Internalism

“Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” (Davey Hume)

Passion is the justification, I figure.

For what?

For enslaving reason and forcing it to do it's bidding when trying to define "justification," I guess.

(can't seem get that clip to work)

Next: a position related to Justification Externalism: Reliabilism

Exactly, Ollie. As Dennet joked: We KNOW it works it practice. What we're trying to figure out is if it works in theory.

Theorize on, theorists. Me, I'm goin with the reliabilist solution to all them angel on pinhead "debates."

Quote:

On such a reliabilist view, the justification of a perceptual belief depends only on the reliability of the perceptual process that produces it, that is, on the fact (assuming that it is a fact) that this process leads to a suitably high proportion of true beliefs. (Note that it is not required that the believer or anyone else know that the process is reliable or have any sort of cognitive access to its reliability — all that is required is that it is in fact reliable).

The justification of such a belief thus requires no appeal to sensory experience at all, thus effectively short-circuiting the issue that divides representationalism and phenomenalism. Such reliabilist views might in a way be viewed as versions of direct realism, but it is less misleading to simply regard them as rejecting the issue which all three of the more traditional theories attempt to respond to: the issue of how sensory experience provides a reason for thinking that perceptual beliefs are true. Reliabilism thus offers a seemingly straightforward and unproblematic account of how perceptual beliefs about physical objects and the physical world are, in a specified sense, justified.


http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-episprob/

I see an apple. [how can I know it's really an apple? How can I know it even exists? How do you define "apple?" Could it be true that.....]

I think to myself: "Imma grab that sukka and chomp it down.". [Who is "I", here? Who is "myself" How can a "mind" have any effect on material objects. Who's doing the "thinking" here? How....]

I get my mitts on it and hog it right down. Tasted good! [how do you KNOW you did that? Where does "taste" reside, exactly? What if...]

That **** in brackets can kiss my black ass. Like I done said: Tasted good. Imma go find me another one.

You can always tune-in to the passionate base of stuff like that by noticing what's at stake. Since internalism of various kinds is related to philosophy of mind, I'd say the passion on the scene has to do with competing conceptions of reality.

On one extreme, the universe and all its inhabitants are essentially dead. Some little blobs of dead matter don't seem to realize they're dead. But that's just because they're incredibly arrogant.

On the other extreme, the universe is something like a vast leviathan humming Bach's Air on the G String. Some of the debris on its scales is upset because it wanted to live forever

...the idea of an internal/external dichotomy. One place it comes up is in addressing equivocation that we might see in people who reject the Cartesian mind/body split.

Contemporary philosophical realism is the belief that some aspect of our reality is ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes, perceptions, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc. Realism may be spoken of with respect to other minds, the past, the future, universals, mathematical entities (such as natural numbers), moral categories, the material world, and thought. Realism can also be promoted in an unqualified sense, in which case it asserts the mind-independent existence of a visible world, as opposed to skepticism and solipsism. Philosophers who profess realism state that truth consists in the mind's correspondence to reality. Realists tend to believe that whatever we believe now is only an approximation of reality ...