My concern in this paper is with the claim that knowledge is a mental state – a claim that Williamson places front and centre in Knowledge and Its Limits. While I am not by any means convinced that the claim is false, I do think it carries certain costs that have not been widely appreciated. One source of resistance to this claim derives from internalism about the mental – the view, roughly spe...

The task of this essay is to use the ought-implies-can principle (OIC) to clarify and defend Bernard Williams’ claim that all reasons are internal. On the interpretation offered here, the internalism/externalism controversy initiated by Williams is about the indexicality of normative practical reasons. The central question is this: Are all of our reasons anchored to our current beliefs and desi...

Mental internalists hold that an individual’s mental features at a given time supervene upon what is in that individual’s head at that time. While many people reject mental internalism about content and justification, mental internalism is commonly accepted regarding such other mental features as rationality, emotion-types, propositional-attitude-types, moral character, and phenomenology. I con...

I respond to John Greco’s argument that all forms of internalism in epistemology are either false or uninteresting. The paper divides into two sections. First, I explain precisely what internalists and externalists in epistemology disagree over. This puts us in a position to assess whether Greco’s argument succeeds. Second, I present Greco’s argument and offer two objections. 1. Internalism and...

It is commonly assumed that content preservation required for success in testimonial exchanges. Many internalists, however, cannot endorse this assumption. They must claim instead exchanges can often succeed when the grasped by hearer not of speaker’s testimony, p, but some merely similar content, p*. Goldberg (2007. Anti-Individualism: Mind and Language, Knowledge Justification. Cambridge: Cam...

One of the deepest and longest-lasting debates in ethics concerns a version Euthyphro question: are choiceworthy things because agents have certain attitudes toward them or they independent any agents’ attitudes? Reasons internalists, such as Bernard Williams, Michael Smith, Mark Schroeder, Sharon Street, Kate Manne, Julia Markovits, David Sobel answer first way. They think that all an agent’s ...

The traditional debate over skepticism has largely presupposed the framework of foundationalism. With the rise of the intemalism/externalism debate in epistemology, however, it is apparent that there are radically different ways to understand foundational justification. In this chapter we begin by examining the traditional epistemic regress argument for foundationalism. Before presenting what I...

a SPECIAL ISSUE II, pp. 45 – 53, 2008 INTENTIONALITY AND THE EXTERNALISM VERSUS INTERNALISM DEBATE