The Terms "Internalism" and "Externalism"

The terms "internalism" and "externalism" are used in philosophy in a variety of different senses, but their use in epistemology for anything like the positions which are the focus of this book dates to 1973. More precisely, the word "externalism" was introduced in print by David Armstrong' in his book Belief; Truth and Knowledge' in the following way:

According to "Externalist" accounts of non-inferential knowledge, what makes a true non-inferential belief a case of knowledge is some natural relation which holds between the belief-state, Bap ['a believes p'], and the situation which makes the belief true. It is a matter of a certain relation holding between the believer and the world. It is important to notice that, unlike "Cartesian" and "Initial Credibility" theories, Externalist theories are regularly developed as theories of the nature of knowledge generally and not simply as theories of non-inferential knowledge. (Belief, Truth and Knowledge, p.157)

So in Armstrong's usage, "externalism" is a view about knowledge, and it is the view that when a person knows that a particular claim p is true, there is some sort of "natural relation" which holds between that person's belief that p and the world. One such view, suggested in 1967 by Alvin Goldman, was the Causal Theory of Knowledge. On this view, a person knows that p (for example, that it's raining) when that person's belief that p was caused by the fact that p. A related view, championed by Armstrong and later by Goldman as well, is the Reliability Account of Knowledge, according to which a person knows that p when that person's belief is both true and, in some sense, reliable: on some views, the belief must be a reliable indicator that p; on others, the belief must be produced by a reliable process, that is, one that tends to produce true beliefs. Frank Ramsey was a pioneer in defending a reliability account of knowledge. Particularly influential work in developing such an account was also done by Brian Skyrms, Peter Unger, and Fred Dretske.

Accounts of knowledge which are externalist in Armstrong's sense mark an important break with tradition, according to which knowledge is a kind of justified, true belief. On traditional accounts, in part because justification is an essential ingredient in knowledge, a central task of epistemology is to give an account of what justification consists in. And, according to tradition, what is required for a person to be justified in holding a belief is for that person to have a certain justification for the belief, where having a justification is typically identified with being in a position, in some relevant sense, to produce an appropriate argument for the belief in question. What is distinctive about externalist accounts of knowledge, as Armstrong saw it, was that they do not require justification, at least in the traditional sense. Knowledge merely requires having a true belief which is appropriately connected with the world.

But while Armstrong's way of viewing reliability accounts of knowledge has them rejecting the view that knowledge requires justified true belief, Alvin Goldman came to offer quite a different way of viewing the import of reliability theories: in 1979, Goldman suggested that instead of seeing reliability accounts as rejecting the claim that knowledge requires justified true belief, we should instead embrace an account which identifies justified belief with reliably produced belief. Reliability theories of knowledge, on this way of understanding them, offer a non-traditional account of what is required for a belief to be justified. This paper of Goldman's, and his subsequent extended development of the idea, have been at the center of epistemological discussion ever since.