Proposal: On Normative Externalism: What Makes Externalism External

2024-1 Seminar Epistemology

 

As is widely known, debates between externalism and internalism are often characterized by the question of whether epistemology is (or should be) a normative science. “Epistemic norms are norms describing when it is epistemically permissible to hold various beliefs. […] Epistemic norms govern ‘right reasoning’” (Pollock 1987: 61; my emphasis). “[T]o say that a belief is justified […] is to say that it is good in some sense” (Kornblith 1993: 360; my emphasis). Here, normativity often involves several epistemic responsibilities of the knowing subject; for the subject is to be evaluated in terms of whether their belief is rightly justified, permissible to hold, or simply good. So in his famous paper, BonJour concluded that a person who believes himself to have the power of clairvoyance is (epistemically) blameworthy insofar as he does not have any good reasons for his belief. In short, blameworthiness and answerableness are crucial to internalist accounts of justification. On the contrary, externalists consider them trivial where “non-subjective or external state of affairs which need not in principle be accessible to the cognizer” (Kornblith 1993: 336) come into play regarding justification.

In her Radical Externalism, Srinivasan challenges this traditional distinction and shifts the frame to the distinction between structural and individualistic notion of justification (Srinivasan 2018: 410) According to her, blameworthiness and blamelessness, responsibility, action-guidance are neither necessary nor sufficient for being normative. “Marxism, for example, is arguably a normative theory, in the sense that it is responsive to the gap between how things are and how things should be. But Marx was uninterested in the questions of what any given individual ought to do or who is to be blamed” (Srinivasan 2018: 427). As she rightly points out, if we adapt a novel notion of normativity then externalism would be a genuinely normative theory of justification for people who recognize the world as place filled with bad ideology. Then, what are the proper characteristics of normativity, and which normativity is appropriate for epistemology?  In the present paper, I aim to examine the possibility of normative externalism and discern several challenges to materialize it: ideological relativism-by which I mean that ideology may blur the line between good and bad-and epistemological nihilism-by which I mean it might annihilate the possibility of resistance against bad ideology, respectively.

 

 

The Tentative Bibliography

1)  Papers on Radical Epistemology

Srinivasan, A. (2018). Radical Externalism. Philosophical Review. 129(3), 395-431.

Johnson King, Z. (2022). Radical internalism. Philosophical Issues 32 (1): 46-64.

Pettigrew, R. (2022) Radical epistemology, structural explanations, and epistemic weaponry. Philos Stud 179, 289–304.

2) Papers on the general accounts of Epistemic Norms

Bonjour, Laurence (1980). Externalist Theories of Empirical Knowledge. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 5 (1):53-73.

Pollock, J. L. (1987). Epistemic Norms. Synthese, 71(1), 61–95.

Maffie, J. (1990). Naturalism and the Normativity of Epistemology. Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, 59(3), 333–349.

Kornblith, H. (1993). Epistemic Normativity. Synthese, 94(3), 357–376.

Copp, D. (2015). Explaining Normativity. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 89, 48–73.

McPherson, T., & Plunkett, D. (2021). Conceptual ethics, metaepistemology, and normative epistemology. Inquiry, 1–33.