The internalism /externalism debate is of interest in epistemology since it addresses one of the most fundamental questions in the discipline: what is the basic nature of knowledge and epistemic justification? It is generally held that if a positive epistemic status obtains, this is not a brute fact. Rather if a belief is, for example, justified, it is justified in virtue of some further condition obtaining. What has been called epistemic internalism holds, as the label suggests, is that all the (...) relevant factors that determine justification must be “internal”. Epistemic externalism is the denial of internalism. Epistemic internalism about justification is the subject of this article. After introducing the central intuitive considerations that have tended to motivate internalism, this paper will explore different ways of construing the internalist position. In addition to classical formulations, more recent formulations will be discussed, concluding with a discussion of an emerging position known as “Epistemological Disjunctivism”, which its advocates claim preserves the most important features of more traditional forms of internalism, while avoiding their difficulties. Epistemological Disjunctivism is particularly worthy of attention since if true, it promises to bridge internalist and externalist epistemologies, bringing a rapprochement to two sides of what may otherwise appear a deep and intractable debate about the fundamental nature of epistemology. (shrink)

Knowledge seems to need the admixture of de facto reliability and epistemic responsibility. But philosophers have had a hard time in attempting to combine them in order to achieve a satisfactory account of knowledge. In this paper I attempt to find a solution by capitalizing on the real and ubiquitous human phenomenon that is the social dispersal of epistemic labour through time. More precisely, the central objective of the paper is to deliver a novel and plausible social account of knowledge-relevant (...) responsibility and to consider the merits of the proposed combination of reliability and responsibility with respect to certain cases of unreflective epistemic subjects. O conhecimento parece precisar de uma combinação de confiabilidade de facto e responsabilidade epistêmica. Mas os filósofos têm tido grande dificuldade tentar combiná-las para alcançar uma teoria satisfatória do conhecimento. Este trabalho tenta encontrar uma solução baseada no fenômeno humano real e onipresente que é a dispersão social do trabalho epistêmico através do tempo. Mais precisamente, o objetivo central deste artigo é entregar uma teoria social de responsabilidade epistêmica nova e plausível e considerar os méritos de a combinação de confiabilidade e responsabilidade proposta relativas a certos casos de indivíduos epistemológicos não reflexivos. (shrink)