ALSTON’S ANTI-JUSTIFICATIONISM AS A STRATEGY TO RESOLVE THE CONFLICT BETWEEN INTERNALISM AND EXTERNALISM MOHAMMAD ALI MOBINI Academy of Islamic Sciences and Culture (ISCA), Qom, Iran After a justificationist period, William P. Alston has tried to eliminate justification from the epistemology of belief. He introduced a list of epistemic desiderata all of which contribute to the positive status of beliefs and none of which has an exclusive and decisive role so that it could be isolated as the property of being justified. Careful examination reveals, however, that this list includes fewer desiderata than advertised. Truth-conducive desiderata are most important for Alston, and these are five; during his discussion, however, Alston reduces these desiderata to only one, the reliability of process, which has an externalist character. Besides this desideratum, there is one other group of desiderata, all of which have an internalist character. What Alston has in fact done, then, through the presentation of his anti- justificationist list, is to separate externalist and internalist elements for the positive status of belief and to give an independent role to each. Since Alston regards the truth-conducive group as the most important, however, and since he has failed to show a real pluralism in this group, we may conclude that he continues to have a monistic approach to the evaluation of beliefs, which belies his alleged pluralism. Until a few years ago, epistemologists worked within a monistic approach toward justification; they maintained there is one epistemically crucial property or feature that is of central importance for evaluating beliefs. When a belief is evaluated positively because of its having this feature, it is called ‘justified’. Of course, some epistemologists preferred to use another term, such as ‘rational’ or ‘warranted’. Whatever name they chose, the important thing is their claim that there is a single factor that plays a decisive role for the evaluation of beliefs. This monistic approach, however, has recently been questioned. John L. Pollock, for example, writes: Ten or fifteen years ago epistemologists assumed uncritically that there is just one concept of epistemic justification and all epistemologists are talking about it. That now seems dubious. It has become increasingly apparent in the last ten years that there is more than one important concept that might reasonably be called ‘‘epistemic justification,’’ and it seems clear that these different concepts have often been confused with one another in the epistemological literature. 1 Richard Fumerton also distinguishes between ordinary concepts of justification and a philosophical concept. He argues: [T]here is a concept of epistemic justification of particular interest to the philosopher who is engaged in what is, to be sure, a rather unusual activity. The demands of philosophically relevant justification are stronger than the demands of ordinary concepts of justification precisely because the philosopher is interested in a concept the satisfaction of which removes a kind of philosophical curiosity that prompts the raising of philosophical questions about justification in the first place. 2 r 2010 The Author. The Heythrop Journal r 2010 Trustees for Roman Catholic Purposes Registered. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. HeyJ XLVIII (2010), pp. 1–6 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2265.2010.00633.x