Smithies’s Mentalism and E = K

Central to the project of Smithies’s excellent The Epistemic Role Consciousness (2019) is a doctrine he calls mentalism, that ‘epistemic justification depends solely on your mental states, rather than reliability their connections external world’ (193). That by no means trivial thesis. However, it does not pin down what distinctive synoptic theory epistemology and philosophy mind. Someone quite unsympathetic Smithies could endorse for instance Williamsonian who thinks one’s evidence comprises knowledge, knowing state, epistemic evidence.1 brand mentalism phenomenal which says determined phenomenally individuated states. These include only conscious experiences, are character, but also consciously accessible beliefs, dispositions. (193)