Internalism and Externalism

In analytic epistemology, there is an important difference between internalists about knowledge and externalists about knowledge. Radical internalists believe that whether a belief of a subject ought to be called 'knowledge' depends only on things internal to the subject's mind - his own conscious reasons for believing the proposition under consideration, for instance. Radical externalists believe that whether a belief of a subject ought to be called 'knowledge' depends only on external factors, such as the truth of the proposition (we are supposing that the proposition is about the external world). In general, internalists stress justification, whereas externalists stress truth.

Radical internalism appears to be based on a very Cartesian idea of the subject: as someone locked into his own mind, having access only to his own impressions and ideas and not being able to justify his beliefs by pointing to the world around him. But the problem of justification doesn't even arise for a Cartesian subject: it is only in a social setting that we can be asked to justify our beliefs, and it is only in a social setting that a set of normative rules for justification can be worked out. Without a social setting, the idea of justification doesn't even make sense.

Of course one may ask oneself to justify one's own beliefs, and in practice one does so often. But arguably one uses the internalised standards of judgement that the community has given one. Really? Does that mean that conscious critical reflection on one's own ideas is impossible if one has not been raised in an epistemic community? (Such as most animals.) I'm hesitant to say so - see below. Does it mean that you are tied to the rules laid down for you by your community? Surely not, but I suggest that adopting different rules of justification amounts to taking the stance that the rest of the community should also adopt those rules - it is a statement that one would like to bring about a social change. "Please people, let's use this rule to evaluate ourselves!"

Making 'justification' a social concept doesn't really solve the problem, though. For one could still be an externalist or an internalist about the social group: does it have knowledge simply when it conforms to its own standards of justification, or does it have knowledge when it is right? And a new problem has arisen: is a social group entirely free to choose its standards of justification, or does the world somehow have a say in this?

We will turn to truth. I have no patience at all for 'everybody has his own truth'-talk, so I'll simply start by assuming that we all agree that truth is somehow external to us. We cannot know for sure that something is true merely by looking at our own mind. Why do we all accept it? Why would we accept it if we were Cartesian subjects? There would simply be no reason to accept the world as something that exists, let alone as something that is relevant, if we were Cartesian subjects. Nope, our idea of truth as something external to us is based on two things: the existence of epistemic authorities, and our reliance on the world.

With the first I mean simply this: there are people who know more about some things than we do. We learn to accept this, and we learn to put their beliefs about those subjects above our own - at least as long as we think that they probably have better justifications than we do. (Justifications are, after all, the social standards which pick out epistemic authorities from the mass.) The existence and our constant recognition and acceptance of epistemic authorities proves to us that we are fallible, that truth is not possessed by us, but that it is sometimes possessed by others who may give it to us.

With the second I mean that to us, non-Cartesian subjects, the world is very relevant as it is what gives us pain and pleasure, shows us beauty and ugliness, gives us enough food or makes us starve, and in the end decides about our life and death. We rely on the world, and since we are ('causally', if we can use that word pre-theoretically) predisposed to choose pleasure, beauty, food and life over pain, ugliness, starvation and death, holding beliefs that will (causally) make us perform worse in those aspects are punished swiftly.

This is a very important point. Beliefs are causes of our behaviour. The most basic normativity concerning beliefs stems from the normativity of survival: those beliefs which harm our survival are bad and therefore not knowledge, those which help it are good and therefore knowledge. But the exact same thing holds for the standards of justification adopted by a community: if they lead to the community's eradication, something was wrong with them. As far as we are not at a liberty to choose pain and death, we are not at a liberty to choose our standards of justification.

I am using a very weak notion of normativity here. It is utterly grounded in natural phenomena, and should not be interpreted as a return of the realm of absolute morals. We have left that behind forever, I'm afraid. In Nietzschean terms, I'm saying that though God is dead, there are strong causal restriction on the new values we can adopt - thus, strong causal restrictions on our (utterly relative) norms.

But this means that our idea of truth as something external is partly grounded in our practice of justification, and partly grounded on aspects of the world that also ground this practice. But this grounding severly underdetermines both our practice concerning truth and that concerning justification. Furthermore, the standards the social group adopts with respect to truth and those it adopts with respect to justification will intertwine and often be identical - indeed, I don't truly see how we could seperate them. Our personal judgements, our social dynamics and the world all intertwine to create our practice of knowledge, and this practice simply cannot be cut into those parts that refer to the self, and those parts that refer to the external world. Many of the things that I have refered to as being part of the world are actually parts of our brains and of our self, and they are dependent on social conditionalisations too.

These conclusions could use more argumentation. Maybe another time. Posts in a blog should not be held to the standards of articles.

So it seems to me that the entire distinction between internalism and externalism is a philosophical misunderstanding. It mistakenly assumes that in the domain of knowledge we can make a distinction between 'internal' and 'external' factors, whereas in reality this domain is formed by a hugely complicated network of causes and effects that is not neatly divided into the self, the social and the world.