15 Internalism and Externalism
At this point, it is important to distinguish two different general approaches to questions in epistemology: internalism and externalism. The difference is between figuring out knowledge “from the inside” (internalism) and figuring out knowledge “from the outside” (externalism). An internalist approach works with the resources each of us has as knowing beings—what we can sense, what we already believe, and what we can reasonably conclude from those things. An externalist approach instead takes a broader view of knowing beings, considering not just what is “inside” them but also their circumstances and their patterns of success in the past. It would not be far off to say that internalism is epistemology from a first-person perspective while externalism is epistemology from a third-person perspective.
An analogy might be helpful. Suppose you are asked to rate the performance of a certain plague doctor in 14th-century Florence. You might first ask by what criteria you are supposed to rate this doctor. Should you rate the performance according to the set standards of 14th-century medicine? If so, then perhaps the doctor did a great job; he rubbed onions and dead pigeons on the bodies of the plague victims and gave them vinegar to drink just as he was supposed to. This would be an internalist rating, or a rating based on more local information. But if you are supposed to rate the doctor according to today’s medical practices, you will have to conclude that his performance was, well, not so great. This would be an externalist rating since the standards come from factors far beyond the plague doctor’s own beliefs and experiences. There is something valuable to be learned from each approach, though they are very different from one another and call upon different sets of facts.
So how does this analogy apply to epistemology? In this way. Sometimes we may find it important to understand the individual’s local information: their own experience, reason, and beliefs and the processes by which they come to know what they think they know (internalism). Other times we may want to know, in fact, whether those processes really do deliver knowledge according to what the rest of us on the outside think we know (externalism). We might examine the individual’s methods for forming beliefs in relation to what we know about their situation and what we know about the reliability of those methods.
Many philosophers have insisted that internalism best captures the meaning of “knowledge,” and others have insisted that externalism best captures the meaning of “knowledge.” But I see no reason to make any such insistence any more than I see any need to insist that one way of evaluating 14th-century Florentine plague doctors is better than the other. Each way gets something right depending on what we are interested in.
Over the last couple of chapters we have seen how difficult it is to offer good internalist answers to the skeptic. What this means