Acquisition and Justification of Beliefs :: Psychology Access Internalism Essays

Bartleby is a lazy student who refuses to study simply because he would prefer not. Although his teacher, Mr. Smith, automatically assumes that Bartleby failed the final exam he just took, Mr. Smith could have reasoned that he has sufficient evidence to support 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 grade to warrant a failing grade. But because final grades are due and Mr. Smith runs out of time to finish grading, he marks an ‘F’ on Bartleby’s 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 confirming Mr. Smith’s time-tested bias that students who have failed in the past are perpetual failures. Was Mr. Smith’s belief justified? Intuitively, we would want to say that it isn’t, because his belief is grounded in, or caused by, his bias against Bartleby. The problem is that both rigidly Internalist, like Access 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 Steup’s account, â€Å"A Defense of Internalism†[1], 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, but at the cost of missing out on the main benefits of both strongly Internalist and strongly externalist theories. Next I will use Alvin Goldman’s article, â€Å"Reliabilism: What is Justified Belief?†[2] to explain the basic ideas of Reliabilist Externalism and again use the Bartleby situation to draw out the inconsistencies between the Reliabilist requirements of justification and our normative intuitions of what justification ought to be.