were abandoned.

I.

I begin then with some ways of formulating the internalism-externalism

issue that aie, in my judgment, not entirely satisfactory. Sometimes the issue
is formulated as one that concerns the correct specification of the concept of
knowledge : is the third condition for knowledge, the justification or warrant
condition that goes beyond the requirements of belief or assent and truth,
properly formulated in an internalist or externalist way? My problem with
this way of putting the issue is that it seems to me more and more doubtful
that there is one clear and univocal concept of knowledge in relation to
which this question can be clearly and meaningfully posed.
Some epistemologists have in fact suggested that there aie at least two
rather different concepts of knowledge, one at least predominantly exter-

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nalist in character and one predominately internalist in character,2 a sugges-
tion that seems to me plausible, as far as it goes, but quite possibly still too
confining.3 And whether or not this is correct, there aie also other problems
pertaining to the concept of knowledge that seem to me to raise serious
doubts as to whether it is sufficiently robust and univocal to provide a good
basis for the formulation of the issue with which we aie concerned. There is
the notorious difficulty (or, I think, impossibility) of specifying the degree
of justification or warrant or reliability required for knowledge, together
with the rather alarming fact that whether a given level is sufficient seems
to vary from context to context, depending on just how much is at stake
(and also the related phenomenon of the lottery paradox). In addition, there
is the problem of making sense of the logic of a concept that intuitively
allows us to infer known consequences from the conjunction of the things
we know, even though the degree of justification or warrant pertaining to the
conjunction necessarily falls short of that of the conjoined items separately
(assuming, as it is standardly assumed, that certainty is not required and that
justification or warrant behaves in a way logically analogous to probability).
And there is also, of course, the notorious Gettier problem. Perhaps these
problems, even when taken together do not show that, as I am to some
extent tempted to conclude, the concept of knowledge is simply too ill-
defined and poorly behaved to provide a good target for philosophical dis-
cussion, but they at least show that it is better to formulate other issues,
including the one that is our present concern, in ways that do not rely on the
assumption that this concept is clear and univocal.
Perhaps then the issue is better formulated, as Goldman indeed primar-
ily formulates it, as an issue about the concept of justification or epistemic
justification : is the correct understanding of this concept internalist or exter-
nalist in character? The immediate problem with this suggestion, of course,
is that epistemic justification is perhaps most standardly specified as that
species of justification which is required for knowledge. But a deeper prob-
lem is that even if an alternative specification can be found, the specifically
epistemological notion of justification is to a significant extent a technical
philosophical notion, one that is not clearly and unquestionably present in
common sense. And this opens the door to the possibility, again advocated
by some, that there may simply be different and incommensurable concepts
of epistemic justification, one or more internalist and one or more external-
ist in character (and also perhaps some that are hybrid in character), leav-
ing it unclear in what way these are competitors between which a choice
has to be made. I will remark in passing that I still think that some of the
familiar arguments for internalism, those that appeal to possible cases of
cognitive powers such as reliable clairvoyance and also those that appeal to
worlds in which experience exactly like ours is produced by a deceiving
Cartesian demon, show at the very least that there is something unnatural

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and counterintuitive about an externalist concept of justification if the use of
the term "justification" is supposed to connect closely with ordinary uses of
that term and with the related ideas of rationality or reasonableness. But if
the externalist is willing to disavow or at least seriously attenuate such con-
nections, it becomes unclear what sort of objection there could be to the
introduction of externalist concepts of justification.
Moreover, as remarked earlier, there are many important and clearly
epistemological questions and issues for which a predominantly externalist
approach seems entirely appropriate and perhaps even preferable. Most of
these issues fall within the confines of what Philip Kitcher has aptly labeled
"the meliorative epistemological project,"4 that is, the general project of
assessing and improving the reliability of human cognitive efforts. Goldman
in fact describes in some detail one investigation of this general kind: a psy-
chological investigation of the phenomenological differences (though he
does not use this label) between ostensible memories of perceptions that
genuinely reflect previous perceptions and those that are merely a product
of imagination, with the former obviously being more reliable with respect
to the truth of the resulting claims about the things that were allegedly per-
ceived. Genuine memories of previous perception turn out, it is reported, to
be richer in information concerning perceived properties like color and
sound, richer in contextual information about the time and place in question,
and more detailed, whereas the spurious memories resulting from imagina-
tion tend to be impoverished in these respects, but to contain much more
information about the subjective cognitive operations of the person in ques-
tion (290-91). Here we have an investigation from an essentially external,
third-person perspective, one that yields results that might clearly be valu-
able, for example, in the assessment of the reliability of witnesses in various
contexts and that a person who was familiar with them might also apply in
assessing his or her own ostensible memories. And it might perhaps be use-
ful, though hardly essential, to formulate these results by saying that mem-
ory beliefs that satisfy the criteria for being genuine are justified in an
externalist or, more specifically, a reliabilist sense.
Neither I nor any reasonable epistemologist should have any quarrel
with any of this. Such investigations are obviously legitimate and valuable,
and also obviously of epistemological, though not merely epistemological,
significance. But there are two important and closely related features of
them that need to be carefully noted, features that will turn out to have an
important bearing on the main issue that concerns us here. First, such inves-
tigations are normally and naturally conducted from a third-person stand-
point, looking at the epistemic agents in question from the outside; and,
second, these investigations do not and must not employ the specific meth-
ods or epistemic sources whose reliability is at issue. The persons studying
the reliability of ostensible memories of perception deal with cases and evi-

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dence pertaining to other people, not to themselves; and, even more obvi-
ously, must not rely on their own ostensible memories of perceptions in
determining whether the memories of others are in fact correct, on pain of
obvious circularity.

II.

So far, we seem to be in some danger of losing our grip on the issue with
which we began, having set aside some of the most standard ways of for-
mulating it as unhelpful. More seriously, at least from my standpoint, while
we have found clear cases in which an externalist approach and perhaps
even an externalist concept of something like justification or warrant are
appropriate, we have so far failed to locate any clear rationale for an inter-
nalist approach. I believe, however, that there is a clear rationale for an
internalist perspective, together with clear and important epistemological
questions in relation to which only such a perspective and its correlative
internalist concept of epistemic justification or reasons will do. Since this
rationale lies in the general vicinity of the ones that Goldman discusses,
even though it is not quite the same as either of them, it will be useful to
approach it by considering his account.
Goldman's description of the "most prominent" rationale for internal-
ism focuses on what he calls "the guidance-deontological conception of jus-
tification" (272). As the label suggests, this conception involves two distinct
and, I would suggest, importantly different aspects or elements: first, the
idea that the central role or point of epistemic justification is to guide peo-
ple in deciding what to believe; and, second, the idea that epistemic justifi-
cation has to do with satisfying one's duty or responsibility as a rational
creature, so that a person's beliefs are justified just to the extent that this
duty or responsibility has been fulfilled in accepting them. My view is that
while the first of these two elements points in approximately the right direc-
tion, it misses the central point just enough to muddy the issues and raise a
spurious problem. The second element, on the other hand - one of which I
am often cited as a leading proponent - now strikes me as largely, albeit per-
haps not quite entirely, a mistake. I will consider these two elements in
reverse order. In doing so, I will be speaking from a broadly internalist per-
spective, as I understand it, which seems reasonable since it is the very
motivation for internalism that is in question.
The central claim of the deontological element of the "guidance-
deontological conception" is that satisfying one's intellectual duty or
responsibility in relation to the acceptance of a particular belief is both nec-
essary and sufficient for that belief to be epistemically justified. Both of

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these claims are questionable, but the claim of sufficiency more obviously
so. The reason for this is the possibility of situations of what I will refer to
as epistemic poverty. It is certainly possible that the epistemic situation of
some person or group of people, the kinds of evidence and cognitive tools
and methods of inquiry available to them, might be so dire or impoverished
as to make it difficult or impossible to come up with strong evidence or
good epistemic reasons for beliefs about many important matters. In such a
situation, it is far from clear that people who accept beliefs on less than ade-
quate evidence or reasons or perhaps even on none at all, while still doing
the best that they can under the circumstances, are guilty of any breach of
their epistemic duty or can properly be described as epistemically blame-
worthy or irresponsible. One's primary epistemic duty, after all, includes
both seeking the truth and avoiding error. To insist that people in such an
unfortunate condition should accept only those few if any beliefs for which
really good evidence or reasons are available, withholding judgment on
everything else, is in effect to give the avoidance of error an absolute and
unwarranted priority over the discovery of truth.5
In fact, few if any internalists would regard the beliefs that such a per-
son might accept in such a situation, beliefs for which there is little in the
way of truth-conducive reasons or evidence, as being epistemically justified
to any significant degree. Such a person may well be making the best of a
bad epistemic situation and may be entirely epistemically unblameworthy
in doing so, but the basis upon which such beliefs are accepted still fails to
make it likely to any serious degree that they are true and so does not
amount to epistemic justification. My suspicion, in fact, is that this is a con-
clusion that virtually all epistemologists of an internalist persuasion would
accept, including those that Goldman cites as proponents of the deontolog-
ical conception. I believe that their apparent statements to the contrary were
misleading, in that they were thinking only about situations of at least
approximate epistemic plenty, ones in which one has ample reasons and evi-
dence and so does not have to accept beliefs on some weaker, less adequate
basis in order to have at least some chance of finding the truth.
Cases of epistemic poverty are cases in which it seems possible to ful-
fill one's epistemic duty without being epistemically justified. It is less clear
that there are cases in the opposite direction, cases in which one could be
epistemically justified, that is, have good, truth-conductive reasons for one's
beliefs, and still fail to satisfy one's epistemic duty. Whether this is possible
depends largely on the scope of epistemic duty, on exactly how much it
requires. If one's epistemic duty includes all that it included in the recently
popular idea of epistemic virtue,6 then it seems possible to believe on the
basis of good reasons and evidence and still be deficient in other respects:
for example, to be less open-minded or intellectually creative than a full sat-
isfaction of epistemic duty would require.

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 Whether or not this is so, it seems clear that epistemic justification can-
not be simply identified with the fulfillment of epistemic duty or responsi-
bility as the deontological conception claims. What is true is rather
something substantially weaker, but still important: seeking good epistemic
reasons and evidence and believing on the basis of them is, at least in situa-
tions of relative epistemic plenty, one important requirement of epistemic
duty and at least arguably the most central of all. That this is so makes it
easy to understand how some internalists, myself included, were led to say
things that overstated the connection between the two concepts. But it
remains the case that the idea of satisfying epistemic duty turns out to shed
no very direct light on the nature of epistemic justification and thus is only
limited help in understanding the rationale for an internalist understanding
of the latter notion.
The other element of the "guidance-deontological conception of justi-
fication" is the idea that the primary purpose of epistemic justification is to
guide a person in deciding what to believe. I have no quarrel with the idea
that epistemic justification does sometimes serve such a function and could
perhaps in principle serve it on a much wider basis than it in fact does. But
we rarely in fact do anything that deserves to be described as "deciding what
to believe," partly but only partly because our beliefs are rarely under any-
thing like direct voluntary control. Thus a stress on epistemic guidance
seems to me to put the emphasis in the wrong place and to invite objections
concerning doxastic voluntarism that aie in fact only marginally relevant to
the central thrust of internalism.

III.

In fact, the central rationale for internalism, at least as I conceive it, is both
more straightforward and, I think, less problematic than either of these. It
arises when I ask, not the third-person question of whether someone else's
beliefs are true or reliably arrived at, but instead the first-person question
about the truth (or reliability) of my own beliefs. To be sure, relatively lim-
ited versions of even this first-person question can still be dealt with in at
least a partially externalist way. If, for example, I am concerned only with
the limited question of whether my own ostensible memories concerning
previous perceptions are true or likely to be true, then there is no reason why
I should not avail myself of studies like the one that Goldman cites. But as
the epistemic issue becomes more global, as I begin to ask also whether my
memories of having read such studies or the perceptual beliefs implicit in
actually reading them or my beliefs about the reliability of such studies are
themselves likely to be true (or reliable), such externalist appeals are often

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no longer available without begging the very questions at issue. And if this
is carried to the point where the issue is whether I have any reason to think
that any of my beliefs are true (or that any of my ways of arriving at beliefs
are reliable), then we also have reached the point where no externalist
appeal of any sort is available to me without begging the question (though
some other person could, of course, still apply externalist results to me from
the outside).
My suggestion is that it is this fundamental epistemic situation, one in
which I ask global epistemological questions about my reasons, if any, for
my own beliefs, that provides both the essential rationale for and the basic
specification of the internalist conception of epistemic justification, with
issues concerning both the idea of epistemic guidance and the notion of
epistemic duty or responsibility being relevant only insofar as they reflect
this more fundamental issue. The global epistemic issue that results is, of
course, and not by accident, essentially the same as the one that plays a cen-
tral role in Descartes's Meditations , which provided the initial impetus for
the modern development of epistemology. Contrary to what has sometimes
been suggested, there is, as far as I can see, nothing in any way obviously
illegitimate or misconceived about the epistemic issue thus raised. Normally,
of course, we content ourselves with more limited issues. Even from the
first-person standpoint, as the contextualist is eager to point out, we nor-
mally ask about the reasons for a limited range of beliefs in a context in
which the acceptability of a wide range of others is taken for granted and
not in question. But this in no way shows that we cannot legitimately and
even reasonably ask the broader question or indeed that it is not the natural
outgrowth of philosophical reflection on the more limited questions that we
ordinarily focus on.
One immediate upshot of this is that the "internal" of "internalism"
means primarily that what is appealed to for justification must be internal to
the individual's first-person cognitive perspective , that is, something that is
unproblematically available from that perspective, not necessarily that it
must be internal to his or her mind or person in the way that mental states
are. A person's conscious mental states play the role that they standardly do
in internalist conceptions of justification, I would suggest, not simply
because they are internal to him or her in the sense merely of being his or
her individual states, but rather because it is arguable that some (but not all)
of the properties of such states, mainly their specific content and the attitude
toward that content that they reflect, are things to which the person has a
first-person access that is direct and unproblematic, that is, that does not
depend on other claims that would themselves have to be justified in some
more indirect way. Elaborating and defending this traditional view is beyond
the scope of the present paper, though I believe that it can in fact be suc-
cessfully defended.7 But the point for the moment is that internalism when

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properly understood gives no special status to mental states as such: if there
are, for example, unconscious mental states, states to which a person has no
direct and unproblematic first-person access, then those mental states are no
more relevant to internalist justification than would be various sorts of phys-
iological states of which the same thing is true.
The other side of this point is that, contrary to what Goldman supposes,
there is nothing at all about the fundamental rationale for internalism that
automatically limits what is available for and relevant to internalist justifi-
cation to facts about conscious mental states and their properties as such. If
there are facts of some other sort that are directly and unproblematically
available from a person's first-person cognitive perspective, then these are
equally acceptable for this purpose. Thus, to take the most important case,
if some facts about logical and probabilistic relations among propositions
can be directly discerned via a priori insight in a way that does not depend
on claims that can only be justified indirectly, then these facts would also be
available from the first-person perspective in which the global epistemolog-
ica! issue is raised. In fact, it seems quite clear that the vast majority of inter-
nalists, and certainly Chisholm (whom Goldman rightly regards as a
paradigm internalist), would include such a priori knowable truths among
those that provide the basis for internalist justification. Thus the problem of
how the internalist is to escape the limitation to facts about the person's own
mental states simply does not arise in the way that Goldman seems to
suppose (282).
I believe that cognitive resources of both of these kinds, facts about the
contents of conscious mental states and facts about a priori knowable logi-
cal and probabilistic relations (and indeed other a priori knowable facts as
well), are legitimately and non-question-beggingly available from within the
first-person cognitive perspective that defines the internalist outlook, though
I cannot undertake a defense of these claims here. Perhaps a more immedi-
ately urgent question is what else, if anything, the internalist can initially
appeal to. I say "initially," because it is of course entirely compatible with
internalism that if a good case can be made from the resources that are legit-
imately available at a given point for the likely truth or reliability of beliefs
arrived at in some further way, such as, for example, by accepting testimony
of various sorts, then such additional cognitive resources become on that
basis entirely acceptable to the internalist. Thus the straightforward response
to Goldman's puzzlement (277) as to why only facts that can be directly
known qualify as "justifiers" for the internalist is that this restriction is
concerned with the initial stage of inquiry: facts that are only indirectly
knowable become available only when and if an appropriate case can be
made for them on the basis of what is directly knowable. (What is lurking
here, of course, is just a version of the well-known epistemic regress prob-
lem.) This is why the primary concern of the internalist is to identify those

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resources for justification that are available before further arguments, argu-
ments that can only start from those initial resources, are invoked.
Is there then anything else that is legitimately available in this initial sit-
uation? Goldman mentions perceptual knowledge, which he describes as an
"externalist form of knowledge" (279). I do not think it is correct for the
externalist to assume complete title to perception in this way. There are cer-
tainly externalist accounts of the justification of perceptual knowledge, typ-
ically relying on facts about the causal process through which perceptual
beliefs are generated, and this sort of justification for perceptual beliefs is
clearly not available initially from within the individual person's first-per-
son cognitive perspective. But it is not entirely clear whether there is not
also an internalist account of perception that would yield acceptably direct
reasons for thinking that perceptual beliefs are likely to be true. It all
depends on what the correct philosophical account of perception turns out
to be, an issue that I am certainly not going to try to resolve here. Using the
fairly standard taxonomy of positions, if a direct realist view should turn out
to be correct, then, at least on some versions, perceptual beliefs might be
directly justified in a way that would satisfy the basic rationale for the inter-
nalist view. My own view is that no direct realist view genuinely succeeds
in achieving this result, but that is controversial. On the other hand, if the
correct account of perception is a representationalist or indirect realist view,
then it seems to follow that what is initially available within the first-person
perspective is only the representations, with any reasons for thinking that
they are likely to be true or reliable depending on further arguments of some
sort on the basis of what is initially available.
What about memory? Here the question is more complicated, because
memory functions in different ways at different levels of our cognitive oper-
ations. It is obvious that one sort of memory must play an essential role in
assembling and keeping track of the resources for an internalist justification
of any but the simplest, most immediate beliefs. Any argument of any com-
plexity or even any very large collection of sensory or mental states cannot
all be held in mind at once, but must be collected and juxtaposed and
reviewed over a period of time, using memory - perhaps aided by more tan-
gible sorts of record-keeping such as writing things down on paper. But con-
trary to what is sometimes suggested or assumed, by Goldman and many
others (including some internalists), this is in no way a fatal or even a seri-
ous problem for an internalist account of justification. When I ask what rea-
sons I have from my first-person perspective for my various beliefs, there is
simply nothing about this question that mandates or even really suggests
that the answer can take account only of what is available or accessible at a
moment, and thus no reason at all for an internalist to accept such a crip-
pling limitation.
Thus it is natural and, I believe, correct to regard this most fundamen-
tal and essential sort of memory, not as an additional cognitive resource on

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a par with the others, but rather as the means whereby whatever cognitive
resources aie available from the first-person perspective are preserved and
made available on an ongoing basis.8 This is not to deny that skeptical ques-
tions can be raised about this sort of memory, as indeed they can about
essentially anything. But such questions have the effect of challenging
whether the person is indeed the sort of ongoing, integrated cognitive agent
that could have good reasons for his or her beliefs, rather than of challeng-
ing the justification of particular beliefs. It is the latter sort of issue with
which the internalist is concerned.9
Other sorts of memory, on the other hand, for example memories of
having perceived such-and-such a physical occurrence at an earlier time
(assuming that perceptual beliefs are themselves justified in some way) or
of having heard or read something or just of a fact that presents itself as hav-
ing been learned in some way that is itself no longer remembered, raise
issues of justification on a par with others and have to be dealt with in essen-
tially the same way. In none of these cases is the truth or reliability of the
beliefs in question something that is directly available from the first-person
perspective, so that from an internalist standpoint the justification of each of
them will require further reasons or arguments of some sort, starting with
those resources that are more directly available. How such reasons might go
and whether they are in fact available in general are issues that cannot be
gone into here (though some relevant points will be mentioned below).

IV.

I want now to consider some of the more specific problems for internalism
that are raised by Goldman.
First, we have what Goldman calls "the problem of stored beliefs":
At any given time, the vast majority of one's beliefs are stored
in memory, rather than occurrent or active

almost any one of these beliefs, one's conscious state at t

includes nothing that justifies it. No perceptual experie
conscious memory event, and no premises consciously
tained at the selected moment will be justificationally su
for such a belief. According to strong internalism, then, n
these beliefs is justified at that moment. (278)

(Here "strong internalism" is the view that only facts abo

scious states at a particular time can justify his or her bel
In fact, the main problem Goldman appears to be con
is not really limited to stored beliefs as such, but has
whether there can be an adequate basis consciously in mi
the justification of almost any belief one might choose
not. I have already anticipated my response to this ob

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internalists seem indeed to have foolishly accepted the limitation to what is
available at a moment (however long that might turn out to be!), there is
nothing about the basic rationale of internalism that in any way supports
such a quixotic conception. What is directly available from within the first-
person epistemic perspective does not cease to be available or somehow
become external in character just because it has to be collected and
reviewed and collated over time. Nor, for that matter, is there anything about
either the idea of conforming to epistemic duty nor the idea of seeking epis-
temic guidance in the acceptance of beliefs that provides any more support
for such an impossible limitation. Thus this first objection has no serious
force against reasonable forms of internalism.
Second, there is, to be sure, a lesser problem in the vicinity for some
internalist views. This is reflected in what Goldman refers to as "the prob-
lem of concurrent retrieval" (explicitly aimed at a view called "weak inter-
nalism," which holds that both conscious and stored mental states are
available for justification). Although there is no reason why a justifying rea-
son or argument whose elements have to be assembled over time does not
still count as internalist, it does still have to be possible to put the result of
this assembly together and grasp it as a unified whole, using the aid of mem-
ory and perhaps written records. Here again, contrary to what Goldman sug-
gests, there is no reason why the grasping in question has to be momentary ,
if that means that everything is somehow fully and explicitly in mind at one
instant, but a unified grasp does have to be genuinely possible. And this may
be enough to make some sorts of reasons or arguments that would otherwise
be acceptable not genuinely accessible from the internal point of view. As
Goldman suggests, this is particularly a problem for the justifying reasons
or arguments characteristic of holistic coherentist views (such as the one that
I myself once held)11: it is doubtful that a reason that depends on the coher-
ence of one's overall system of beliefs or even any very large subsystem
thereof is capable of being adequately assembled and grasped even with the
aid of memory and written records. But while this second objection may
show in this way that certain specific internalist views are untenable, it also
has no serious force against internalism in general.
The third objection I want to discuss is what Goldman calls "the prob-
lem of forgotten evidence." This is concerned with cases where the person
in question has simply forgotten the evidential basis upon which a belief
was originally accepted, but still retains the belief itself. Thus, in his exam-
ple, Sally has read an article about the health benefits of eating broccoli in
the "Science" section of the New York Times (which we may assume to be a
highly reliable source) and formed the corresponding belief. She still retains
the belief, but has forgotten how she acquired it. Thus she seems to have no
properly internalist justification available, but, according to Goldman, her

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belief is still justified and, if true, constitutes an instance of knowledge
(280).
I have already indicated that a focus upon whether or not a given case
is an example of knowledge seems to me relatively unhelpful in relation to
this issue. I see no reason to deny that there is a sense or use of "knowledge"
in which Sally's belief counts as knowledge, together with, very likely, other
senses in which it does not and still others in which the result is, so far,
uncertain. Sometimes epistemologists seem to speak of knowledge as
though it were a flag that one is entitled to wave or an emblem that one can
wear, and I have no objection to having Sally wave the knowledge flag if
she cares to (or to having someone else wave it on her behalf). I am also
inclined, though somewhat more hesitantly, to say analogous things about
the issue of whether Sally's belief is, in some sense or other, justified.
There is, however, a question as to whether Sally has an internalist rea-
son or justification for her belief, and how strong that reason might be, and
here the answer seems to depend on further details of the case, some of
them fairly subtle. One question, as the reply that Goldman cites from
Matthias Steup (281) suggests, is whether Sally has good reason to think
that she is generally careful about the sources on the basis of which she
accepts beliefs - or perhaps just beliefs held with the kind and degree of
assurance with which she holds this one. (Here "assurance" is a rough stab
at a phenomenological characteristic that may turn out to be complicated
and multidimensional.) Another question is whether Sally believes that she
acquired the belief from a reliable source, even if she can't remember which
one, and whether she has reason to think that both her judgments of the reli-
ability of sources and her memories thereof are themselves reliable. A third
question is whether Sally can recall various sorts of details that amplify and
reinforce the belief in question: details about the specific ways in which
broccoli is conducive to good health and about just how it leads to these
specific effects, even if the memories of these details have the same status
of being beliefs whose original justificatory basis she does not recall. She
might well have reason to think that beliefs for which she can remember
details of these sorts are more likely to have been derived from a reliable
source and perhaps also more likely to be accurately remembered. On the
basis of some or all of these answers, Sally might have the resources for an
internalist justification or reason for her main belief, whose strength would
obviously vary with these details of the case. Admittedly, these justifica-
tions are unlikely to be as strong as the one she had at the time she read the
original article, but this seems like exactly the right result and in no way
implausible.
A fourth alleged objection arises from "the problem of the doxastic deci-
sion interval." Goldman argues that the supposed varieties of internalism that

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allow appeal only to conscious mental states (whether only occurrent ones
or also those stored in memory) must be expanded to allow access to logi-
cal or probabilistic relations, and proposes that this be done by allowing
some of the "formal properties of mental states, that is, logical and mathe-
matical properties of their contents" to count as part of the basis for inter-
nalist justifications or reasons, while insisting that these should be restricted
to the ones that "are knowable by the agent at the time of doxastic decision"
by employing a range of "computational relations or algorithms" (282-83).
And the problem is then how long a period of time should be allowed for
such computations, an issue that is aggravated, according to Goldman, by
the worry that the agent's mental states might change during the allowed
interval in such a way as to affect the justification of the proposition in ques-
tion (283-84).
But this way of formulating the supposed issue seems to me miscon-
ceived in a number of ways. I have already noticed that there is nothing
about the basic rationale for internalism that provides any reason for think-
ing that the basis for internalist justification may not properly include mat-
ters that are discernible by a priori reasoning, rather than being limited to
conscious mental states and their properties. (Logical or probabilistic prop-
erties and relations or other sorts of properties and relations that are actually
apprehended in this way would presumably be reflected in some way in the
contents of the person's mental states, but it is not qua properties of those
mental states that they are apprehended.) Moreover, though this is a debat-
able issue, I see no reason for limiting the properties and relations in ques-
tion to those that are formal in any interesting sense - or, still less, to those
which are known via "computational procedures or algorithms." People
rarely make use of procedures of this sort for deciding logical as opposed to
mathematical issues, and certainly the picture that Goldman evokes at one
point of a would-be coherentist attempting to establish the consistency of his
or her set of beliefs by using a very large truth table is not a plausible or
realistic view of anyone's actual cognitive operations.
More importantly, the idea of a fixed "decision interval," within which
the eligible logical or probabilistic or other a priori knowable properties and
relations must be determined, while still excluding the possibility of signif-
icant mental change, is artificial in the extreme. Obviously changes of vari-
ous sorts in one's mental states can affect issues of internalist justification,
but this has, as far as I can see, no very essential connection to the issue of
which a priori knowable properties and relations can be appealed to. The
bearing of such mental changes on justification is simply an independent
issue, and there is no reason that I can see why the two issues must be dealt
with together in the way that Goldman suggests.
There still might seem to be an issue as to how long the person can take
to arrive at a priori insights of various sorts or indeed at the resulting justi-

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ficatory arguments, but it is hard to see that it amounts to very much. The
simple and, I believe, correct thing for an internalist to say is that justifica-
tion can only result from those logical or probabilistic or other a priori con-
nections that have actually been apprehended or discerned - though it must
be added that apprehension or discernment can itself be more or less precise
and explicit, with the strength of the resulting justification or reason varying
accordingly. If one person takes longer than others and thereby arrives at a
complicated but still cogent justification or reason, then as long as that jus-
tification or reason is adequately grasped in the end, there is no reason why
an internalist should exclude it on the basis of the time required. And, to
repeat, while such a justification or reason could, of course, be undercut or
destroyed by some change in the relevant mental states that has taken place
in the meantime, that is simply an independent objection to be dealt with on
its own.
A fifth, somewhat related problem is "the availability problem."
Though Goldman poses this issue in relation to the supposed set of compu-
tational operations whose results are eligible for inclusion in internalist jus-
tifications or reasons (285), I think, for reasons already sufficiently
indicated, that it is better posed as simply the question of which a priori dis-
cernible properties or relations are thus eligible. What is supposed to create
the problem is the large disparities that exist between people with respect to
their ability, as a result of both training and basic intellectual ability, to
arrive at such a priori insights. And the question is then which such insights
aie internalistically admissible.
My response to this supposed problem is that I am unable to see why
there is any problem here at all. It seems obvious that the answer should be
that a particular a priori insight can play a role in the internalist justifica-
tions or reasons of a given person just in case that person is able to grasp or
apprehend it. Logical relations that are too complicated or subtle for me to
grasp cannot contribute to my justification for my beliefs, but if you can
grasp them, they may perfectly well play a role in your justification. As
Goldman says, this means that "two people in precisely the same evidential
state (in terms of perceptual situation, background beliefs, and so on) might
have different epistemic entitlements" (286), i.e., might differ in which beliefs
are justified for them. But it is hard to see why anyone should find this at all
surprising or objectionable. (It is not clear to me whether Goldman himself
does.)
The sixth and last of the relatively specific issues that I want to consider
has to do with the accessibility to ordinary or nave epistemic agents of the
epistemic principles that underlie putative internalist reasons or justifica-
tions. Goldman argues, though he does not put the point in quite this way,
that such principles should be viewed as essential parts of the reasons or jus-
tifications in question, so that they would have to be accessible or available,

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presumably on an a priori basis, from the first-person epistemic perspective
if such reasons or justifications are to be genuinely internalistically accept-
able. I am inclined to agree. And his further argument on this basis is that
most or all ordinary epistemic agents and indeed at least most epistemolo-
gists fail to be capable of formulating and recognizing such principles. As
he has formulated the basic internalist claim, this means that such principles
are not eligible as components of internalist reasons or justifications for any-
one, leading to "wholesale skepticism" (287-88).
This is the most serious of the problems that Goldman raises and the
hardest to deal with in a brief space. But we can see right away that some-
thing is wrong with his formulation of the issue if we ask why an epistemic
principle that is genuinely self-evident from an a priori standpoint for one
epistemic agent should be regarded as ineligible to contribute to a reason or
justification for that agent's beliefs just because it happens to be too com-
plicated or subtle to be discernible by other, less sophisticated epistemic
agents. Surely the right thing to say here is that the epistemic principles that
contribute to a given agent's reasons or justifications must be available to
whatever extent is necessary to that agent. This will no doubt mean that the
accessibility of such reasons will vary from one such agent to another, but I
am unable to see that there is anything implausible about such a result - any
more than its implausible that a scientist who has thought deeply and care-
fully about a certain set of questions should have access to reasons that are
not available in the relevant sense to me, even if we both happen to have
access to the same body of strictly observational data.
The second thing to say about this issue is that availability can be a
matter of degree, with not all degrees of availability requiring the capacity
for explicit formulation. Here the situation is quite parallel to that which per-
tains to logical principles. Ordinary, nave reasoners are very unlikely to be
able to explicitly formulate a principle like modus ponens , but may nonethe-
less be able, after it is formulated and explained to them, to recognize it as
the principle that they were implicitly following. And something analogous
may well be true for various epistemic principles, though the degree to
which this is a plausible claim to make will vary widely from case to case.
Both this point and the previous one will mean that the degree to which var-
ious beliefs are justified from an internalist standpoint is likely to vary
widely from person to person, but once the issue of who gets to wave the
knowledge flag is set aside as uninteresting, as I believe that it should be, it
is hard to see that there is anything alarming or even particular surprising in
such a result.
The final thing that I want to say about this last issue on the present
occasion is that it seems to me to be relevant to the significance of particu-
lar internalist views, but not to constitute any real objection to internalism
itself. If an internalist arrives at an otherwise plausible account of the justi-

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fication of a particular belief or set of beliefs, but one that relies on an epis-
temic principle that is not plausibly one that ordinary people are even
implicitly aware of, then that account of justification will not have any rel-
evance to the issue of whether the belief or beliefs in question are justified
for them - though it might still be of great interest as an account of how the
belief or beliefs in question might be justified for those who come to appre-
ciate the principle in question. I do not think that Goldman is right that all
otherwise plausible accounts of the justification of the main sorts of beliefs
that common sense regards as justified or reasonable will turn out to have
this status, but if they did, that would simply be a philosophical result to be
respected like any other. If the conclusion that these ordinary beliefs are
unjustified seems implausible, as I believe that it does, this cannot be
because of the completely compatible claim that such beliefs are justified or
constitute knowledge in other, perhaps externalist senses, but rather because
of the deep-seated conviction that we actually do have good reasons for
such beliefs, reasons that are accessible from our various first-person epis-
temic perspectives.

V.

I will conclude with two final points, both having to do in different ways with
the relation between the internalist and externalist epistemological
approaches. The first point is that, as already suggested, both of these
approaches are legitimate in relation to genuine epistemological issues and
there is no clear reason why one has to be chosen in preference to the other.
There is intellectual room for lots of different kinds of epistemological issues,
including many that are naturally approached from the third person and that
are at least largely externalist in character, together with some that are essen-
tially internalist issues, especially relatively global issues having to do with
whether one has good reasons for one's own beliefs. What seems puzzling is
the tendency of one side to want to claim exclusive possession of the field of
epistemology, a tendency that seems to me (but perhaps I am biased here) to
have been manifested more strongly by those of the externalist persuasion
(along with those of the closely allied naturalist persuasion). Though I never
expected to find myself paraphrasing Chairman Mao in an epistemological
context, why not let many epistemological flowers bloom?
Having been reconciliatory to that extent, however, I want to insist that
there is a clear way in which an internalist approach, in addition to being
intellectually legitimate on its own, has a fundamental kind of priority for
epistemology as a whole. No matter how much work may be done in delin-
eating externalist conceptions of knowledge or justification or reliability and

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in investigating how those apply to various kinds of beliefs or areas of
investigation, there is a way in which all such results are merely hypotheti-
cal and insecure as long as they cannot be arrived at from the resources
available within a first-person epistemic perspective. If, for example, an
epistemologist claims that a certain belief or set of beliefs, whether his or
her own or someone else's, has been arrived at in a reliable way, but says
this on the basis of cognitive processes of his or her own whose reliability
is merely for him or her merely an external fact to which he or she has no
first-person access, then the proper conclusion is merely that the belief or
beliefs originally in question are reliably arrived at (and perhaps thereby are
justified or constitute knowledge in externalist senses) if the epistemologist's
own cognitive processes are reliable in the way that he or she believes them
to be. Of course there might be a whole series of hypothetical results of this
sort: cognitive process A is reliable if cognitive process B is reliable, cogni-
tive process B is reliable if cognitive process C is reliable, and so forth. But
the only apparent way to arrive at a result that is not ultimately hypothetical
in this way is for the reliability of at least some processes to be establishable
on the basis of what the epistemologist can know directly or immediately
from his or her first-person epistemic perspective. (Here the epistemic
regress problem lurks again.)
And this is why internalism is indispensable to epistemology as a
whole. Though there are many other legitimate questions and issues, only
an internalist approach will ultimately do when, now paraphrasing Bishop
Butler, "I sit down in a cool hour" and ask whether I ultimately have any
good reasons for thinking that my beliefs are true or indeed that they are
reliably arrived at.12

NOTES

1. Alvin Goldman, "Internalism Exposed," Journal of Philosophy 96 (1999): 271-93.

Parenthetical references will be to the pages of this article.
2. For versions of such a view, see J. L. Mackie, Problems from Locke (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1976), 217-20; and Ernest Sosa, Knowledge in Perspective
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 240 (and elsewhere in this same vol-
ume).
3. Indeed, I believe that there is some reason to think that there is even a sense or concept
of knowledge that amounts to nothing more than true belief - or at least that there are sit-
uations in which ascriptions of knowledge are standardly made and accepted as correct,
in which only these two conditions are satisfied. One sort of situation that I have in mind
here is one in which there is some fact or set of facts about which the person in question
has been deliberately deceived and which are such that his or her merely having a true
belief about these matters, however it may have been arrived at or whatever reasons for
it he or she may have, is enough to destroy any chance that the deceiver or deceivers will
succeed in their main aims. Examples would be a case in which an unfaithful spouse and
his or her lover conspire to deceive the initially unsuspecting husband or wife, or one in

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 which an embezzler tries to deceive the chief accountant so as to avoid an instant audit
of the books. In such situations, it seems to me quite natural, should the previously
deceived person form a true belief as to what is actually going on, to ascribe knowledge
to them - and relatively pointless to challenge such an ascription by questioning that per-
son's evidence or justification or the general reliability of the way in which the belief was
arrived at. A sufficiently firm true belief, where this will lead inevitably to the collapse
of the underlying plot (and the eventual discovery of evidence), is all that matters in this
sort of case.

4. In his paper "The Naturalists Return," Philosophical Review 101 (1992): 64-65.
5. Though he does not put things in exactly these ways, I take the foregoing to capture one
part of Alvin Plantinga's criticism of internalism in his Warrant: the Current Debate
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), ch. 1 and 2.
6. As discussed, for example, by Linda Zagzebski in her book Virtues of the Mind
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
7. For a start in this direction, see my paper "The Dialectic of Foundationalism and
Coherentism," in the Blackwell Guide to Epistemology , ed. John Greco and Ernest Sosa
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 117-42, esp. 130-34.
8. This idea derives from Tyler Burge's paper "Content Preservation," Philosophical
Review 102 (1993): 457-88, esp. 462-65.
9. Indeed, I would suggest, it is a mistake to regard this most basic use of memory as giv-
ing rise to beliefs at all. When I recall an earlier sensory state or apprehended logical
relation or state of mind, I do so, not by having the belief that the episode in question
occurred, but simply by recalling it directly - though what is recalled in this way might,
of course, itself be a belief.
10. Goldman defines a series of different internalist positions, with the later ones being
motivated by the problems that he finds in the earlier ones. For reasons of space and also
because many of these positions do not seem to me to correspond very well to positions
actually held by internalists, I have taken note of them only where it seems necessary for
clarity. My main concern has been whether and to what extent his objections are telling
against what I take to be the main version of internalism, both historically and substan-
tively.
11. See my book The Structure of Empirical Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1985).
12. I am grateful to Ann Baker for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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