Externalism for Internalists

Externalism for Internalists Jonathan Dancy Philosophical Issues, Vol. 2, Rationality in Epistemology. (1992), pp. 93-114. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1533-6077%281992%292%3C93%3AEFI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-M Philosophical Issues is currently published by Ridgeview Publishing Company.

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PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES,2 Rationality in Epistemology, 1992

Externalism For Internalists Jonathan Dancy

The current popularity of the distinction between internalist and externalist approaches to epistemology has not led to any great increase in our understanding of the area. The only thing on which most writers on the topic agree is that most other writers do not understand the distinction at all well. I am no exception to this rule, and in this paper I try to lay out what I think the basic structure of a theory of justification of belief should be in a way sensitive to the issues debated between internalists and externalists. At the same time I attempt to relate what I have to say to ethics. It has been common for proponents of both sides of the epistemological argument to make appeal to the appearance of a view like theirs in ethics, in ways of which I do not wholly approve.' 'See A.I. Goldman, "The Internalist Conception of Justification", and L. Bonjour, "Externalist Theories of Empirical Knowledge", in

Not that I mind the appeal to ethics itself; this seems to me quite in place. I just don't think that much is gained by finding a view similar t o one's own in a cognate area which has had a good run for its money there. This might achieve respectability for one's own view (were this in danger of being denied) but could hardly count as evidence for its truth. And the problem is that even if the various analogies were sound, the positions they appeal to in ethics are so contentious that not a lot is gained. My general aim here is t o discover the truth on both sides. In my view the two areas are strongly analogous, and the truth in one will probably be pretty like the truth in the other. However since I do not think that the t r u t h of the matter has yet been discovered in ethics, I shall not be arguing from ethics t o epistemology. Instead I will be trying t o move forward on both fronts a t once.2 I start with a standard charxterisation of extreme versions of the two views in epistemology. The externalist holds that a belief may be fully justified if it has certain properties which we may call truth-effective; to fix ideas, think of the leading such property as that of being the product of a reliable method or process. So our externalist holds that a belief is fully justified if it is the product of a reliable method or process. No more than this is necessary for justification, nor is there any other notion of justification than this one. So facts that are not believed by the agent may suffice for justification, and the agent's believing them adds nothing. (Of course among the facts that contribute t o justification may be the fact that the agent believes something). The theory offers no room for differing accounts of belief and of believer. We can say 'S's belief is not justified, but if things were in general as S believes them t o be, 5''s belief would be justified'. But we don't mean by this t o suggest that S (the agent) is here impeccable though his belief is flawed; S inherits the faults of his acts (beliefs). P. French et al. (eds.) Midwest Studies i n Philosophy, vol. 5 , Studies in Epistemology (Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, 1980), among many others. 21n pursuit of this aim, I will be speaking indifferently of agent and of believer, of act and of belief. My epistemology is explicitly normative.

The internalist position is, to start with, equally trenchant. The standard characterisation of internalism is the claim that justification can only be achieved by appeal to elements that are internal to the agent's perspective. This is not yet much help, and I shall later argue that it suffers from ambiguity. One way of making it less metaphorical is to read it as saying that only S's other beliefs are relevant to the question whether S is justified in the belief that p. Once this sort of internal justification has been achieved, there are no further questions about justification. In particular, that the agent's beliefs are true adds nothing, and nothing is subtracted if they are false. This theory too has no room for differing accounts of belief and of believer. We can say 'S is not justified in believing that p, though there are facts which, if S had believed them, would have justified him in believing that p'; but we do not mean by this to suggest that S's belief that p is somehow sound as things stand. S's belief that p inherits S's faults as a cognitive agent. So both my extreme internalist and my extreme externalist speak indifferently of the justification of belief and of believer; both take it that if the belief is justified the believer is and vice-versa. Neither of these extreme positions admits the possibility that the belief be justified when the believer is not, nor that the believer be justified when the belief is not. Two thoughts persuade us to make room for these possibilities. The first is that even if things are going badly in externalist terms, we are not always inclined to attach much epistemic blame to the agent; the second is that even if the agent's epistemic behaviour is irresponsible, we may find something to approve in the end product. But I want to pause to look for ethical analogies for the positions we already have, before moving on to more complex theories. Extreme externalism will appeal to the sort of moral theory that focuses primarily on the value of acts, and tries to write its account of the worth of agents directly from what it finds there. The fact is, however, that this sort of moral theory cannot cope with everything we want to say in ethics. In particular, we want at this stage to make room for the idea that agents sometimes derives moral worth from the attempt to do the right thing, or from their belief that what they were

doing was right, or from the fact that if the circumstances had been as they thought they would have been doing the right thing. This is just the sort of idea that the extreme externalist is trying to get away from. So the sort of moral theory that extreme externalism can appeal to is not much support. The same is true for extreme internalism. It is likely to appeal to Kant in some way. The first chapter of the Groundwork is intended to undermine the apparently common-sense idea that actions can have moral properties which they derive somehow from the sort of difference they make to the world. We could take this to mean that the distinction between act and agent has no moral relevance for Kant. Moral worth attaches itself primarily to agents, and only derivatively to acts, in the sort of way that extreme internalism suggests. My own view, however, is that Kant cannot be used like this. It is true that given the choice between act and agent Kant will always focus on the agent, but I think that rather than accepting the distinction Kant has really left it behind. We can test this by asking what Kant would say about the agent who obeyed the Categorical Imperative in this sense, that he acted out of respect for the universalisability of his maxim, but in a case where the maxim was not in fact universalisable. Nothing in Kantian scholarship helps me a lot with this question. Its purpose here is just to show that there is the same pressure for Kant to admit that there are two forms of evaluation going on at once, according to one of which things are going on well enough and according to the other of which they are not. This need not be the actlagent distinction itself, but it is still enough to make the appeal to Kant a less than complete defence for the extreme internalist. So the ethical analogies to which these two approaches appeal do not really offer much in the way of support. They are weak on the very point on which they were being looked to for help, namely that there is no need for anything other than a trivial distinction between act and agent. And there are other reasons for being unhappy with the choice between the two approaches. It is agreed that externalism probably makes our epistemic life very easy. Given that human cognitive methods and processes are genuinely truth-effective,

most of our beliefs will be justified. Scepticism is not an endemic problem for externalism, and this is both one of its chief attractions and one of its main weaknesses. Internalism, on the other hand, though it has considerable intuitive appeal, leaves us very vulnerable t o the sceptic. We would like to be able to say that the fact that human cognitive processes and methods are truth-effective does somehow contribute to the justification of the beliefs they generate, but on the internalist perspective this will only be true of those agents who have the relevant beliefs, and most of us are not in that fortunate position. Given then the difficulty of saying that everything necessary to justification is believed by every believer, it looks as if justification is going to be a fairly rare occurrence, by the internalist's lights. Internalism may have the support of intuition, as I believe it does, but it is a gift for the sceptic. This leads one to suppose that the two views I started with are too extreme, and that some form of intermediate position must be found. Something has gone wrong here. The choice we are being offered is too stark. Neither side is willing to admit the relevance of anything that the other side wants to see as important, and yet underlying each view there seems to be something intuitively plausible. What seems to be needed is a way of admitting that facts that are not believed can be relevant to the epistemic status of an agent or of a belief, while accepting that the only things that can justify are things internal t o the agent's perspective. I want to suggest a way of doing this, and I shall work towards it by considering other compromise positions to be found in the literature. The first of these is Alston's internalistic externalism, which, in Audi's formulation, comes out like this:3 S's belief that p is epistemically justified iff: 1 S's belief is based upon grounds G such that 3 ~ e W. e Alston, "Internalism and Externalism in Epistemology"; this formulation of Alston's position, which I use merely for an example, comes from R. Audi's contribution to J . Tomberlin (ed.) Philosophical Perspectives Vol. 2 , Epistemology, 1988.

( a ) the members of G are the sorts of things that are typically accessible t o normal humans (e.g. experiences, beliefs) (b) the members of G are fairly directly accessible to S upon reflection (c) G reliably indicates the truth of p and 2 S has no additional undermining beliefs. As can be seen, this position has both internalistic and externalistic elements. 1 ( a ) and 1 (b) are internalistic; experiences and beliefs are just the sorts of things that are within an agent's perspective, in a way that is merely stressed by the demand that they be accessible t o this particular agent. 1 (c) is intended by Alston t o be externalistic; there is no suggestion that this fact need be one on which S has any grip a t all. The status of 2 in this respect is, I think, indeterminate. What I want t o say in criticism of Alston here is that his position is one with which nobody will agree. Our externalist will not see the relevance of requiring 1 (a)-(b), and our internalist will not see that 1 (c) adds anything a t all. Alston's view is in a sense a compromise, but it is not the sort of compromise I am looking for -it is not one which either party is going t o be able t o accept. A plausible compromise position will be one which in some way respects the intuitions which drove the two originally opposing views, so that each can accept the compromise without abandoning too much of its own motivation. Alston seems t o give us none of this. Better would be t o attempt t o meet directly the defects we found in the extreme theories. What seemed t o emerge from them is that we need 1 a distinction between act (belief) and agent (believer) which 2 enables our assessment of them t o diverge.

Something very much on these lines is supposed t o be offered by the distinction commonly drawn between objective

and subjective justification. This promises t o provide a good sense t o the actlagent distinction, objective justification being justification of act and subjective justification being justification of agent. One might worry that the two sorts of justification are not very clearly related t o each other, but that need not be so. There are various ways of running the objective/subjective distinction, but a standard way would be this: S 7 sbelief that p is objectively justified iff it has properties Fl-F,.

S is subjectively justified in believing that p iff S believes that his belief that p has properties Fl-F,. Here it is clear that subjective justification is defined in terms of objective justification, since (ignoring problems of opacity) we could write the second clause thus:

S is subjectively justified in believing that p if S believes that his belief that p is objectively justified. What we purport t o have here is a way of thinking of subjective justification as concerned with the agent, and objective justification as concerned with the act. And this is how a compromise between internalism and externalism might be run. As a compromise, it is not a complete success, since it requires both sides t o give up something of which they were fond. But all they lose is the claim that the sort of justification they were focusing on is not the only sort of justification. The externalist agrees that as well as justification of act there is justification of agent; the internalist accepts that as well as justification of agent there is justification of act. Neither loses the story they wanted t o give about the place they started from. But despite this, we have still not reached a genuinely intermediate position between internalism and externalism. So far we have merely moved away from the insistence of the two extreme positions that where the act is justified, so is the agent. We now have room for the idea that our assessments of act and agent can come apart; we can say that the agent may be subjectively justified in holding a belief which is not

objectively justified, or that the agent may not be subjectively justified in holding a belief which is in fact objectively justified. But we have not yet made the final move. We make this move when we accept that these are genuinely independent assessments, in a way that enables us t o approve fully of the agent for holding a belief which is in fact unjustified. The objective/subjective distinction begins to have real bite with this addition, for with this we begin to persuade ourselves that there are two independent elements in a full epistemic story, each of which can be fully satisfied without the other. The agent story is the internalist story; the act (belief) story is the externalist story. The main problem that I see as facing this position is that of coping with the gap between the two stories that it wants to keep apart. The two stories need to be separate but not too separate. The danger is that the gap that is opening up between objective and subjective justification will be so great that we are forced to hold that there are really two senses of the word 'justified'; subjective justification is not the same sort of thing as objective justification at all, and there is no point in pretending that it is. It is not that if we add subjective justification to objective justification we have made things better in the same direction; rather we have told a completely separate story. So justification is not one thing but two. Some philosophers are not frightened by the idea that there are two senses of 'justified'. They notice the very same move being made in ethics, associated with the distinction between objective and subjective rightness. Again, this distinction can be run in several ways, but a classic way of doing it would have it that: An act is objectively right if its consequences are the best available.

S acts subjectively rightly if S believes his act to be the one whose consequences are the best available. We could express this using the language of 'ought' rather than of 'right', thus:

S ought (objectively) t o do the action whose consequences are the best available. S ought (subjectively) t o do that action whose consequences S believes will be the best available. Given the obvious truth that the action whose consequences are the best available may not be the one of which S believes this, we have it that the same action may be both objectively right and subjectively wrong. This is in danger of meaning that S both ought and ought not t o do it; the contradiction which threatens here is apparently only relieved by admitting that the word 'ought7 has two distinct (though of course related) senses. We have the very same move in ethics as we have in epistemology. So there is a strong pressure t o accept that, once we make explicit the fact that justification of act and justification of agent can come apart in this way, so that each can be fully present without the other, we have in effect admitted the existence of two senses of 'justified'. The contradiction that drives us is the admission that S may be justified in believing something which is not justified. Epistemically speaking, S both ought and ought not t o believe it. By admitting that there are two senses of 'justified' we have implicitly abandoned our earlier claim t o have retained a comprehensible link between subjective and objective justification. The claim that agent assessment is independent of act-assessment has pulled the two sorts of evaluation too far apart. So long as we simply understood subjective justification in terms of objective justification, so that S was subjectively justified in believing that p iff S believed himself objectively justified in believing that p, all was well. It is when we suggest that in such a case S is blameless that trouble arises, for we now say that S can be justified in believing something unjustified. And t o say this we have to give up the claim of harmless interdefinability. But perhaps things are not as bad as this makes out. The real worry was that it is impossible t o keep assessment of act and agent apart without generating two distinct senses of the relevant evaluative terms. This worry is led by the 'discovery' of a contradiction, but I myself a m not convinced

that the discovered contradiction is a genuine contradiction at all. It seems to me that anything we have yet unearthed can be handled using a single sense of 'ought'. We can assert that agents are right to do what they think right, while accepting that they are sometimes mistaken in what they take to be right, without admitting more than one sense of 'right' -and similarly for 'ought'. This is because the crucial remark that S is right to do what he thinks right is structurally ambiguous. We can express the ambiguity at issue here using a simplified form of Hintikka's deontic logic.4 Take the following manual: BSp: S believes that p Sda: S does a Rp: it is right that p. The 'R' in 'Rp' is a modal operator, and 'Rp' is interpreted as saying that in all deontically perfect worlds, p. The sentence ' S is right t o do what he thinks right' can mean either (1) (BS (RSda)

+

RSda)

which makes S infallible on such matters, or (2) R(BS (RSda)

+

Sda),

which does not. If we read our English sentence as being of the first form, and want to say that some action which S believes right is in fact wrong, we have to admit two senses of 'right'. For there is a contradiction in: (1)a (BS(RSda) -+ RSda) & BS(RSda) & -RSda.

If we use the second form, we can make do with a single sense. There is no contradiction in: (2)a R(BS(RSda) + Sda) & BS(RSda) & -RSda. Note that we cannot infer (1) from (2) directly without committing the standard modal shift fallacy of moving from 4 I first presented this idea in "The Logical Conscience", Analysis 37 (1977), pp. 81-4.

We might hope to support the inference in the special case of (1) and (2) by introducing a separate principle

(5) R (Sda

+

RSda)

but I do not see this as a reliable move, for the reason that I do not imagine that every action performed in a perfect world is itself going to be morally perfect or right. It seems to me that at least some actions done there will be morally indifferent. A morally perfect world is surely to be thought of as one in which every action right in the actual world is done, not as a world in which everything done is morally right. So I do not think that the distinction between objective and subjective justification is necessarily associated with the discovery of a contradiction of the sort contained in the thought that conscience is both paramount and liable to error, in a way which can only be resolved by accepting that there are two senses of 'right', 'ought' or 'justified'. What is more, if we were t o allow the existence of two senses in these cases, we would have to allow them in every structurally similar case -and there are too many such cases for us to feel at all comfortable here. For instance, it is silly to do what one thinks it is silly to do; it is rational to do what one thinks it rational to do; it is cruel to do what one thinks it is cruel t o do; it is pointless t o do what one thinks it is pointless to do: and so on. Are we to announce similar ambiguity in each such term, or are we to allow the existence of the same structural ambiguity case by case? Simplicity argues strongly for the latter. So it may be possible to keep the assessment of act and agent far enough apart to satisfy the purposes of the compromise position, without pulling them so far apart that we are left with two different senses of the relevant evaluative terms. But we should not forget that the 'two senses' theory had a purpose. This was that it made it possible for us to live

with an otherwise awkward fact, that our compromise position can recommend an act t o an agent which it then says it would be wrong of him t o do. It seems undeniable that this is what is going on within the full-blown version of the subjective/objective distinction. The belief is recommended by the assertion that it is justified, and then the agent is told that, given his circumstances, it would be wrong of him t o do it. Can we escape this result by appeal to the structural distinction I drew between 1 BS(RSda) + RSda

and

2 R(BS(RSda)

-+

Sda)?

I doubt it. It seems t o me that we are still left with an incoherence. Take any case where S believes that it is right for him t o do a, when in fact it is wrong (not right) for him t o do a. (Analogy: S believes that his evidence supports p when in fact it supports not-p.) Does the theory recommend his doing a? Not exactly, but it recommends his either doing a or ceasing t o believe that it is right for him t o do a . But of this disjunction it recommends that S not do the first disjunct, and it seems to me that the whole thrust of the theory is that it can approve (and so recommend) one's believing that it is right to do an action which in fact it is wrong t o do. So in the sort of case we are considering it recommends that S not do the second disjunct either. But a theory which recommends a disjunction while recommending that we do neither disjunct is incoherent. (Of course it would be coherent if it merely failed to recommend either disjunct.) So we are still stuck for an account of how our compromise theory can keep its evaluations of act (belief) and of agent coherent. This is where the compromise position makes its real appeal t o ethics. Surely we are all familiar with the suggestion that there can be an action which is itself right, but which the agent derives no moral worth from doing. And we can cope equally well with the idea that an agent can acquire moral worth from an action which, through no fault of his

own, turns out badly. The action makes the world worse, but the agent was right t o do it. I confess, however, that I find these well-known views hard to accept in ethics. Take the classic example of the Pharisee who gives alms t o charity ostentatiously. Are we really t o allow that the action is right here? This is to suppose that the motive is no part of the action, so that what is done is not affected in itself by why it was done. But I can see no rationale for carving things up in this way. The motive is not a peculiar kind of cause, which is all over with by the time the action starts. I want t o say that the motive infects the action, because it plays a large part in determining which action was done. A bad motive will mean a bad action, no matter how well things turn out. In the contrary case, where the action is supposed t o be bad but the agent right t o do i t , it is not clear to me that the right way t o cope with this is t o cut the action off from the agent so that the two are assessed separately. I suggest instead that we could distinguish the worth of the agent-in-the-action from any value the consequences may have. So I a m not much impressed by the ethical analogy t o which we were appealing t o show how it can be coherent t o hold a theory that recommends an action (belief) which it then says the agent is wrong to do (believe). It may be that a theory that does this is not in direct contradiction with itself, but it does seem t o be issuing contrary recommendations, and this is bad enough. One might fail t o see the problem here for either of two reasons. First, one might suppose that the belief is called justified because it is probable given the evidence that there is, rather than because it is probable given the evidence that S has. If this were so, calling the belief justified would not yet be t o recommend it to anyone; all epistemic recommendation would occur a t the level of the agent, and a belief which is not probable on the evidence that there is might still be one that given the evidence we have we are all right to believe. Here there are not two recommendations, but only one. But this would be t o confuse the theory of justification of belief with the theory of probability. One theory may of course build on the other, but they are not identical. It is not the

proposition believed that we are concerned with in the theory of justification, but the belief in that proposition. Equally, the belief we are concerned with is not an ownerless belief which is somehow justified in abstraction from any owner. It is justified as a belief of S's, though unfortunately this does not seem t o mean that S is to be justified in believing it. The second way of failing t o see the problem is similar. We might make the mistake of supposing that our account of what it is for a belief to be justified is non-normative in some strong sense. Any such view is hopeless, I think. We may indeed specify non-normative conditions under which we accept a belief as justified (e.g. being the product of a reliable method), but this should not obscure from us that we are setting ourselves an aim in the adoption of the theory, namely the aim of acquiring beliefs like this. I do not see how a theory of justification can fail t o be in the business of specifying a cognitive aim in this sense; it is making recommendations. But, given that, the problem is how t o give a coherent story about the two sorts of recommendation it makes, especially since we admit, or rather insist, that the very same belief that in one voice it recommends it may also in another forbid. Effectively, the theory will on occasions specify an aim for us and then tell us not to aim for it. I take this t o mean that the theory is self-defeating in a damaging way.5 The thrust of my criticism of the compromise theory has been t o cast doubt on the actlagent distinction which it uses. One might think that this is clearly wrong. After all, we obviously need some distinction between objective and subjective justification (as we do between objective and subjective rightness), and surely this is all the actlagent distinction amounts to. I think, however, that this reply is a mistake. In my view, the distinction between act and agent is just a different distinction from the distinction between objective and subjective anything. We originally held that what was 5I do not have space to show this here, but I attempt to rebut current claims that being self-defeating in this way does not matter in my "Parfit and Self-Defeating Theories", forthcoming in J . Dancy (ed.) Reading Parfit.

necessary was a way of distinguishing what we said about the belief (action) from what we said about the believer (agent). It was a simple assumption that the right way t o do this was t o introduce the distinction between objective and subjective justification. But one can distinguish between the objective and the subjective properties of an action, without running anything much in the way of a distinction between agent and action. Equally one can distinguish between properties of agent and action without concerning oneself about the difference between objective and subjective properties. To give an example of the sort of thing I mean here, consider the opening chapter of Derek Parfit7s Reasons and person^.^ He offers four (not two) clauses. Subjective and objective rightness for acts are defined as follow^:^ An act is objectively right if its outcome is the best possible. An act is subjectively right if the agent believes that its outcome will be the best possible. The worth of agents is defined differently, in terms of that of motives or sets of motives. Parfit is discussing a theory C (consequentialism) which defines rightness of act in terms of value of outcomes. A motive is a member of a set of motives which C can recommend if having that set of motives would lead t o outcomes at least as good as the outcomes of any alternative set of motives. We can call such a set of motives 'C-approved', and define something called 'agent-rightness' as follow^:^ An agent acts objectively rightly (here) if his motive is a member of a C-approved set of motives. An agent acts subjectively rightly (here) if he believes his motive t o be a member of a C-approved set of motives. 60xford: Oxford University Press, 1984. 7p.

24.

'Notice that this notion offers an evaluation of the agent in doing a particular act; it purports to be atomistic.

An epistemological theory T could have the same structure as Parfit's C has here. We could hold: A belief of S's is objectively justified if S's evidence supports i t . A belief of S's is subjectively justified if S believes that his evidence supports it.

S is objectively justified in believing if S is using a Tapproved method. S is subjectively justified in believing if S believes his method t o be ~ - a ~ ~ r o v e d . ~ What are we t o make of this? One's first thought is that for the purposes of moving away from the extreme theories with which I started, all we need is the objective/subjective distinction. I am encouraged in this idea by the fact that the original distinction between internalism and externalism can be written separately for act and for agent (for belief and for believer). Thus we could take the externalist view that an act is right if it has the best outcomes or the internalist view that acts are right if they are expected to have the best outcomes (the criterion for rightness of act is not the actual but the expected consequences). And one could run the same

here is a complexity here which it is worth keeping track of. Parfit mentions later (p. 153) a different distinction between the objective and the subjective which, written out in the terms I have used above, would emerge like this: An act is objectively right if its results are best. An act is subjectively right if, were things to be as the agent generally believes them to be, its results would be best. T h e analogue in epistemology would look like this: A belief is objectively justified if the evidence supports it. A belief of S's is subjectively justified if, were things to be as S generally believes them to be, the evidence would support it. This creates a more convincing epistemological theory than the one I have laid out in the main text. T h e notion of the agent's general beliefs is intended to draw the focus away from the belief that the outcome of this action will b e best or that the evidence favours this belief.

distinction for agent-rightness, and for agent-justifiedness, taking the externalist line that a n agent is justified if using a truth-effective method, or the internalist one that the agent's justifiedness requires that the agent believe himself t o be using a truth-effective method. So it seems odd, from this perspective, t o resolve the internalism/externalism debate by appeal t o a distinction between action and agent. It genuinely is the objective/subjective distinction that we should be using, and all the talk about act and agent was a irrelevance. For myself, I have no trouble with this. I accept the need for an objective/subjective distinction; I only want to reject the sort of act /agent distinction that the compromise theory relies on. But the fact is that the thrust behind the compromise position does require of it both distinctions rather than merely the one. The admission that matters is that a believer may be completely blameless in believing even though his belief is not justified. This stress on the epistemic status of the believer as opposed t o that of the belief (the independence thesis) seems t o me t o require the addition of the actlagent distinction t o the objective/subjective one. We want t o be in the position of having nothing to say against the believer but much t o say against the belief, and the distinction between objective and subjective properties of the belief is not calculated to help us much in that direction. If we want t o distribute approval in the way the compromise theory does, what we want is not two ways of approving of one thing (why should we approve of an act just because its agent is satisfied with it?) but something like one way of approving of two different things. With this motivation behind us, our distinction between act and agent is going to be a serious one rather than the lesser one capturable by separating objective from subjective properties of acts. Is it possible then that the actlagent distinction will do the job for the compromise position all by itself? I don't think so. The actlagent distinction does not concern itself with what happens in cases where the agent is ignorant or in error. This is what the subjective/objective distinction is concerned with. So if we want t o approve fully of the agent in certain cases of error, we will need both distinctions, not just one.

I take it then that a new way needs t o be found of reconciling the opposing demands of internalism and externalism, which makes room for the objective/subjective distinction but has no serious use for the actlagent distinction. And this is what I now attempt to provide. I start from my original expression of the intuition underlying internalism. This was that justification must be achieved by appeal to elements that are internal t o the agent's perspective (the believer's perspective). As I see it, this intuition can be more or less captured by any of three different approaches, each of which can therefore be called internalist. The first and most extreme of these we have already seen. It is the proposition that: (Extreme internalism) Only beliefs of S's are relevant t o the determination of S's epistemic status. A weaker but still strong form of internalism could hold this less demanding position: (Strong internalism) A set of justifiers which has some members not starting BS.. .must have, for each such member p, a member BSp. BSp will be among the justifiers. The weakest version will hold only that: (Weak internalism) If a set of justifiers has some members not starting BS. . .then for each such member p it must be true that BSp, though BSp need not be among the justifiers. In such a case, BSp will be not a justifier but an enabler.1° It enables p t o contribute to the justification, without acting as a justifier itself. Each of these positions could be an expression of the intuition that only what is in S's perspective can serve t o justify a belief of S's. In that sense each of them seems t o me t o be internalist enough. Each of them is in opposition to the externalist view that a fact can justify even when it is not ''Steven Strange suggested the term 'enabler'. When I first mooted this idea, on the final page of my Introduction t o Contemporary Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), I spoke more clumsily of 'allowers'.

believed by the agent. My preference is for the third, weaker form. And the reason for this is that this form can be shown also to capture something at least of the intuition underlying externalism. This is in two ways. First, most of the things that occupy the justifiers box will be facts rather than beliefs; they will be things believed rather than believings of them. Second, many enablers will be brute facts, facts which are not believed by the agent. So a fact does not need to be believed in order t o contribute to justification, only it cannot in that case do so by functioning as a reason. The contrast I intend to draw between justifiers and enablers is a contrast between considerations which are reasons and considerations which are not themselves reasons but which make it possible for the things that are reasons to function in that way. To give a simple example: That my nervous system is in good working order is a truth which is not among my reasons for believing that tomorrow is Friday, though it needs to be true for the things that are my reasons to be my reasons. However I do not need to believe it. In fact my reason is probably just this, that today is Thursday. (I need to believe this, of course, or else it could hardly be a reason for me and so justify my belief.) Not all enablers are of this sort, however. Sometimes the fact that I do not believe something functions as an enabler. Here I am talking about the absence of undermining beliefs. That undermining beliefs are absent enables the things that are my reasons to be the reasons they are. Further enablers might be beliefs which do not themselves count as reasons, but without which one could have no reasons at all. Here I am thinking of the belief that there are solid objects, that other people can understand what I say, that things do not happen just because one wants them to, and so on. Replacing talk about justifiers by talk about reasons should make one externalist aspect of this approach clearer, namely that it holds that facts are reasons. So I want to claim that my approach captures, if not all the intuitions that underly the original extreme positions, at least enough of them t o count as a genuine compromise. It is worth trying to lay out some differences between the strong and the weak forms of internalism.

The first is that the weak form can accept the relevance of brute facts (i.e. the fact that q where not BSq) to justification when they act as enablers. Such facts do not contribute to justification in the way in which reasons do, but they are not because of that to be excluded from the story altogether. The strong form must claim that all such facts are irrelevant, since it only countenances one sort of way in which a consideration can be relevant to justification. The second difference is that the strong version has a tendency to pull everything relevant to justification into the set of justifiers. Since there is only one way in which a consideration can contribute to justification, everything that does not contribute in that way is irrelevant. The weak version is more flexible, because it offers two ways in which something can be relevant to justification. I venture here the observation that the availability of the weak version can be hidden from one if one writes one's theory as a list of necessary and sufficient conditions for justification, in the way that I expressed Alston's position earlier. This format imposes on one the idea that all relevant considerations are relevant in much the same sort of way. The third and final difference is in a way the most telling. The strong version encourages us to suppose that we can divide the set of justifiers up into two halves, those which begin BS. .. and those which do not. We are then tempted to hold that where all the BS.. . members of the set are true, the relevant belief is in some sense already justified, though its justification can increase. (Note however that the fact that we are tempted to hold this does not mean that we can make very good theoretical sense of it.) The move we are considering here is the one which gives us the distinction between justification of act and of agent. The weak version does not encourage this sort of move. On the weak version, when all the relevant BS.. . clauses are true justification is now possible, but there is no temptation to suppose that the relevant belief is already to some extent justified, or that the believer is justified though the belief is not. This is the other reason why I am not happy with the compromise built round the actlagent distinction. I find the story about enablers plausible in its own right, and it fits what I

want to say in the theory of motivation and elsewhere. I want to find in other places the same tripartite structure that I find here between justifiers, enablers and pure background. In the theory of motivation, I want similarly to distinguish between motivating reasons, states which enable those motivators to motivate, and states which play no such role. Equally, in the theory of moral properties, I want to distinguish between properties that make the action good, properties whose presence or absence enables the first properties to make the action good, and properties that are pure background (here). So I have a general approach of which this is merely one application. Given this, I find it hard to accept as well the distinction between justification of act and justification of agent. That distinction leads us to suppose that we can sort out the agent's justification before we turn our attention to the justification of the act (belief), in a way that means that act-justification neither helps nor harms agent-justification, We find ourselves supposing that in cases of well-intentioned failure we do not blame the agent, so that agent-assessment is entirely independent of act-assessment. But that is not at all the way my attempt to find a compromise between internalism and externalism is supposed to work. For me, act-assessment depends upon agent-related facts, and those agent-related facts (that S believes this or that) are largely not in the set of justifiers at all. They are not thought of as being in the set of justifiers, except in a special part of it labelled 'justification of agent'. So it is hard for me to add the actlagent distinction in any serious form to what I already have in place. Of course this leaves me with the question what to say about a case where the agent is blameless though misguided. The general view must be that one can say everything that needs to be said here without any radical distinction between assessment of act and assessment of agent. But I cannot hope to establish this here. I end then by trying to lay out the picture as I see it. S's belief that p is justified if S's reasons for believing that p are good reasons (are among the reasons). S's reasons will mainly consist of facts; that S believes those facts is probably not among S's reasons for believing that p, though

the fact that one believes that q can sometimes be a reason for believing that p. This is not ruled out, but it is not the normal situation. The facts that are S's reasons can only play that role if S believes them, but that is not to mean that S's reasons are beliefs of S7s. That S believes them enables them to justify and is not itself a justifier. Often the facts that justify a belief will not be very extensive. For instance, what justifies my belief that it is raining outside? Answer: I can see and hear the rain. This might be the whole answer. Don't I need also to believe that I can hear and see the rain? Yes, but this belief is an enabler and not itself among my reasons. Mustn't it be true that human perceptual mechanisms are in general reliable? Yes, but again this functions as an enabler. Though it needs to be true, it does not need to be among my reasons. It makes it possible for what are my reasons to be the reasons they are. Of course I can believe that human mechanisms are reliable, and this fact (the fact that they are reliable, not the fact that I believe them to be so) could then be a justifier; but it doesn't need to be. Mustn't it be true that I am not asleep, dreaming that I hear and see the rain? Yes, but this fact is another enabler. I do not need to believe it for it to play this role. Only facts that are reasons need to be believed, and the fact that I am not asleep dreaming is not among my reasons. My reason was simply that I can hear and see the rain."

''I a m very grateful to Richard Gale for discussion of an earlier and very different version of this paper.