Acquisition and Justification of Beliefs :: Psychology Access Internalism Essays

Bartleby is a lazy student who refuses to psychoanalyse precisely because he would prefer not. Although his teacher, Mr. smith, automatically assumes that Bartleby failed the final exam he rightful(prenominal) took, Mr. Smith could have reasoned that he has sufficient evidence to brave his belief. Mr. Smith has seen that Bartleby shows little interest in the class, that he has poor study habits and has consistently failed all his previous exams, and that just about enough questions were incorrect on the portion of the exam that Mr. Smith did have time to tick off to warrant a failing grade. But because final grades argon due(p) and Mr. Smith runs out of time to finish grading, he marks an F on Bartlebys test without actually calculating the score or even realizing that he has sufficient evidence to support his belief that Bartleby failed. Later, Mr. Smith comes to find out that his belief was true, thus once again corroborative Mr. Smiths time-tested prepossession that students who have failed in the gone argon perpetual failures. Was Mr. Smiths belief justified? Intuitively, we would hope to say that it isnt, because his belief is grounded in, or caused by, his bias against Bartleby. The problem is that twain bang Internalist, like approach shot Internalism, and rigidly Externalist accounts of justification, like Reliabilism, have difficulties with showing how bias can disqualify a seemingly justified belief. In what follows, I will use Matthias Steups account, A Defense of Internalism1, to explain Access Internalism and then use the scenario just presented to show how the justificatory requirements of Access Internalism are incompatible with the findings of current psychological research on how most beliefs are actually acquired and justified. Next I will briefly discuss how a much weaker form of Internalism with an Externalist character, Psychological Internalism, can avoid the problems of Access Internalism, how ever at the cost of missing out on the main benefits of both strongly Internalist and strongly externalist theories. Next I will use Alvin Goldmans article, Reliabilism What is Justified Belief?2 to explain the basic ideas of Reliabilist Externalism and again use the Bartleby built in bed to draw out the inconsistencies between the Reliabilist requirements of justification and our normative intuitions of what justification ought to be.