Internalism and externalism in epistemology

 Not all of our beliefs are justified, nor are all of our justified beliefs to the same degree. That our beliefs are justified is something that concerns us and should concern us as epistemic agents, since it is assumed that if a belief is (well) justified, if we have good reasons for it or have formed it in an appropriate way, this will make its probability of being true increases. In this way, justification is considered a fundamental epistemological good. Now, what is the fact that a belief is justified? What kinds of facts, properties, states, or conditions can confer justification on a belief? What is the nature of justification?

 

If the distinction between coherentism and foundationalism —or infinitism— (see Epistemic Justification) referred to the structure of justification, the distinction between internalism and externalism refers to its nature, that is, to what type of factors can act as justifiers of a belief. This distinction is relatively recent, it appears for the first time in (Armstrong, 1973) and, although there it refers to the different types of definitions of knowledge, it has subsequently been imposed as a way to distinguish between two types of theories about the (nature of knowledge). the justification. According to the most generally accepted conception, the internalist conception of epistemic justification is one that defends that only what the subject has or can have cognitive access to (through introspection or reflection) can justify a belief; in general, then, only mental states (experiences, memories, other beliefs) can be justifiers. Externalism is the negation of internalism: it is not true that only what is cognitively accessible can be a justifier. For example, if A forms a certain belief from reading a news item in a serious newspaper and forms another belief by reading a tabloid newspaper, his first belief will be justified and the second will not, although the subject does not know that one of the newspapers deserves trust and the other does not. The objective reliability of the source, whether or not it is known to the subject, is relevant to the justification of the belief.

 

We can say that our appeal to justification responds to two different intuitions or presents a double aspect that, unfortunately, is not always easy to match. It is this double aspect that favors the different positions (internal and external) that we are dealing with here. If what centers our interest with respect to justification is what makes it reasonable for the subject to acquire or maintain a belief, our position will tend to be internalist. If, on the contrary, we emphasize what increases the probability that the belief is true, externalism will appear to us a more attractive position.

 

As we have characterized this distinction, we can see that internalism is the most demanding position, only what is internal to the subject's mind can justify a belief. To the extent that externalism is the negation of internalism, it could seem that it is more permissive: there would be phenomena that, without being cognitively accessible to the subject, nor being mental states of the latter, could be justifiers. However, there are two types of externalism: 1) that which considers that the internalist condition is not sufficient for justification; that is, in addition to what is internal to the subject's mind, some external condition is needed, something that does not have to be accessible to the subject, (which would be a more permissive externalism than internalism) and 2) which holds that internalist conditions are not only not sufficient for justification, but they are not necessary: ​​it is only some condition that does not have to be accessible to the subject (such as the reliability of the process by which they have been acquired) that determines the justification of the beliefs. In this second case, externalism would not be more permissive than internalism, but would simply introduce demands of a different nature.

 

Internalist theories of justification

Within internism we can also distinguish two types, according to their degree of demand: 1) what we can call status internism and 2) simple internism. Both types, as interns, agree on:

 

a) Only what is internal to the subject's mind can be a justifier.

 

But while simple internism requires only this condition, status internism further maintains that:

 

b) Nothing can be a justifier unless the subject is (or can be) aware that it is (that is, of his justifying status).

 

That is, for simple internalism it is not necessary that what justifies the belief is recognized as such by the subject, it is enough that it be cognitively accessible by mere reflection. Thus, according to this position, a perceptual experience, for example, can serve as a justifier of a belief. My perceptual experience of a tree before me justifies my belief that there is a tree before me. On the other hand, for status internism (BonJour, 1985, ch. 2; BonJour & Sosa, 2003), this same experience cannot justify said belief if, in addition to having it, I am not aware (currently or potentially) of the justifying relationship between one and the other; that is, if I do not believe in turn that such an experience makes it probable that there is a tree before me. In this way, an important difference between one type of internism and another is that status involves a doxastic conception of justification: it maintains that our beliefs can only be justified by other beliefs. On the other hand, simple internalism admits that also experiences, memories ..., can be justifiers. Simple internalisms are dogmatism (Pryor, 2000, 2001) and evidentialism (Feldman and Conee, 1985; Conee and Feldman, 2001).

 

Pryor's dogmatism rightly holds that such things as experiences and memories are immediate justifiers and that when a belief is based on them it is immediately justified. For its part, evidentialism maintains that (in the formulation of Bergmann, 2004, which corrects that of Fedman and Conee, 1985): “The belief C of S is justified if and only if C is an adequate doxastic response to the evidence of S ”(Bergmann, 2004, p. 35). That is, the subject's belief will be justified if it occurs in response to the reasons, experiences, memories, etc., that he possesses.

 

The problem with these theories is that they do not require as a condition for something to be considered evidence that it has to be a reliable indicator of the truth of the belief. For both dogmatism and evidentialism (and, in general, for internalism) an experience justifies whether it is a true perceptual experience or a delusional one. In other words, if two subjects are in the same mental state, it cannot be that the belief of one is justified and that of the other is not. For example, if the "perceptual" experience that a subject would obtain in the presence of a cat justifies him to believe that there is a cat in front of him, then if he has a qualitatively identical experience, this will also justify him to believe that there is a cat in front of him. , even if it is a case of delusion and there is really no cat before him. Even if we were brains in a vat or were systematically deceived by an evil Cartesian genius, our beliefs, insofar as they correspond to our evidence, would be justified, even if all or most of them were false. At the end of the day, what has caused the belief is not something that (at least not always) is within the cognitive reach of the subject, nor is it internal to his mind, with which he cannot influence the justification according to the internalist positions. But if evidence, and therefore justification, does not increase at all the probability that our beliefs are true, then why do we care? What epistemic value would they have?

 

On the other hand, with regard to evidentialism, as in this conception of justification only the evidences available to the subject are taken into account and not their responsibility and efficiency when acquiring them, it may happen that there are many counter-evidences of which the subject does not have due to having been negligent and, despite everything, his belief would be justified. Epistemic irresponsibility could favor justification.

 

As we can see, internalism places the emphasis on that aspect of justification that has to do with the subject's relationship with his belief and with the reasonableness of acquiring or maintaining a belief from such a perspective, and largely forgets the relationship of justification. with the truth, her role as conductor of the truth.

 

2. Externalist theories of justification

In general, when speaking of externalist theories, only those of the second type are usually considered as such, that is, those that defend that the justifiers of a belief are external to the subject's mind, that they do not have to be cognitively accessible. .

 

These include proper functionalism and, above all, reliabilism. According to the first of these theories, a belief is justified if it has been formed by properly functioning cognitive faculties (Plantinga, 1993; Bergman, 2006). For its part, reliabilism maintains that the justification of a belief does not depend at all on the reasons available to the subject, nor on the logical connections that the content of the belief maintains with the other beliefs of the subject, but on the fact of that the process that generated it is reliable, that is, that it provides (in the right circumstances) a high percentage of true beliefs. According to its highest representative, Alvin Goldman, (Goldman, 1976, 1986) this is all that is needed for a belief to be justified. Reliable processes are, in general, perception, memory, reasoning and introspection. Thus, for example, if under normal observation circumstances, I acquire the belief that there is a book before me as a consequence of my perceptual experience of the book, my belief will be immediately justified, for under such circumstances perception is a reliable process of understanding. obtaining beliefs.

 

A theory that straddles both types of externalism is Sosa's epistemology of virtues (Sosa, 1991). According to this author, a belief is justified if it has its origin in an intellectual virtue, that is, in a faculty (perception, memory, reasoning) that generates, in the right environment, a high index of true beliefs. Now, Sosa maintains that this type of justification is sufficient for "animal knowledge" (one in which beliefs are direct responses to the impact of one's own experience), but not for "reflective knowledge", which requires a " epistemic perspective ”, which is constituted by the beliefs that the subject has about the reliability of their faculties, etc. And, he argues, "reflective knowledge is better justified than animal knowledge."

 

We can see, then, that the fundamental interest of externalism is the connection of belief with truth. The justification of the belief must be an indication, a symptom of the truth: justified beliefs are much more likely to be true than those that are not justified. Justification has to do with the relationship between belief (the process that generated it) and the world. The difference between one type of externalism and another is whether only such a connection is required or it is also considered that the subject must have reasons or evidence in favor of his belief.

 

If internalism prioritized the relationship of the subject with the belief and the reasons that it had in its favor, centered its interest in the fact of whether it was reasonable to believe given the reasons that were possessed, externalism focuses on the relationship of belief with the environment and the connection of justification with the truth. But the externalist theories that we are seeing also have a clear drawback. If the subject's belief is justified from the external point of view, but he has no reasons that he can offer (not even to himself) to justify it, his epistemic position seems weak. Having a justification that is completely ignored does not seem like an adequate justification. Therefore, we have that, as Comesaña (2010, p. 571) says, “reliability without evidence is blind, evidence without reliability is empty”.

 

It seems, then, that an adequate theory of epistemic justification must incorporate both internalist elements (having evidence) and some externalist element. That is, it seems necessary to include some external element that helps to specify what constitutes evidence and what does not. If, for example, I say that there is a cat in front of me and I am asked how I know it or why I believe it, the fact that I say that I know it because I see it indicates something in this regard. I have said that I know because I see it and not anything else because I consider my experience as evidence in favor of the belief that there is a cat before me. I am assuming that my visual experience makes it likely that there is a cat before me. Well, we could demand that for something to constitute evidence in favor of a belief it must make the truth of the belief really probable. The intuition that the brain's perceptual beliefs in the vat would also be justified remains to be resolved, although their experiences did not make it probable that they were true. Indexical reliabilism aims to solve this problem . Ultimately, according to this theory, it is a matter of saying that the justification of beliefs depends on the reliability of the process in our world. Thus the beliefs of the brain in the vat will be justified because perception is a reliable process in our world (although it is not in yours).

Argument against physicalism

Mary's room, also known as Mary the super-scientist, is a thought experiment proposed by Frank Jackson in his 1982 article Epiphenomenal Qualia, and extended in What Mary Didn't Know, 1986. The experiment is intended to motivate what Jackson called the Knowledge Argument against physicalism

The debate that arose from its publication has led to an anthology entitled There's Something About Mary, published in 2004, and which includes responses from philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, David Lewis and Paul Churchland.

 

The thought experiment

The passage where Jackson introduced the thought experiment says:

 

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for some reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room through a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let's say, all the physical information there is to get about what happens when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and uses terms like "red", "blue" and so on. She discovers, for example, just what combination of waves from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces through the nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and the expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the pronunciation of the sentence " the sky is blue". [...] What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or given a television with a color monitor? Will she learn something or not? It seems obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then it is undeniable that her prior knowledge of her was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is something more to have than that, and "physicalism" is false.

In other words, Mary is a scientist who has all the physical information about colors, but she has never experienced colors. The question is: once she experiences colors, will she learn anything new? If the answer is yes, then it means that physical information is not all there is to know about the world, and therefore physicalism is false. The argument can be reconstructed like this:

 

Mary has all the physical information about human color vision before she is released.

But there is some information about human color vision that Mary did not possess before she was released.

Therefore, not all information about human color vision is physical.

 

Daniel Dennett

Daniel Dennett argues that in fact, Mary would not learn anything new when she left the room in black and white and saw the color red. Dennett claims that if she really knew "all about colors," that knowledge would necessarily include a deep understanding of why and how human neurology makes us feel the qualia of colors. Therefore, she Mary would already know exactly what to expect from the color red, even before she leaves the room. Dennett argues that although we cannot conceive of such profound knowledge, if the unrealistic premise of the thought experiment is that Mary knows everything there is to know about colors, we cannot assume that because we cannot conceive or describe such knowledge, that knowledge is impossible. Consequently, Dennett concludes that the experiment does not provide a solid argument for the existence of qualia.

 

However, Frank Jackson, as emerges from the preceding quotes themselves, does not hypothesize that Mary knew "all about colors," but only that she has "all the physical information" (emphasis added). Otherwise, that the experience of colors involves more than just physical information about them. Dennett's argument is a clever play on words, but he fails to really replicate Jackson's postulate.

 

Plotinus and neoplatonsim

Brief summary

 

Plotinus; (205-270) was a Hellenistic Greek philosopher, author of the Enneads , and founder of Neoplatonism, a school that also included Numenius of Apamea, Porphyry, Iamblichus and Proclus. He was born in Egypt and educated in Alexandria, being a student of Ammonio Saccas (who had tried to harmonize Aristotle and Plato). He finally settled in Rome.

 

Plotinus's work is essentially an original commentary on Plato's works, in a much more structured way than Philo of Alexandria did. Attracted by Platonic idealism, he developed his philosophy incorporating Christian elements with Greek and Eastern philosophical ideas.

 

His main work was the Enneads, a compilation of the treatises that he began to write from the year 253 until a few months before his death, 17 years later. The task of compiling the treatises and organizing them as a book was done by Porfirio, who grouped them into six groups of nine (in total, 54 treatises). The Enneads collect the lessons that Plotinus taught at his school in Rome.

 

Plotinus elaborated a theological structure that saw the universe as the result of a series of emanations from an ultimate, eternal and immaterial reality that he called One. From it arises another divine principle, the Nous, source of the Platonic forms from which the Soul emanates. . Plotinus believed like Plato that the body is the "prison" of the soul and its purpose is to return to the One through a life of wisdom and virtue.

Later, other philosophers, especially of Christian beliefs, such as Augustine of Hippo and Boethius, showed a strong influence from Plotinus and Neoplatonism. His metaphysical writings have inspired pagan, Jewish, Christian, Gnostic, and Islamic mystics.

 

Doctrine

Plotinus's central proposal consists in affirming that there is a reality that founds any other existence: the One. From an act of procession, some opt for emanation, the nous and the soul emerge. In reality, the basic principle is only the One, while the other two hypostases and the rest of realities are derived.

 

Speaking of hypostasis is an attribution made by Porphyry, a disciple of Plotinus, to the thought of his teacher, since the term hypostasis is not found in the text of the Enneads.

 

Hypostasis

The one

The One of Plotinus's theory is indescribable, since it is the unit, the greatest, to such an extent that he sometimes calls it as God, unique, infinite. Plotinus, before wanting to correct, prefers to remain silent than to say something. A clearly mystical attitude. As a principle and last reality, this absolute transcendence means that there are no terms to refer to it. It is then about the Unity that founds the existence of all things. That is the center of all his doctrine. The One is beyond Being and therefore there is no definition that positively describes the One and opts for the negative path. He eludes her understanding because he considers it impossible according to the human mode of knowing. Plotinus contemplates the One as an unbeatable and supreme reality from which the nous and the soul come. He affirms that the act of existing of all entities depends directly on the One. He considers it the maximum unit of the principle of all reality since it is unlimited, perfect and does not tend to end, therefore, it is a single reality.

History of Political philosophy

 Political philosophy is the branch of philosophy that studies how the relationship between people and society should be, and includes fundamental questions about government, politics, laws, freedom, equality, justice, property, rights, political power, the application of a legal code by an authority, what makes a legitimate government, what rights and freedoms should it protect and why, what form should it take and why, what obligations do citizens have towards a government legitimately (if any), and when they can legitimately topple him (if ever). While political science investigates how political phenomena were, are and will be, political philosophy is in charge of theorizing how these phenomena should be

In a vernacular sense, the term "political philosophy" often refers to a general perspective, or a specific ethics, belief, or attitude, about politics that need not belong to the technical discipline of philosophy. Charles Blattberg, who defines politics as "responding to conflicts with dialogue," suggests that political philosophies offer philosophical considerations of that dialogue.

 

Political philosophy has a broad field of study and is easily connected with other branches and sub-disciplines of philosophy, such as the philosophy of law and the philosophy of economics. It is strongly related to ethics in questions about what kind of Political institutions are suitable for a group depending on what way of life is considered suitable for that group or for the members of that group. The best institutions will be those that promote that way of life.

 

The metaphysics, the main controversy is about whether the fundamental entity on which rights and obligations must fall is the individual, or the group. Individualism considers the fundamental entity to be the individual, and therefore they promote methodological individualism. Communitarianism emphasizes that the individual is part of a group, and therefore gives priority to the group as a fundamental entity and as a unit of analysis.

 

The foundations of political philosophy have varied throughout history. For the Greeks the city was the center and end of all political activity. In the Middle Ages, all political activity focused on the relationships that human beings must maintain with the order given by God. From the Renaissance on, politics adopted a basically anthropocentric approach. In the modern and contemporary world, many models emerge and coexist, ranging from totalitarianisms to participatory democratic systems (among which there are many variants).

 

Some influential political philosophers were: in the UK, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham and James Mill; in France, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire; in Italy, Cesare Beccaria, Giambattista Vico and Giuseppe Mazzini; and in Germany, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

 

Contemporary political philosophy

 

From the end of World War II until 1971, when John Rawls published his Theory of Justice, political philosophy declined in Anglo-American academia, as analytical philosophers expressed skepticism about the possibility that normative judgments had cognitive content. and political science turned to statistical methods and behaviorism. In continental Europe, on the other hand, the postwar decades saw an enormous flowering of political philosophy, with Marxism dominating the field. This was the time of Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser, and the victories of Mao Zedong in China and of Fidel Castro in Cuba, as well as the events of May 1968, which sparked a growing interest in revolutionary ideology, especially the New Left. Some continental European emigrants to Britain and the United States, including Karl Popper, Friedrich Hayek, Leo Strauss, Isaiah Berlin, Eric Voegelin, and Judith Shklar, fostered the continued study of political philosophy in the Anglo-American world, but in the 1950s and 1960’s, they and their students stood against the analytic establishment.

 

Communism continued to be a major focus especially during the 1950s and 1960s. Issues such as colonialism and racism were major issues that emerged at the time. In general, there was a marked tendency towards a pragmatic approach to political questions, rather than a philosophical one. Most of the academic debate centered on one or both of the following pragmatic themes: the application of utilitarianism to public policy problems, and the application of economic models (such as rational choice theory) to political questions. The rise of feminism, LGBT social movements, and the end of colonial rule and the political exclusion of minorities such as African Americans and sexual minorities in the developed world, enabled feminist, postcolonial, and multicultural thinking to become meaningful. This posed challenges to the idea of ​​the social contract by philosophers such as Charles W. Mills, in his book "The Racial Contract", and Carole Pateman in her work "The Sexual Contract", focusing on the fact that the social contract excluded people of color and women, respectively.

 

In Anglo-American academic political philosophy, the publication of John Rawls's “ Theory of justice” in 1971 is considered a landmark. Rawls used a thought experiment, the original position, in which representative parties choose principles of justice for the basic structure of society from behind a veil of ignorance. Rawls also offered a critique of utilitarian approaches to political justice issues. Robert Nozick's 1974 book "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" responded to Rawls from a libertarian perspective, gaining academic respect for his views.

Contemporaneously, with the emergence of analytical ethics in Anglo-American thought, several lines of philosophy emerged in Europe between the 1950s and 1980s aimed at criticizing existing societies. Most took elements of Marxist economic analysis, but combined them with a more cultural or ideological emphasis. Within the Frankfurt School, thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Jürgen Habermas combined Marxist and Freudian perspectives. For their part, several other thinkers, still heavily influenced by Marxism, placed new emphasis on structuralism and on a "return to Hegel." Within the line of poststructuralism thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Claude Lefort and Jean Baudrillard can be placed. The Situationists were more influenced by Hegel; Guy Debord, in particular, transferred a Marxist analysis of commodity fetishism to the realm of consumption and examined the relationship between consumerism and the dominant ideological formation.

 

Another debate developed around the various critiques of liberal political theory made by Michael Walzer, Michael Sandel, and Charles Taylor. The liberal-community debate is often considered valuable in generating a new set of philosophical problems, rather than a profound and illuminating clash of perspectives. These and other communitarians (such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Daniel A. Bell) argue that, against liberalism, communities are prior to individuals, and therefore must be the center of political focus. Communitarians tend to support greater local control, as well as economic and social policies that encourage the growth of social capital.

 

A pair of overlapping political perspectives emerging towards the end of the 20th century are republicanism (or neo-republicanism, or civic republicanism) and the capabilities approach. The resurgent republican movement seeks to provide an alternative definition of freedom from Isaiah Berlin's positive and negative forms of freedom, namely, "freedom as non-domination." Unlike liberals who understand freedom as "non-interference", the idea of ​​"non-domination" implies that individuals are not subject to the arbitrary will of any other person. For a liberal, a slave who is not interfered with, may be free, but for a republican the mere status of a slave, regardless of how that slave is treated, is reprehensible. Prominent Republicans include historian Quentin Skinner, jurist Cass Sunstein, and political philosopher Philip Pettit. The capacity approach, initiated by the economists Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen and developed by the jurist Martha Nussbaum, understands freedom along allied lines: the real capacity to act. Both the capacity approach and republicanism treat the election as something that must be funded. In other words, it is not enough to be legally capable of doing something, but to have the real option to do it.

 

One of the most prominent themes in recent political philosophy has been the theory of deliberative democracy. The seminal work is from  Jurgen Habermas in Germany, but the most extensive literature has been in English, led by theorists such as Jane Mansbridge, Joshua Cohen, Amy Gutmann, and Dennis Thompson.