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Date Posted: 08:18:12 03/11/03 Tue
Author: OPB
Subject: Ok..
In reply to: Kathy 's message, "Go on." on 07:12:47 03/11/03 Tue

There are two main apporaches to espistemology: internalism and externalism. The former position has been the most widely held in the past, and is traditionally associated with science: one's justification for believing P is related to one's evidence for P; justification for a belief is internal to the believer--he has access to his reasons for belief, in other words. (Deontology, or the moral duty to justify one's beliefs, has also been a component of internalism. Think of how science demands evidence, and you'll see this in action: those who make bald assertions aren't taken seriously, and indeed, are laughed at.)

Externalism does away with the reliance on evidence completely. It holds that justification of beliefs is causal--e.g., one is justified in believing P if the belief that P is caused by a reliable process. Reliable processes, on the externalist view, would be the senses, deduction via logical laws, etc. Externalism is popular among the postmodernist camp that Dennett was speaking of, partly because it does away with the strict evidentalist component of belief; but hard-core science types have also embraced it, some in reaction to the postmodernist (ab)use of it (their goal was to show that externalism should be the foundation of science, thereby neatly undermining any postmodernist claims that externalism supports _their_ case.)

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