Doxastic planning and epistemic internalism

In the following I discuss the debate between epistemological internalists and externalists from an unfamiliar meta-epistemological perspective. In doing so, I focus on the question of whether rationality is best captured in externalist or internalist terms. Using the idea of epistemic judgments as “doxastic plans”, I characterize one important subspecies of judgments about epistemic rationality focusing on the distinctive rational/functional role they play in regulating how we form beliefs. Then I show why any judgment that plays this role should be expected to behave the manner internalists predict. In this way, I argue, we can explain why our basic toolbox for epistemic evaluation includes an internalist conception of epistemic rationality. This is an essay about two basic epistemological questions: First, what is the nature of epistemic rationality? And, second, do judgments about rationality behave as epistemological internalism implies they should? In what follows, I’m going to approach these questions by taking a step back from the familiar epistemological debates about them in order to focus on the nature and purpose of epistemic evaluation. In doing so, I take up an under-explored way of thinking about epistemic judgment and use this meta-epistemological perspective to shed light on exactly which aspects of our practice of epistemic evaluation deserve to be thought in broadly internalist terms and why. Thus, instead of focusing on the nature of epistemic properties like knowledge or rationality, in what follows I will focus on the nature of epistemic con-