Internalism and externalism are two competing theories in epistemology that address how beliefs are justified and how knowledge is acquired.

• Internalism holds that the justification for a belief must be accessible to the believer’s consciousness. In other words, a person must have introspective access to the reasons or evidence that justify their belief. This view emphasizes the importance of reflection and self-awareness in the process of acquiring knowledge.
• Externalism, on the other hand, argues that justification depends on factors external to the believer’s awareness. It focuses on whether the belief-forming process is reliable, even if the individual is unaware of how or why the process works. For example, if a belief is formed through a trustworthy cognitive mechanism, such as perception or memory, it can be justified without the believer needing explicit access to the justification.

These two approaches raise important questions about the limits of human cognition, the nature of justification, and the reliability of our knowledge.

This article are just comments from Jimmy Stephens’ critique of internalism, contrasting it with externalism in epistemology. How internalism fails to address the challenges posed by human finitude, fallibility, and moral corruption, ultimately arguing that only a theistic framework can resolve these philosophical tensions.

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The properties of human nature are irreconcilable with internalism.
Human nature, at present, has the following properties: finitude, fallibility, and foulness.
Finitude refers to the limited nature of the human mind. We do not know all facts; we are not omniscient. We know little about what is going on beyond the gestalt provided by our five senses. We cannot know everything that is going on around the globe. We know comparatively little about what is going on in the universe in total. We know relatively little about the past, especially prehistory. We know nothing about the future except scarce predictions. But in all of these things, we are dependent on our environment.
Whatever we could know a priori is neither practically brought into our sense-experience so that we can guarantee historical events, for example, nor are historical events deductible from an innate a priori.
All this is just to give a rough sketch to say: we don’t have an infinite, all-encompassing idea of the universe. We cannot know all facts in reality. We cannot explain any fact of reality in relation to all other facts.
So then, we have no guarantee that our present conception of the universe isn’t inherently flawed. Perhaps, somewhere out in the unknown, somewhere on the timeline of philosophy, someone will discover something that disproves our most basic concept of the universe. Worse, since we cannot know all facts, perhaps there is a fact that entails all of our pretenses of knowledge to be delusional folly.

Fallibility is obvious. Human beings make mistakes, sometimes on a nuclear scale. The best internalism could offer, therefore, is wholesale fallibilism. Since wholesale fallibilism is incoherent, internalism is likewise impossible.
Foulness refers to the sinful nature of humanity. We are not immaculate, we are immoral. We lie, cheat, and steal. Sometimes we deceive ourselves. People have unconsciously deceived themselves before and some have willfully accomplished delusion.
Since, on internalism, all knowledge depends for justification on the knower, all justification could amount to deception, unconscious or willful. The former could just be a case of insanity – perhaps everyone is just a delusional animal.
And for the internalist, we need not bicker with him over petty details in the universe. All that matters, for the sake of his view, is that he cannot compete with God in terms of attributes. Without infinity, the internalist has no way of guaranteeing the shape of the universe is not an inherently Christocentric one. Without infallibility, the internalist cannot guarantee that he isn’t borrowing from the Christian worldview, cannot guarantee his own autonomy. Without sinlessness, the internalist cannot answer Romans 1.

I think the concept of abstraction can be staked on a dilemma between internalism vs externalism:

P1. Empiricism is internalistic or externalistic.
P2. If internalistic, it requires an innate universal.
P3. If externalistic, it requires a universalizing mechanism.
P4. All innate universals and all universalizing mechanisms are universal particulars.
P5. Universal particulars are incoherent.
C: All empiricism is incoherent.

P4. All innate universals and all universalizing mechanisms are universal particulars.

Imagine what constitutes the sort of thing internal to the knower and the sorts of things external to the knower capable of explaining abstraction. Internalism is easy. Things internal to the knower are intuitions, memory, knowledge generally, affections, intentions, dispositions (if you want to add that distinction), and so forth. Basically, you have the mind of the knower. Whether it is a faculty of that mind or content in it or a constitutional orientation of it (toward abstraction) – that’s really irrelevant to the problem. What is important is that you have the mind and there is nothing else internalism can refer to, since it is internalism.

The obvious question is how the mind can contain a universal by which to render intelligible all particulars? Since the empiricist denies a priori knowledge, he’s left with consititution, like faculties, or operations, like intentions, of the mind. But how can the nature of the mind ground some sort of access to all particulars in a way that classifies those particulars for itself upon the occasion of experience? How can the mind retain its property of finitude and also contain the property of universality (access to classification of particularity)? What is the difference between saying the constitution of human minds involves a universal by which to (at least begin) process(ing) particulars and saying that the human mind is the concrete universal whose self-consciousness is that which renders intelligible all reality (Hegelianism)?

Other sorts of internalism fail the same way. Saying the operation of the mind is itself the universal(izing) phenomenon responsible for interpretation of particulars falls right back into the original problem. For in order for the mind to function in a way that gives it access to particularity, it would need to have access to all particulars, and how could it if it is finite? What is the difference between that and Berkeley’s Infinite Perceiver, whose “sight” into all particulars grounds them? Again, how can a mind with a universal faculty retain its finitude? One could say it has a “particular” universal to answer this question – in fact, that seems to me the only forthcoming answer, and an incoherent one.

Externalism is less intuitively problematic (to me) but really suffers the same propertarian problem. By that I mean, the issue still arises how to reconcile finitude with universality. What sort of mechanism offers itself as the cause or process by which is obtained a universal? Saying that our organs, our neurobiology, the whole of our biology and environment, our whole history, etc., at no point escapes the problem that nowhere do such things ground an access to all particulars in existence. The only way around this is just to say that all particulars together ground an external universal which means everything is experienced in a particular, and we’re right back to the universal particular.

All this is just my unsophisticated way of pointing out the Problem of the One and Many, which cannot be resolved by things in creation. At the very least, it seems only the so-called “religoius” answers get off the ground, but even this is not helpful because the frankensteinian monstrosities called gods in Islam, Shintoism, Odinism, etc., are all impersonal or finite or unitarian and so incapable of solving the Problem. Only Trinitarianism is even prima facie cogent of answer.

In summary, two things:

1.) I’m not a scholarly philosopher. I’ve gotten a little embaressed at the end here when I think, “Why is Vincent even asking me this?”

2.) The issue is really how you can have knowledge of a particular without having knowledge of all reality and how you can know something about all reality without particulars. Empiricism is to this issue what naturalism is to metaphysics: they’re sitting ducks with sand to drink while they attempt to escape the desert.

You’ve asked me to hear you out, so you’ll have to tell me where you think the entailment lurks. Something about internalism is supposed to rule out epistemic circularity. What is that specifically? You’ve since answered this question: there’s supposed to be a meta-regress problem. You then provide an illustration.

I’ll get to that in a bit.

Critical about sources

You didn’t stop there, and I wasn’t going to assume, but if this had just come down to an appeal to epistemologists (a la the McGrews) analyzing “internalism” or “externalism,” I find that suspect on the face of it. Which is to say, I find the McGrews’ analysis prima facie dubious. The McGrews are not Reformed in their theology, let alone their philosophy. Sadly, they are quintessential of highly regarded Christian epistemology in their evidentialism. So we can expect the same false one-many dilemmas found elsewhere in their analysis of justificatory access.

I’ll expand on this too.

Common Ground & Not so common

Bahnsen was right about justificatory regress, despite the meretricious foundationalism. Justification can’t hang in the air. It has to terminate in Christian revelation somehow. I’m pretty sure we agree on both: there is an inherent case of justification, and it’s found in revelation.

Per your illustration, justification does bottom out in revelation: “We are conditioned (through the imago dei) to recognize God’s voice and His media.” (Ironically, this line reads more naturally as an externalist idea. You could be taken to mean some kind of proper-function-like externalist story about human nature, like Plantinga, but I digress, and your sentence can be read internalistically as well.)

I do not think this counts as what philosophers are gesturing at with “internalism.” The reason is that we have no prior or independent access to any criteria of justification for knowledge like, say, “I am imago dei.” The sufficient condition for possessing that knowledge is being imago dei, not some internal thought of or about its relation to a criterion of justification independent of that nature and its covenantal-nature-borne-covenantal-consciousness.

Transcendental Critique

Presuming you and I agree with Bahnsen and my interpretation of you is accurate, then how might my take on justification interact with the whole internal-external question?

Borrowing from Watkins, revelational epistemology “diagonalizes” the three traditional justificatory structures. It plunders the best formally-true insights from foundationalism, coherentism, and infinitism, without succumbing to their systematic faults. So one can transcendentally critique internalism and externalism the same way someone might critique realism and nominalism.

Van Til had already pointed out, and Bahnsen reiterated, this same transcendental critique of truth theory. Strengths of correspondence theory, coherence, identity, and the rest, are all collected in Christianity without their distinct weaknesses. Frame has time and again made the same transcendental move using the transcendence-immanence problem. Therefore, I would expect ahead of time the same pattern of transcendental counter-explanation to occur at the internalism-externalism divide with unbelievers and inconsistent believers (e.g., the McGrews).

Historical consideration/Definition

To wit, historical internalism lends itself to methodism (cf. internalist readings of Aristotle like Rand, Spinozan “proofs,” Cartesian methodological doubt, Hegelianism, Husserl’s phenomenology, the Vienna Circle, probably Oppy), a vicious abstraction in place of Creative unity. Externalism lends itself to the mysticism of particularism (cf. Aristotle’s psychology of abstracting, gnosticism, Descarte’s light of reason, Husserl’s given, Dooyeweerd, all the modern dusting-off of Reidian commonsense realism), instead of a Created individual. (At least, that is my memory.) That is more evidence to expect confusion where unbelievers and inconsistent believers touch on internalism-vs-externalism.

This passes by the definition issue again, and maybe that should have been my first question. What do you mean, Daniel, by internalism and externalism, such that they’re mutually exclusive, with epistemic circularity belonging to one and not the other? (edited)

Summary of my push-back

As I commented above, the issue seems to be that, when we put aside taxonomical questions for the moment, your view (viz. the imago-Dei appeal) either invokes epistemic circularity because trust in a source and its particular testimonies are mutually dependent – in this case, God and different examples of His revelation – or you will have to put some other notion of intrinsic justification, or whatever.

For my part, I think epistemic circularity, though not just any garden variety, well captures the epistemic one-many unity. Suppose we illustrate this via the criterion problem.

Problem of the Criterion

Do we know God as reliable source first of all because we know a particular item of revelation? Or do we know God as reliable source in order to receive particular items of revelation? The answer should be, I submit, neither. We neither start with some mystic access to God’s deity apart from His historically conditioned acts of self-disclosure, nor do we build up our theology like the theontological version of constructive empiricism from mere revelatory “info.”

You cannot have one without the other. As one, en masse, etc., the universal nature and therefore trustworthiness of God is delivered via any and all of His testimonies; and meanwhile, our familiarity with His nature backs up any singular historic claim or natural impression from the world of and about Him and His plan.

That sounds like epistemic circularity to me.

“How do we know the Bible is God’s word?”
Your answer was perfectly adequate, but I think, ambiguous on this topic. Yes, we do recognize the Bible because we are imago Dei. We are determined to recognize it by our God-given human nature.

However, that is not:
a mere arational psychological disposition free from epistemic criterion, like some kind of proper functionalism;
a mere arational praxis or developmental “how,” as Wittgensteinian methodism:
a mere supra-rational mind state-and-content, such as Dooyeweerd’s religious root concept;
a mere ahistorical essence psychology, like in Aristotle
a mere ahistorical divine-memory version of Plato’s remembrance of the Forms.

It is instead a situation, all at once, in which both the criterion and the item are “inside” God’s act of acquanting us with Himself by creating us in a revelatory way, with a revealing nature, in an environment of revelation.

We know the Bible is God’s word as a development of the same answer to the question you could ask about knowing a tree is Yahweh’s tree or that one’s own mind is Yahweh’s image bearer: because it constitutes revelation of said God.

That sounds (and is) circular.

Thoughts for definitions and taxonomies
Wandering in my mind about this practically…

If externalism is a denial of the KK and nothing more, then what’s the nature of the KK? Specifically, what’s its scope? If the KK says all cases of justification are cases of knowing how I know, then I maintain Christians should be externalists. If the KK says some cases of justification require knowing how I know, or if it’s the thesis that all “non-KK justifications” are contingent on a “KK justification,” then I would affirm the KK, and I guess I’m an internalist. Of course, is the KK all there is to the debate anyway?

The God-Elephant

IMHO, the elephant in the room are the doctrines of revelation, anthropology, and Incarnation. How we put those together is the key, and I submit the real substantial sunlit way to talk about this, and not first of all the dim, flickering match light of a meta-regress problem. As the Gospel demonstrates, problems – the big ones, at least – must be understood in light of their solutions. So what is really going on with justification and with its correlate psychology given (a) revelation, (b) Jesus, the ideal knower, image of truly natural humanity, and (c) His sin-conditioned followers, who are being progressively remade in Christ’s image. What does that messy-theology-words situation turn out for a more abstract philosophy question about the justification?