Page "Internalism and externalism" Paragraph 7

In contemporary epistemology, internalism about justification is the idea that everything necessary to provide justification for a belief must be immediately available to an agent's consciousness.

Externalism in this context is the view that factors other than those internal to the believer can affect the justificatory status of a belief.

One strand of externalism is reliabilism, and the causal theory of knowledge is sometimes considered to be another strand.

It is important to distinguish internalism about justification from internalism about knowledge.

An internalist about knowledge will likely hold that the conditions that distinguish mere true belief from knowledge are similarly internal to the individual's perspective or grounded in the subject's mental states.

Whereas internalism about justification is a widely endorsed view, there is debate about knowledge internalism, due to Edmund Gettier and his Gettier-examples.

These are claimed to show that knowledge is not simply justified true belief.

In a short but influential paper published in 1963, Gettier produced examples that seemed to show that someone could be justified in believing something which is actually false, and inferring from it a further belief, this belief being coincidentally true.

In this way, he claimed that someone could be justified in believing something true but nevertheless not be considered to have knowledge of that thing.