Questions: Internalism and Externalism About Justification

Question 1

Maria is a reliably accurate weather forecaster, but she cannot explain her knack — it is not accessible through introspection or reasoning. According to a strict internalist, her weather beliefs are:

• A. Fully justified, because they reliably lead to true beliefs
• B. Not justified, because the factors making them accurate are not reflectively accessible to her
• C. Justified as long as she has considered the evidence consciously available to her
• D. Neither justified nor unjustified — both internalists and externalists suspend judgment in such cases

Answer: (B)

A strict internalist requires that justificatory factors be accessible through reflection. Maria cannot identify through introspection what makes her forecasts accurate — so that factor cannot play a justificatory role by internalist standards. An externalist (reliabilist) would say she is justified: reliable process is sufficient. The disagreement is precisely about whether reliability without reflective access counts. Maria's case is designed to pump externalist intuitions, but a strict internalist must say she is not justified in the relevant sense.

Question 2

The 'new evil demon' thought experiment is most powerful as an argument for:

• A. Externalism, because it shows that cognitive processes fully determine justification
• B. Skepticism, because it shows we cannot know whether the external world exists
• C. Internalism, because the demon-deceived agent seems epistemically blameless even though all her processes are unreliable
• D. Reliabilism, because it shows that reliability is the standard we implicitly use to evaluate beliefs

Answer: (C)

The demon scenario shows an agent who reasons carefully, consults her experience, and follows evidence — yet all her beliefs are false because a demon feeds her false inputs. Intuitively she seems epistemically blameless: she is doing everything right by her own lights. An externalist must say her beliefs are unjustified (unreliable processes), but this feels like blaming someone for bad luck. The scenario is designed to pump the internalist intuition that justification tracks rational epistemic conduct, not truth-connection.

Question 3

Internalism about justification entails that animals and young children have many justified beliefs, since they accurately perceive the world.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

This gets the implication backwards. Internalism requires that justificatory factors be reflectively accessible — roughly, the believer must be able to evaluate their own epistemic standing through introspection or a priori reflection. Animals and young children typically cannot engage in this reflection, which is a standard objection *to* internalism (not a consequence of it). Externalists can more readily attribute justified beliefs to animals and children, since reliable process is sufficient regardless of reflective capacity.

Question 4

Both internalism and externalism track genuine epistemic values — they are not simply a terminological disagreement about what the word 'justified' should mean.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

Externalism tracks the connection between justification and truth: a belief that reliably tracks the world is epistemically valuable in the knowledge-producing sense. Internalism tracks the connection between justification and rational epistemic conduct: a belief formed by an agent who has done everything right by their own lights is epistemically blameless. Both of these are real things we care about. The debate continues because these two values can come apart — as the evil demon case shows — and there is no neutral ground from which to declare one more important.

Question 5

Why does the internalism/externalism debate matter for how we evaluate the epistemic status of agents in radically deceptive environments?

Model answer: In a deceptive environment (like the evil demon scenario), an agent's cognitive processes are unreliable — they produce mostly false beliefs. An externalist must say the agent's beliefs are unjustified, since the processes fail to track truth. But the agent may be behaving exactly as a careful reasoner would — consulting available evidence, reasoning carefully, drawing reasonable conclusions. An internalist says this agent is epistemically blameless and therefore justified, because what is accessible through reflection is all that can fairly be demanded. The debate reveals that 'justified belief' may be doing two jobs: certifying truth-connection (externalist value) and certifying rational epistemic conduct (internalist value). Whether these come apart matters for how we assess agents who are deceived, misinformed, or cognitively limited through no fault of their own.

The debate has practical stakes: how we evaluate students given misleading textbooks, patients given wrong diagnoses, or communities raised with false beliefs. An internalist says some of these agents are epistemically blameless despite widespread false belief; an externalist may say their beliefs are unjustified even if excusable. The stakes are highest precisely in adversarial or distorted epistemic environments.