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Essay / Belief Acquisition and Justification - 3191
Bartleby is a lazy student who refuses to study simply because he would prefer not to. Although his teacher, Mr. Smith, automatically assumes that Bartleby failed the final exam he just took, Mr. Smith might have thought that he had sufficient evidence to support his belief. Mr. Smith found that Bartleby shows little interest in class, has poor study habits, and has consistently failed all of his previous exams, and that just about enough questions were incorrect on the part of the exam that Mr. Smith had time for. to note to justify a failing grade. But with final grades due and Mr. Smith running out of time to complete the grading, he grades 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 failed. Later, Mr. Smith discovers that his belief was true, thus once again confirming Mr. Smith's proven prejudice that students who have failed in the past are perpetual failures. Was Mr. Smith's belief justified? Intuitively, we would like to say that this is not the case, because his belief is based on, or caused by, his bias against Bartleby. The problem is that both rigidly internalist, such as Access Internalism, and rigidly externalist, such as Reliabilism, conceptions of justification have difficulty showing how prejudice 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 justificatory requirements of access internalism are inconsistent with the findings of current psychological research. about how most beliefs are actually acquired and justified. Next, I will 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 missing the main advantages of the theories both strongly internalist and strongly externalist. Next, I will use Alvin Goldman's article, “Reliabilism: What is Justified Belief?” what should be the justification.