Internalism comes in many varieties, not all of which are relevant to present purposes. In this chapter, I am interested in internalism about epistemic normativity, or the full normative status that is required for knowledge. This is because I am here defending a virtue-theoretic account of such, and internalism about epistemic normativity seems incompatible with that account. A virtue-theoretic account, after all, emphasizes the importance of causal and other modally strong features of belief, and these sorts of features have been treated as paradigmatically externalist. An internalist account, of the sort I am considering here, claims that such features are not relevant, or not centrally relevant, to issues of epistemic normativity.

In Section 1 I clarify the internalist thesis, arguing that a particular formulation of the thesis is apropos. In Section 2 I present an argument against internalism so understood. In Section 3 I consider some ways that an internalist might respond.

WHAT IS INTERNALISM?

Let us begin with some stipulative definitions. By “knowledge-relevant normative status” I mean the sort of normative status (whatever it is) that is required for knowledge. For short, we can call this “k-relevant normative status” or simply “k-normative status.” By “internalism” I mean the thesis that, in some important sense, knowledge-relevant normative status is entirely a function of factors internal to the knower. We get varieties of internalism depending on how the notion of “internal to the knower” is understood. For now, I want to consider a version of “Privileged Access Internalism” (I-PA).