The externalist turn in epistemology

We have so far defined individualism, evidentialism, and internalism in epistemology, and we have seen how both evidentialism and internalism entail individualism. We have also seen how these views are related to ideals of self-sufficiency, and how they reject any real epistemic dependence on other persons.

broadens the epistemic resources available to the individual (in effect, externalism thickens the agent and her agency), 2) externalism motivates anti-evidentialism, and 3) externalism motivates anti-individualism.That is, we will see how a) externalism rejects ideals of self-sufficiency, and b) embraces real epistemic dependence on others.This comes with c) more realistic estimations of one's own abilities and limitations, d) a greater appreciation of (in the sense of valuing) one's epistemic dependence on others, and e) a notion of intellectual autonomy that is consistent with social epistemic dependence and cooperation.

We defined epistemic internalism as follows:

(I) The facts about an individual's epistemic status (of one sort or another) supervene on facts that are “internal” to the individual.

Epistemic externalism simply denies epistemic internalism. Thus, on an externalist view, the facts about an individual's epistemic status (of one sort or another) are not wholly determined by facts that are internal to the individual.

What kinds of facts might matter? Most notably, these will be causal and other modal facts, describing relations between the individual and the world. For example, facts about the reliabil­ity of one's cognitive faculties, facts about the proper functioning of one's cognition and, more generally, facts about causal and modal relations between the individual and her environment.¹⁴ These are all paradigmatically external facts, in that they are neither facts to which one has privileged access nor are they facts about one's mental states.

Accordingly, externalism replaces the notion of a pure agent operating in a pure realm, with that of an embodied agent operating in the world.What matters for intellectual status is a function both of a) what goes on internal to cognition, and b) how that cognition relates to the world; e.g., whether the agent's environment is enabling or undermining. In this way, external­ism makes epistemic status (of one sort or another) depend partly on an environment that is not of the agent's own making. In doing so, it also makes epistemic status, and the agent herself, vulnerable to contingencies and to what she cannot control.

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