As to knowledge, I am a strong internalist. I simply see no reason to hold that one man can have knowledge while another man who is justified in his belief in the exact same way and to the exact same degree does not. Furthermore, I don’t see what difference the distinction between knowledge and “apparent knowledge”, as the externalists call it, could amount to in practice. The distinction only seems to serve the purpose of preserving our intuitions concerning the objectivity of knowledge by providing a label which we can apply ad hoc to any cases which do not align with such intuitions. My opinions regarding the debate between externalism and internalism as it applies to justification are not nearly as strong. In this post I will lay some ground work for a latter exploration in this matter.
What I wish to argue for in this post is that there is a difference between a belief, B, being justified and a person being justified in holding that same belief. Of course a person is usually justified in believing any belief which is justified. However, it seems possible that a person can be justified in believing some unjustified belief just as it is possible that they can justified in believing some unjustified belief. Furthermore, since there is a difference between these two types of justification, there is no reason to assume that justification in one case cannot be external while the other is necessarily internal. This distinction will thus prevent inappropriate counter-examples from arising in future posts.
Let us explore a little further the difference between belief and believing. A belief is simply a proposition which represents the world as being some way. Loosely, if the world is as the belief represents it to be, then it is true. The justification of belief is concerned with deciding (by way of evidence, coherence, etc.) whether a belief represents the world correctly or not. Believing, on the other hand, is our accepting or giving allegiance to some representation of the world. Justification for believing, accordingly, concerns itself with deciding whether it is good to accept some representation of the world. Thus, while the latter concerns itself with ‘is’ claims, the latter concerns itself with ‘ought’ claims.
The difference between the belief, B, being justified and a person being justified in believing B is very closely related to the difference between epistemic justification and pragmatic justification. If B is pragmatically justified, then there are good reasons that some agent should believe B whether or not B is true. If, on the other hand, B is epistemically justified, then there are good reasons that B is true whether or not B should be believed by some agent. Whereas in the case of epistemic justification we are primarily concerned about the status of the belief, in the case of pragmatic justification we are primarily concerned about the status of the believer.
Let us take as an illustration of this difference Pascal’s wager. Pascal, being a fideist, thought that all arguments for God’s existence were dismal failures. (Of course he thought the arguments against God’s existence were just as bad.) Thus, rather than argue for God’s existence, he argued for the belief in God’s existence by saying, roughly speaking, that we have everything to gain by believing and nothing to gain by disbelieving. In other word, he did not argue that God exists (an ‘is’ claim), but that we should believe that God exists (an ‘ought’ claim). While I think Pascal’s argument for the belief in God is no more compelling than are the arguments for God which he himself dismissed, this example illustrates the distinction between a belief being justified and our being justified in believing.
Pascal’s wager (were it convincing) is an example of our being justified in believing an unjustified belief. Cases can also be given, however, in which one is unjustified in believing a justified belief. Suppose a terrible baseball player is up to bat. Since his batting average is dismal, the belief that he will not get a hit in this at-bat is quite justified. Nevertheless, the batter is not at all justified in believing such a thing, for his believing that he will not get a hit actually decreases the chance of his getting a hit. In other words, while the belief almost certainly does not represent the world correctly, the batter ought to accept such a representation anyways. Therefore, we have a case of a batter being justified in believing a quite unjustified belief.
To repeat, it is usually (perhaps always?) the case that we are justified in believing justified beliefs, but such is not necessarily the case. In fact, even if it was the case, necessarily, this still would not mean that justification for belief just is justification for believing as the examples above have shown. Accordingly, since justification for believing is not the same as justification for a belief, we have no reason to assume that they must either both be externalist or both be internalist in nature. It could even be said (with little to no backing) that we should expect justification for ‘ought’ claims to be different from justification of ‘is’ claims in some important way. But these are issues which must wait for a future post.
Note that one shouldn’t equate all forms of Externalism to what is argued by the reliabilists. I agree the reliabilists miss something fundamental about what is in question in epistmology. And I agree with your point there. The more interesting kinds of externalism are those raised by Putnam and related notions which treat knowledge as a kind of linguistic knowledge and then basically raise externalist conditions on language. Then there is the problem of “access” to evidence. That then raises the issue of the inside/outside of the mind. That is, why is access to memory that is internal somehow different from the exact same process that perhaps uses an external sign to jog ones memory? Given how important memory or creative imagination is to internal justification, sometimes the border criteria seems ridiculously arbitrary.
Comment by Clark — January 15, 2007 @ 12:37 pm
BTW – the way you frame a belief is probably better cast as a discussion of beliefs in terms of public processes versus believing in terms of private processes. That’s because the way you frame it, belief (as opposed to believing) is just after what could possibly justify that belief independent of any particular person meeting that criteria. But it seems to me that in that case your committed to proposition as public propositions (i.e. public senses of sentences) rather than what any particular individual intends by them.
Maybe I’m wrong by that and one can still talk about what justifies a belief given a particular person. But in that case it seems much harder to make the distinction between beliefs and believing you make.
As to the knowledge and “apparent knowledge” that’s not just an issue for externalists. Lots of internalists accept that. Roughly apparent knowledge is something we believe is knowledge but isn’t. If one is committed to certainty for knowledge then this is impossible. If one is committed to fallibilism of knowledge then of course one need not know when one knows.
Comment by Clark — January 15, 2007 @ 2:15 pm
Just for the record, I do not have problems with the knowledge/apparent-knowledge distinction per se. Rather, I dislike the role which apparent knowledge plays in externalist theories of knowledge. I agree that to deny apparent knowledge altogether seems a tad absurd.
Comment by Jeff G — January 16, 2007 @ 5:32 pm