Bartleby is a lazy student who refuses to study simply because he would rather not. Although his teacher, Mr. Smith, automatically assumes that Bartleby failed the final exam he just took, Mr. Smith could have reasoned that he had sufficient evidence to support his belief. Mr. Smith saw that Bartleby shows little interest in the class, that he has poor study habits and has consistently failed all of his previous exams, and that nearly enough questions were incorrect in the portion of the exam where Mr. Smith he had time. evaluate to justify a negative vote. But because final grades are due and Mr. Smith no longer has time to finish the assessment, he scores an "F" on the Bartleby test without actually calculating the score or even realizing that he has sufficient evidence to support his belief that Bartleby has failed. Later, Mr. Smith discovers that his belief was true, thus once again confirming Mr. Smith's time-tested prejudice that students who have failed in the past are perpetual failures. Was Mr. Smith's belief justified? Intuitively, we would say that he is not, because his belief is founded on or caused by his prejudice against Bartleby. The problem is that both strictly internalist accounts of justification, such as Access Internalism, and strictly externalist accounts, such as Reliabilism, have difficulty showing how biases can disqualify an apparently justified belief. In what follows, I will use Matthias Steup's account, "A Defense of Internalism"[1], to explain Access Internalism and then use the scenario just presented to show how the justification requirements of Access Internalism are incompatible with the results of current psychological research. about how most beliefs are actually acquired and justified. I will next briefly discuss how a much weaker form of internalism with an externalist character, psychological internalism, can avoid the problems of access internalism, but at the cost of losing the main advantages of both strongly internalist and strongly externalist theories. Next I will use Alvin Goldman's article, "Reliabilist: What is Justified Belief?"[2] to explain the basic ideas of reliabilist externalism and I will again use the Bartleby situation to highlight the inconsistencies between the reliabilist requirements of justification and our normative intuitions of what the justification should be.
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