Epistemic Supervenience and Internalism: A Trilemma

Abstract

AbstractEpistemic Internalism (EI) is the claim that an agent S is justified in believing that p at a time t iff S has either an actual or potential direct awareness of the grounds or properties that confer justification on p at t. In this paper I argue that EI does not provide the proponent of EI with an intuitively clear analysis of epistemic justification. More exactly, after identifying two different versions of EI – a weak version and a strong version – I offer some general considerations for thinking that neither the weak version nor the strong version provides the proponent of EI with a plausible analysis of epistemic justification and conclude, therefore, that EI itself cannot be considered a plausible analysis of epistemic justification.