Ultra-Strong Internalism and the Reliabilist Insight

When someone believes something that is justified for her, what part does the subject play in her state of being justified? I will answer this question by developing a strong internalist account of justification according to which the justification of a believing for a subject consists in her having grounds for her belief, and holding the belief in recognition of those grounds. But the internalist theory I defend incorporates key elements of reliabilism into its account. Using perception as a model for justification, I show how ordinary perceivers would appeal to external factors to support their perceptual beliefs, and normally suppose that their beliefs are reliably connected to the objects their beliefs are about. I find in this feature of our common justificatory practice a sufficient basis for positing an externalist condition on justification—namely that subjects are justified only if their beliefs are reliably connected to their objects. When someone believes something that is justified for her, what part does the subject play in her state of being justified? I will answer this question by developing a strong internalist account of justification according to which the justification of a believing for a subject consists in her having grounds for her belief, and holding the belief in recognition of those grounds. I.A. Ultra-Strong Internalism I begin with an account of the internalist view of justification that I will work with in this discussion. I will develop my account within the context of William Alston’s helpful distinction between two broad types of internalism that he calls “perspective internalism” and “access internalism,” adapting and modifying Alston’s definitions to meet the demands of my reconciling view.1 Perspective internalism lays down a material condition for C R A W F O R D , J O U R N A L O F P H I L O S O P H I C A L R E S E A R C H 2 7 (2 0 0 2 ) 2 what can justify a belief and asserts that only states of a subject, that is beliefs or experiences,2 can be justifiers. Access internalism gives a formal condition on justification, whatever its source may be, namely that a belief is only justified for a subject if she grasps her grounds and recognizes them as justification-giving.3 The internalist view that I will defend combines features of perspectiveand accessinternalism, but with some important qualifications. First, while I will ultimately defend the perspectivist idea that the source of justification lies within the subject, viz., in her thinking and reasoning activity, I will also show how perspective internalism can accommodate a central claim of reliabilism, namely that external facts and circumstances that surround the belief and give rise to it figure prominently in its justification. The perspectivist insight is preserved by maintaining that these external factors can only confer justification in so far as subjects rely on them as grounds for their belief, and can utilize them as reasons for it if called upon to do so. Thus the external facts that ground a belief are linked to the subject’s perspective via the subject’s recognition of them and her ability to participate in the social practice of asking for and giving reasons. The access-requirement as I formulated it has two parts: it requires, first, that subjects must in some way grasp what grounds their belief; and second, that they must recognize their justifying grounds as grounds. In order to achieve this, subjects must have the necessary justificatory concepts and be capable of applying them whenever they justifiably believe something. Internalists have tended to view the access-requirement, in both its parts, as a wholly dispositional affair, where the subject’s grasping and recognizing refer to what the subject can do, or would do, in circumstances of asking for and giving justifications. When these requirements are so understood, I will call the view that they define Strong Internalism. This dispositional account of justification goes a long way toward capturing the fundamental intuition of internalism, namely that whenever a belief is justified for a subject, the subject has grounds that are her own grounds, the grounds on which she bases her belief. However I will argue that Strong Internalism does not fully capture this intuition; to do so it will be necessary to give an even stronger interpretation of the accessrequirement, which requires of a subject whose believing is justified that at the time she (occurrently) believes something, she actively grasps her justifying grounds as grounds; and this implies that she is doing some second-order thinking about her belief and its grounds concurrently with the original belief, and that the belief is tokened by the subject in recognition of its authority. I will call the view that is defined by this stronger interpretation of the access-requirement Ultra-Strong Internalism. In the remainder of this discussion, my task will be, first, to refine and defend the ultrastrong internalist position, and then to show how one of the central claims of reliabilism can be incorporated into it. To accomplish these goals, I will be drawing on some recent views expressed by William Alston and Robert Brandom, both of whom in different ways have attempted to combine internalist and externalist elements into their theories of justi-