Epistemic Internalism and The Agential Regulation of Belief

It has been argued that Epistemic Internalism -- which I'll here take as the claim that "the justificatory status of a person's doxastic attitudes strongly supervenes on the person's mental states, events, and conditions." -- is supported by the idea that one of the jobs of an account of justification is to provide guidance to those who would improve their doxastic practice. This reasoning rests on a mistaken understanding of what guidance requires.

Steve Petersen argues on these grounds in favor of a kind of internalist epistemology. Likewise, Pollock and Cruz, make reference to this kind of reasoning in their defense of internalism about justification:

"If improvement is to be possible, however, it needs to be possible to determine which belief among many candidate beliefs is most justified. Internalists have been driven, then, by what we might think of as rational solipsism since, in their view, we are alone in the task of refining our beliefs and the only resources we have to work with are the ones that can be brought to bear internally. Second, epistemic concepts have been viewed as deontological in character. That is, it has seemed to many epistemologists that intellectual achievement is at least partly a matter of duty-fulfillment. Fulfilling a duty, however, seems to require that one be able to do the things that duty requires and to determine what oneÂ’s duties are. In order to secure the means to an intellectual duty, an epistemic agent will need to be able to reflect on her condition and on the resources she has available."

Thus they conclude that it is reasonable to suppose that whatever determines the justificatory status of a belief supervenes on an epistemic agent's own mind. The idea is this: only an epistemic agent's own mind is accessible in such a way as to allow for the refinement of belief and the fulfillment of epistemic duty.

As Petersen puts it:

"...any proposed epistemic standard that demands some contingent relation obtain between the thinker's psychological state and something external to it will fail the guidance intuition. For since the standard is contingently relational, all the intrinsic properties of the psychological state could stay the same while its success in obtaining the relation to the things external could change. Therefore, again, error with respect to this standard cannot be cognitively accessible to the thinker."

Petersen, Pollock, and Cruz are all mistaken. The guidance intuition -- as Petersen puts it -- does place some constraints on the kinds of factors that make for certain kinds of epistemic value. Likewise, the fact that we might have epistemic duties probably constrains the the kinds of factors that make for certain kinds of epistemic value. However, the result is not that these kinds of epistemic value must inhere in the internal -- introspectively accessible -- state of the epistemic agent.

What is plausibly required is that these factors be cognitively accessible, full stop. If that which makes for epistemically valuable belief is beyond my ken, then I can hardly be blamed for failing to regulate my belief in its light. This is because I cannot seek to regulate my belief in light of what is beyond my ken.

Petersen's worry (and I think Pollock and Cruz's) is that facts external to me cannot be accessible, since they might vary while I stay the same. (This is an entailment of their being external to me.) Accordingly, PP&C conclude, those dimensions of epistemic value in light of which I might be expected or wish to regulate by belief must be internal to me.

However, I doubt that the mere contingency of my grasp on the external facts is enough to put those facts beyond my ken. Consider the position of a security guard supervising a government lab via closed circuit TV. Does he have access to the facts about how things are going in the government lab? Given that the cameras etc. are in working order, the guard has access to activities in the lab. Of course, the image on his TV screen is such that it could exist, even while superspies have damaged the cameras in the lab, but this doesn't by itself defeat the claim that he has access to the facts. A mode of access might be reliable without being necessarily reliable.

My possession of access to some domain of facts requires that those facts have some impact on me. Thus it is clear that if I am to regulate my beliefs in light of their justificatory status it had better be possible for the justificatory status of my beliefs to have some impact on me. However, so long as the factors that constitute that status are accessible to me, they needn't be internal to me -- needn't be constituted by my mental states, relations between my mental states, etc. They needn't be internal to me because access doesn't require necessitation.

May 22nd: Welcome carnies! Many thanks to anniemiz for organizing the gala.