Strong Access Internalism, Synthesis, and Self-Justifying Beliefs

Richard Fumerton has written a short but useful summary of various kinds of internalism in Resurrecting Old-Fashioned Foundationalism. It can be found in the amazon preview of the book on pgs. 4-7, here. One kind of internalism Fumerton mentions is "access internalism." Access internalism is "the position that in order to know that p, S must have 'access' to what justifies that belief" (link). Whether we must actually have access to the justification or merely the potential to do so is what differentiates strong and weak versions of access internalism. 

Fumerton, who is an internalist and foundationalist himself, finds weak access internalism unmotivated, as externalists needn't deny that we could in principle become aware of what justifies our foundational beliefs. He finds strong access internalism virtually unintelligible:

If one maintains that for any set of conditions X that one proposes as constitutive of S's justification for believing P, those conditions must always be fortified with some other set of conditions describing S's access to X, then the view is hopeless. Call the satisfaction of access conditions to X, A1. Will X together with A1 constitute justification for S to believe P? Not given the view. Our strong access requirements require access (call it A2) to the new proposed sufficient conditions for justification (X and A1). But the conjunction of X, A1, and A2 will not constitute S's justification for believing P as the view requires us to add access to these conditions and so on ad infinitum.  

To avoid this problem, the strong access internalist must distinguish carefully a view about what is constitutive of justification from a view about what is necessary for justification. If the view is to be intelligible the access internalist must argue that when some set of conditions X constitutes S's justification for believing P, those conditions will be such that they entail that S has access to them. The access, however, need not be part of what constitutes the justification. An analogy might be helpful. P cannot be true unless it is true that P is true - P's truth entails (in some sense of "entails") that it is true that P is true. But it would be a serious mistake to argue that P's being true is constituted by its being true that P is true. The correct analysis of what it is for P to be true should not make reference to metatruths about P's truth even if the correct analysis of P's being true must reveal why P's being true entails that it is true that P is true.

Many contemporary epistemologists have made this sort of argument against strong access internalism, implicitly if not explicitly. For example, see here:

Laurence BonJour (1985) raised another highly influential objection to all forms of classical foundationalism (an objection raised before he joined the ranks of foundationalists). The objection presupposed a strong form of what we might call access internalism. Put very superficially the access internalist argues that a feature of a belief or epistemic situation that makes a belief noninferentially justified must be a feature to which we have actual or potential access. Moreover, we must have access to the fact that the feature in question is probabilistically related to the truth of what we believe. So suppose some foundationalist offers an account of noninferential justification according to which a belief is noninferentially justified if it has some characteristic X. BonJour then argues that the mere fact that the belief has X could not, even in principle, justify the believer in holding the belief. The believer would also need access to (justified belief that!) the belief in question has X and that beliefs of this sort (X beliefs) are likely to be true. At least one of these propositions could only be known through inference, and thus the putative noninferential justification is destroyed. 

BonJour presented the objection on the way to developing a coherence theory of empirical justification. But it ultimately became obvious that the objection to foundationalism, if good, was too strong. Given the structure of the argument it should become evident that the coherence theory (and any other theory) would be equally vulnerable to the argument. Just replace “X” with some complicated description of beliefs cohering with each other. That might suggest to the classical foundationalist that strong access internalism is a view to be avoided. (link)

And here:

Klein develops an argument against foundationalism along similar lines, although he departs from Sellars and BonJour in proposing infinitism rather than coherentism as an alternative to foundationalism. He imagines a proponent of  foundationalism, Fred, who engages in a process of critical reflection on his justification for a certain belief. He traces back the chain of inferential justifications for this belief until he reaches some foundational belief that he takes to be nonI inferentially justified. Fred is committed, on pain of arbitrariness, to acknowledging that there is some feature F in virtue of which the belief in question is non-inferentially justified. But then the question arises whether beliefs that have F are likely to be true. And now there seem to be two options. If Fred ducks the question, or answers it in the negative, then his belief is epistemically irresponsible and so  unjustified. But if he answers in the affirmative, then Klein (2007: 15) concludes, “the regress has continued because Fred has located a very good reason for thinking  that b is true, namely, b has F and propositions with F are likely to be true.” (link)

Several of these objections were originally intended to refer epistemic justification in the context of empirical knowledge, but in this last version by Klein especially, they each can be viewed as applicable to any type of proposed foundational knowledge. By way of reply to these arguments, I wish to make two observations.

Firstly, I don't object to the idea that some of our beliefs are externally justified, i.e. that we needn't show or be aware of what justification our beliefs have in order for those beliefs to be justified in some sense. Some might, but I suspect that is because they begin with a theoretic or methodological understanding of "knowledge" or "justification" and then see which beliefs they have that qualify as falling under those categories. On the other hand, contemporary epistemologists appear more interested in discussing what particular beliefs we have which we intuit are "known" or "justified" and attempt to find commonalities among these beliefs in order to understand what "knowledge" or "justification" is. Should we define "knowledge" and "justified belief" chronologically prior to labeling and categorizing our beliefs, or should we attempt to abstract working definitions from paradigm examples of commonly accepted instances of "knowledge" and "justified belief"?

This question probably causes more harm than good and leads to a vast internalist/externalist divide when there should be none. We can grant that there is something about everyday beliefs which through the ordinary use of language has led us to say we know them or are justified in believing them in one sense. And we can grant that there may be a type of knowledge or justified belief - defined appropriately and not intended to exclude any other type of knowledge or epistemic justification - the reflective denial of which entails internal inconsistency. 

Here we find reason for a synthesis of externalism and internalism. A motivation of the former is to account for everyday knowledge or justified belief, unreflective yet sensible if not given disproportionate leniency or preference in its evaluation. A motivation of the latter is to provide us with the ability to form a principled defense of our beliefs (including those which are externally justified) when confronted with people who believe contrary to them.

Secondly, in defense of strong access internalism, each of these above arguments seems to make a key assumption I have already elsewhere denied should be granted, viz. the assumption that foundationalists are or ought to be metajustificatory foundationalists rather than traditional foundationalists (link). Notice that Fumerton, Bonjour, and Klein all formulate their respective objections to [the strong access version of internalist] foundationalism by appealing to some alleged "condition," "characteristic," or "feature" of [foundational] beliefs and asking something like whether these things are truth-conducive or whether we need to access something further in order to form a wedge between the foundation and the metajustification. 

If a certain belief can be self-justifying, however - and how we defend or attack a claim to one as such is a separate issue altogether - then a belief whose truth is its own justification is already all one needs to answer these questions. The belief itself is sufficient. These objections, like the objection to foundationalism Jeremy Fantl makes which I address in the above link, fail to address the foundationalist who states that foundational beliefs are self-justifying and, if of an internalist variety, infallibly so. To recall Fantl's admission:

We can ask why self-justifying reasons are self-justifying. If the traditional foundationalist has an answer, it seems like it must involve some metajustificatory feature. If the traditional foundationalist has no answer, it seems like the view has arbitrary foundations. (See BonJour, Structure, 30-3, for a similar argument.)   

However, the traditional foundationalist can argue that completely self-justifying reasons are not self-justifying in virtue of some metajustificatory feature, nor are they arbitrary. It may be that certain reasons have to be assumed to be self-justifying if skepticism is to be avoided. This is a rather familiar form of rationalist argument for the existence of a priori justification. Here, the main implication of these arguments is that there might be a way to non arbitrarily show that we need to take certain reasons to be completely self-justifying without requiring that there be a metajustificatory feature which makes those reasons self-justifying. What convinces us we need to take those reasons to be self-justifying need not make them self-justifying.    

This move does not seem to be available in the case of reasons that are self-justifying only to a degree. (pg. 544)

This very charitable concession turns out to be very critical. The fine distinctions in the second paragraph in particular dovetail perfectly with my explanation of the distinction between epistemology and apologetics (link):

While "test[s] for truth" can serve as confirmatory evidences of Christianity, they shouldn't function as the ground of knowledge; divine revelation does. Elsewhere, I have called tests for truth necessary conditions for knowledge and the postulate[s] by which one claims to know anything the sufficient condition[s] for knowledge (link). The former are the means by which we make arguments for (i.e. apologetics) the latter (i.e. epistemology).

Again, apologetics should include an explanation of the epistemology of the system one is defending. Any good defense of a system of knowledge should explain what that system says about how we can know anything. But that explanation and defense should not be confused for that actual process of knowing. In fact, apologetics is only possible insofar as we know the system we are defending is true in the first place (see here). 

Or, as Fantl says, "what convince us we need to take those [foundational] reasons to be self-justifying need not make them self-justifying." Our practical defense is not our justification, not to understate the former's importance.

This position also perfectly addresses Fumerton's point in the first quote of this post that "The correct analysis of what it is for P to be true should not make reference to metatruths about P's truth even if the correct analysis of P's being true must reveal why P's being true entails that it is true that P is true." 

That is, the correct analysis of what it is for a belief P to be self-justifying should not make reference to subsidiary, necessary truths even if the correct analysis of P's being self-justifying must reveal why P's being self-justifying entails that these subsidiary, necessary truths are true. We can, however, reference these for the apologetic purpose of convincing others of our foundational and self-justifying belief - i.e. that any knowledge which is both internally justified and infallible must be founded on divine revelation which, in our case, is coextensive Scripture.

Internalism Defended

In a recent post, I noted a few ways in which the internalist-externalist debate is relevant to Scripturalism. In this post, I will highlight a few epistemologist's reasons for thinking why internalism is, of the two, the necessary justificatory framework for an epistemological position. To begin, I will quote the whole context of Bonjour's statement from the end of my last post:

Having been reconciliatory to this extent, I still 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, so that externalist views, whatever their other merits, do not constitute satisfactory responses to the general issue with which this essay is concerned: that of whether we have any good reasons to think that any of our beliefs about the world are true (and what form these reasons might take). 

This is so because externalist justification simply does not speak to this global and essentially first-person issue. One way to see this is to note that if an epistemologist claims that a certain belief or set of beliefs, whether his own or someone else’s, has been arrived at in a reliable way, but says this on the basis of cognitive processes of his own whose reliability is for him merely an external fact to which he has no first-person, internalist 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 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, cognitive 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 first-person, internalist epistemic perspective… 

The basic question (which each person must in the end ask for himself or herself) is whether I have good reasons for thinking that my beliefs are true (and, if so, what form those reasons take). And the reason that this leads to an internalist view is that the reasons in question are supposed to be reasons that I have, not in the impossible sense of having them explicitly in mind at every moment, but in the sense of their being more or less immediately available or accessible. (Epistemic Justification, pgs. 39, 174)

I recall reading Alvin Plantinga say that as an externalist, he doesn’t really see why “a main concern of epistemology is replying to the skeptic” (A Companion to Epistemology, 2^nd edition, pg. 173). And in a way, he’s right. Skeptics don’t know what knowledge means or can mean, so there is no reason skeptics should dictate the terms of what a knower needs in order to know. But then again, one can ask himself the same questions a skeptic would.

[One might instead ask why we need to regard skepticism as a main concern in epistemology. An extended reply would take me to far afield of the present post, but in short, the question suggests its own ironic answer: "why do I need an answer to this question in order for this to be true or known to be true?"]

With the skeptical concern in mind, I turn to this excellent passage by Michael Williams, to which I have nothing further to add at this time:

The essential feature of Agrippan skepticism is that it is universal. The Agrippan Argument applies to any arbitrary belief or claim. This is why it is available for indefinite reiteration. The skeptic’s challenge is to explain how it is possible for us to know (or be justified in believing) anything whatsoever (Stroud, 1989). 

The skeptic’s question is peculiar. If I tell a child about dinosaurs, she may ask me how it is possible to know anything whatsoever about them. After all, they went extinct thousands of years ago, so no one has ever seen a dinosaur. I will reply by telling her about the fossil record and how it gives us clues to what different kinds of dinosaur there were, their different structures in turn giving clues to how they lived. But of course, in giving an explanation like this, I am only explaining how it is possible to know some things on the basis of others. What the skeptic wants – and what the traditional epistemologist means to provide – is an explanation of the possibility of knowledge in general. An explanation of the possibility of knowledge that takes certain facts for granted – treats them as if they were known – will lack the requisite generality. The skeptic imposes – and the traditional epistemologist accepts – a Totality Condition on a properly philosophical understanding of knowledge and justification (Williams, 1992). 

The Totality Condition creates pressure to accept a further constraint: internalism, or full epistemic self-awareness. Internalism is the view that, to be justified in holding a belief, we must have “cognitive access” to its “justification-makers.” So-called “externalist” theories of knowledge and justification, by contrast, allow epistemically appropriate believing to result from factors of which we are not aware. For example, an externalist may say that a belief of mine is epistemically appropriate if it is formed by a method that is in fact highly reliable, whether or not I know about the reliability of the method I used. For externalists, such reliability-knowledge is relevant to the quite different question of whether I know, or am justified in believing, that my original belief is justified. One can have beliefs that are epistemically appropriate without understanding why. Presumably, the “knowledge” we attribute to animals is like this. According to externalists, human knowledge is not essentially different (Kornblith, 2002). 

Prima facie, internalism is not particularly plausible, at least if it is taken as a fully general view of ordinary justification (Goldman, 2001). Everyday justification often seems to work as externalists say it does, as, for example, when it flows from the unselfconscious exercise of dependable recognitional abilities (Fogelin, 1994, chapter 3). We do not always require people to have reflected systematically on their abilities at large, or even on their performance in the situation at hand. However, in the peculiar context of the skeptical challenge, it is easy to persuade oneself that externalism is not an option. 

An explanation of how knowledge or justification is possible has to do more than show that knowledge or justification is logically possible: that there is a way of thinking about knowledge that does not involve a contradiction. Externalists can surely manage this. They can sketch a consistent picture of the world in which we credit ourselves with reliable faculties and so, by externalist lights, with epistemically appropriate beliefs. But are we justified in believing that our faculties are reliable? Is that belief epistemically appropriate? If not, then for all we know, we have no justified beliefs. This is a significant concession to skepticism. We want a reply not just to the claim that we know nothing, but also to the meta-skeptical claim that for all we know we know nothing. We want to know that we know. This too pushes us towards internalism. 

Admittedly, committed externalists can resist this line of thought. They can say that our epistemic beliefs (meta-beliefs about the reliability of our faculties) may indeed be epistemically appropriate – by externalist standards! But how do they know that? Well, they believe it: appropriately, too, if this meta-epistemic belief is formed in some suitably reliable way. And so on. But that is the problem. More traditionally minded theorists will surely feel that externalists who go down this route are either accepting infinitism or simply turning their backs on the sceptical problem. The traditionalist thought is that the epistemic self-understanding we seek can be attained only if the epistemic appropriateness of our beliefs at large can be made in some way evident. This is an internalist demand. 

This pressure to adopt internalism gets further reinforcement from the thought that the context of philosophical inquiry is inherently reflective. In doing philosophy, we step back from all particular practical engagements in order to make explicit presuppositions that we normally take for granted without formulating in a precise way. But once such presuppositions are made explicit, the question of their epistemic appropriateness cannot be avoided. In philosophy, we want to get clear about what, at the deepest level, we are committed to and whether we are entitled to those commitments. 

To understand philosophical reflection this way is to link such reflection with a particular ideal of self-understanding. It is because it adopts this ideal that traditional epistemological reflection is conducted from a first-person standpoint. By contrast, externalist approaches to knowledge and justification are elaborated from a third-person point of view. Accordingly, to the traditionalist, externalist epistemologies embody an attitude that we might take to someone else: we see that he is a reliable informant about this or that, and so we take his beliefs in that area to be epistemically appropriate, not worrying about what, if anything, he knows about his own reliability. But it is not clear what would even be meant by proposing to take such an attitude towards oneself. Again, the very character of traditional epistemology, as a quest for total epistemic self-understanding, pushes us to adopt internalism. 

Externalist epistemologies seem plausible, the skeptic will suggest, because they accord with what we already believe. Our common-sense–scientific picture of the world suggests that, within limits, our basic cognitive faculties – perception, memory, and so on – are fairly reliable, so that beliefs formed with the aid of those faculties tend to be epistemically appropriate. But in taking the common-sense picture of the world for granted, we are not explaining how it is possible to know anything whatsoever. (Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, pgs. 207-208)

Scripturalism, Internalism, and Externalism

In one of my more recent posts, I mentioned the need for Scripturalists to focus on contemporary issues in epistemology, as there are a lot of interesting dimensions that have yet to but should be explored. To give just a brief example as to why, let’s briefly look at the current internalist-externalist debate. 

A fairly common explanation of internalism is as follows: “the epistemic justification of a person’s belief is determined by things to which the person has some special sort of access… things that are internal to the person’s mental life” (Epistemology: An Anthology, 2^nd edition, pg. 408). Externalism is the denial of this thesis: one’s justification of his beliefs is determined by things other than his mental life to which he has cognitive access. [There are varying positions I am skipping for convenience, e.g. one in which internalism and externalism are collectively sufficient although individually insufficient conditions for justification.]

So, whereas an internalist, for example, might reflect on his own beliefs to examine whether they have been properly inferred from other beliefs or pass an epistemic test which a properly foundational belief would, an externalist might appeal to an aetiological explanation for why we can have justified beliefs: for example, our beliefs are justified when they have been caused in a certain way, as that which causes them either in general or even must engender true beliefs.

As such, externalists are sometimes said to view justification from a third-person perspective, where justification is just something persons have: given a person in such and such an environment or circumstance, he will be justified in believing x. Internalists, on the other hand, view justification from a first-person perspective, where justification is something persons can [additionally] show themselves as having: I am justified in believing x because I can cognitively access my mental state y, which is self-justifying (here the internalist would be a kind of foundationalist).

Now, while some Scripturalists like myself have argued for the necessity of self-knowledge (link, link, link, link, link, link), many Scripturalists and non-Scripturalists have denied that, on Scripturalist presuppositions, self-knowledge is possible. For two such examples in this past year, see (here and here). What does this have to do with the internalist-externalist issue?

For starters, if we rule out self-knowledge, do we have cognitive access to our own beliefs? Perhaps pragmatically, but not in an epistemic context, at any rate, which is the context in which the internalist-externalist issue is framed. So if we can’t access our own thoughts, then if our beliefs are justified, it obviously cannot be from an internalist perspective. That would suggest Scripturalists who deny self-knowledge must be externalists. But there are several individuals who have observed that Scripturalism and internalism are a package deal: link, link, link, and so forth. 

A point they make is that if an integral part of a Scripturalist apologetic is that if an individual can’t show how they know x is true, then they have no justification for it, Scripturalists are implicitly arguing that internalism is true. But if Scripturalists reject self-knowledge, they’re hypocritically applying a standard to others which they don’t even attempt to meet themselves. The result is sloppy apologetics.

Ironically, Scripturalists who deny self-knowledge would logically have a kind of unwitting affinity with the externalists of Reformed epistemology... whom some of those same Scripturalists have criticized. A pure externalist of, say, the empirical variety will face a meta-regress regarding how he knows that his theoretic scenario – reliabilism, proper functionalism, etc. – according to which men allegedly acquire knowledge is itself a product of that scenario. A Scripturalist who denies self-knowledge will face the meta-question of how he knows that he is a person to whom God has imparted knowledge of Scripturalism. 

Scripturalists who think they can side-step the force of this by humbly admitting that while they might not be Scripturalists or even be persons, Scripturalism as a system comes out unharmed need to realize that they’ve already effectively ruined for themselves any chance of knowing that from an internalistic perspective. They’ve as much as admitted they can show no basis for that belief, so whence the assurance? How are they better off than the empirical externalist who is sure that, while he may not be able to know that he knows his belief regarding reliabilism was reliably arrived at, at least reliabilism itself is unharmed?

This is why I’ve stressed the need for Scripturalists to read contemporary epistemologists and issues currently being debated. There is clearly room to improve Scripturalism, if not in revision, then at least in development. [For instance, if internalism is true, so much the better for my argument that we must have self-knowledge.]

And as for my thoughts on the merits and truth/falsity of internalism or externalism - since the above paragraphs were not designed to address that - I will save that for another post. I will only say here that I see no reason why we can’t say we “know” certain things in a looser, externalist sense and “know” other things in a stricter, internalist sense. But I do agree with Bonjour 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, so that externalist views, whatever their other merits, do not constitute satisfactory responses to... whether we have any good reasons to think that any of our beliefs about the world are true (and what form these reasons might take). (Epistemic Justification, 2003, pg. 39)