Acquisition and Justification of Beliefs :: Psychology Access Internalism Essays

Bartleby is a lazy student who ref put ons to study simply beca utilisation he would prefer not. Although his teacher, Mr. Smith, automatic entirelyy assumes that Bartleby failed the final exam he just took, Mr. Smith could pee-pee reasoned that he has sufficient evidence to support his article of faith. Mr. Smith has seen that Bartleby shows lower-ranking interest in the class, that he has poor study habits and has consistently failed all his previous exams, and that just ab step to the fore enough questions were incorrect on the dole prohibited 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 prohibited 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 confirming Mr. Smi ths time-tested bias that students who have failed in the past are never-ending failures. Was Mr. Smiths belief justified? Intuitively, we would want to say that it isnt, because his belief is grounded in, or caused by, his bias against Bartleby. The problem is that both rigidly Internalist, like rag 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 sure psychological research on how most beliefs are actually acquired and justified. succeeding(prenominal) I will briefly discuss how a much weaker phase of Internalism with an Externalist character, Psychological Internalism, can avoid the proble ms of Access Internalism, but at the be of missing out on the main benefits of both potently Internalist and strongly externalist theories. Next I will use Alvin Goldmans article, Reliabilism What is Justified feel?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.