1. INTERNALISM AND EXTERNALISM ABOUT TESTIMONIAL JUSTIFICATION

Epistemic internalists claim that facts about justification depend upon one's internal reasons. The traditional way of unpacking the notion of internal reasons is to say that one's internal reasons are one's a priori accessible reasons – where a priori is used in the narrow or traditional sense that a condition is a priori just in case it doesn't depend on any of the sense modalities.Footnote ¹ Thus, the modes of a priori accessibility include not only reflection and reasoning, but also introspection and other cognitive mechanisms with an experiential aspect. And, in this way, internalists emphasize the epistemic importance of one's subjective point of view on the world. Epistemic externalists, on the other hand, deny this. More specifically, they deny that only internal or a priori accessible reasons can have justificatory relevance. Instead, they think that facts about reliability, factive mental states, or other conditions that are external to one's subjective point of view can make a justificatory difference.

The internalism–externalism debate has recently made its mark on the epistemology of testimony. Consider, for example, someone telling you that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is the author of Sherlock Holmes, or that the New York Public Library has more than 50 million items. A significant number of the beliefs we hold come from assertions like these.Footnote ² Assertions present propositions that the speaker represents as being true, and that a hearer under the right conditions can get knowledge or justified beliefs from. The epistemology of testimony is about how we should evaluate such beliefs under different conditions. According to the internalist about testimonial justification, the following thesis is true:

TJ internalists thus think that testimonial justification has its primary source in the hearer, rather than the speaker. Moreover, as formulated above, TJ internalism entails the following thesis about the justificatory status of internal duplicates:

Externalists about testimonial justification, however, reject TJ internalism, instead claiming that conditions that are external to the hearer's subjective point of view can make a difference with respect to his testimonial justification.Footnote ⁴

In this paper, I will argue for TJ internalism and defend it against recent objections. First, I will present an argument providing intuitive support for the view that only internal reasons can make a difference with respect to testimonial justification. Having thus motivated TJ internalism, I will defend it against three objections recently offered by Stephen Wright.Footnote ⁵ The upshot of my discussion will be that externalist conditions do make an epistemic difference when it comes to our testimonial beliefs, but that they cannot make any difference with respect to their justificatory status – i.e., they are justificationally irrelevant.

This is how the paper is structured. Section 2 presents an argument in favor of TJ internalism. Sections 3, 4, and 5 respond to three objections recently offered by Wright. Section 6 comments on Wright's criticism of Jennifer Lackey, arguing that he either must accept TJ internalism or an externalist position similar to Lackey's. Section 7 concludes.

2. THE ARGUMENT

I will begin by presenting a scenario that will serve as the basis for an argument for TJ internalism. The scenario considers a pair of epistemic agents that are duplicates with respect to their internal reasons, but that differ with respect to external conditions, such as reliability and truth. And by evaluating the epistemic positions of both agents, the scenario provides the intuitive basis for an inference to the best explanation saying that the character of justification is epistemically internal. The argument's general structure is familiar from the internalism-externalism debate,Footnote ⁶ but has had less impact on the epistemology of testimony.Footnote ⁷ The scenario I will consider is as follows.

Now, let's evaluate Barry and Larry's epistemic positions. First, it is clear that there is a difference between them. Whereas Barry's testimonial beliefs are highly reliable and almost all true, Larry's testimonial beliefs are generally unreliable. When Barry forms beliefs based on the testimonies of his professors, his beliefs represent his environment in a truth-conducive manner. But when Larry does the same, his beliefs usually misrepresent his environment. Following a recent trend in epistemology, we can define epistemic entitlement as a condition that (primarily) turns on the reliability or truth-conduciveness of one's doxastic dispositions in one's normal environment.Footnote ⁸ A natural way of conceptualizing the difference between Barry and Larry's epistemic positions is then to say that Barry's beliefs are entitled, whereas Larry's beliefs either are entitled to a much lower degree or, even worse, not entitled at all.

A second difference between Barry and Larry is that Barry appears to get a lot of knowledge by relying on the testimonies of his professors. The professors at Trustworthy College undoubtedly know a lot about their respective areas of expertise. And the internal reasons Barry has for trusting his professors appear to facilitate transmission of much of this knowledge, via their testimonies, to him. Larry, on the other hand, appears to get very little knowledge by relying on the testimonies of his professors – even when what they say actually turns out to be true. The professors at Untrustworthy College are simply too unreliable and insensitive with respect to the facts about their (so-called) areas of expertise. Following Alvin Plantinga (Reference Plantinga1993), we can define epistemic warrant as the condition(s) that turns true belief into knowledge.Footnote ⁹ Another natural way of conceptualizing the difference between Barry and Larry's epistemic positions is then to say that Barry's beliefs (often) are warranted, whereas Larry's beliefs usually aren't.

However, despite the differences in their epistemic positions, there also seems to be something they have in common that speaks in favor of them. Both Barry and Larry's testimonial beliefs are supported by their internal reasons, and, as a consequence, they appear to be equally justified. After all, as far as the students are concerned, the schools are indistinguishable in all the relevant ways. More specifically, from the students’ perspective, the professors at Untrustworthy College are no less trustworthy than the professors at Trustworthy College. And since the apparent trustworthiness of the professors at Trustworthy College seems to justify their students' testimonial beliefs, so does the apparent trustworthiness of the professors at Untrustworthy College seem to justify their students' testimonial beliefs. Indeed, despite the differences in entitlement and warrant, it seems that the justificatory status of Barry and Larry's testimonial beliefs are the same as long as we hold fixed their internal reasons. And the best explanation for why this should be so is that the facts about which propositions one has testimonial justification to believe, and also the degree to which one has testimonial justification to believe them, supervene upon one's internal reasons.Footnote ¹⁰ By abductive reasoning we can therefore conclude that TJ internalism is true.

To further support this argument, consider a similar scenario, but where Barry is transported from Trustworthy College to Untrustworthy College in the middle of the night while he is fast asleep. Unbeknown to himself, when Barry wakes up he finds himself at Untrustworthy College. Moreover, since the two schools are, from the students’ point of view, indistinguishable, Barry continues to believe that he is at Trustworthy College; as far as he can tell, there is nothing indicating that he isn't or that his judgment is compromised. However, after a certain amount of time, Untrustworthy College becomes Barry's new normal environment.Footnote ¹¹ As a result, the new (testimonial) beliefs he forms by relying on the testimonies of his professors are no longer reliable or truth-conducive. Although his new testimonial beliefs appear to be just as true as his earlier ones, most of them are in fact false.

Now, it is quite clear that Barry's new testimonial beliefs, in contrast to his earlier ones, neither are warranted nor entitled (to the same degree); his doxastic dispositions are simply not reliable or sensitive enough with respect to the facts about his new environment. However, his new testimonial beliefs appear to be just as justified as his earlier ones. After all, for all that he, or anyone else in his epistemic position, knows, Barry still finds himself at Trustworthy College where the professors are trustworthy. So, once again, it appears that the justificatory status of his testimonial beliefs turns on his internal reasons for believing that what the professors say is true.

In order to see this more clearly, it is enough to point out that Barry in the second scenario has gone from the same position that he was in in the first scenario to the position that Larry was in. Moreover, according to Duplicates, which follows from TJ internalism, all internal duplicates are justificatory duplicates. And since Barry and Larry are internal duplicates, the testimonial beliefs Barry acquires at Untrustworthy College are no less justified than those he acquired at Trustworthy College. TJ Internalism thus appears to provide a simple and natural – indeed, I claim, the best – explanation for the intuitions elicited by the scenarios above.

However, scenarios like these and the arguments they support are not without their critics. In a couple of recent papers, Wright has presented three objections with the purpose of undermining TJ internalism. In the next three sections, I will defend the argument above against them.Footnote ¹²

3. THE OBJECTION FROM LACK OF WARRANT

The first two objections have also been responded to by Brent Madison (Reference Madison2016). For that reason, I will not spend too much time defending my argument against them. However, since I suspect that many externalists about testimonial justification share some of the concerns that Wright's first two objections raise when it comes to TJ internalism, it will be useful to demonstrate why they fail to undermine it.

Plausibly, there exists some sort of necessary connection between justification and knowledge.Footnote ¹³ According to Wright (Reference Wright2016b: 75), “justification is that which puts someone in a position to know things.” Without providing us with any more detail, this presumably means that justification is warrant – i.e., it is whatever condition(s) that is required in order to turn true belief into knowledge.Footnote ¹⁴ Now, with this claim in place, Wright considers a couple of scenarios similar to Trustworthy and Untrustworthy College – one of which is inspired by Frederick Schmitt (Reference Schmitt, Greco and Sosa1999), and the other being Alvin Goldman's (Reference Goldman1976) Fake Barns scenario – and argues, as I also did above, that Barry and Larry's epistemic positions differ insofar as it is only Barry's testimonial beliefs that are warranted; that is, it is only he who is in a position to know that the contents of his professors' testimonies are true. And since warrant and justification is the same epistemic property, it therefore follows that only Barry has testimonial justification for his beliefs – despite the fact that Barry and Larry are stipulated to be duplicates with respect to their internal reasons. Hence, since Duplicates, which follows from TJ internalism, is false, so is TJ internalism.

There is, however, a problem with this particular objection. Without providing any motivation for his claim that justification is warrant, the idea that Barry's testimonial beliefs are justified whereas Larry's aren't because only Barry's testimonial beliefs are warranted begs the question against the proponent of TJ internalism. The reason is simply that Wright assumes, without argument, that justification is an externalist notion (i.e., that it is the same as warrant).Footnote ¹⁵ But the internalist can of course adopt a different theory of justification, one that doesn't presuppose the necessity of any externalist conditions. Indeed, not only is the internalist free to adopt an alternative view of justification, but there are also strong reasons for why he shouldn't adopt Wright's view. For example, by claiming that justification is warrant, Wright is committed to the view that justified true belief is sufficient for knowledge. However, as Madison (Reference Madison2016: 747) rightfully points out, in the aftermath of Edmund Gettier's (Reference Gettier1963) counterexamples, it is clear that the tripartite analysis of knowledge intuitively fails.Footnote ¹⁶ We therefore have good reason to reject Wright's claim that justification is warrant, and with it the claim that Barry and Larry differ in terms of testimonial justification too.

4. THE OBJECTION FROM LACK OF EPISTEMIC VALUE

However, according to Wright, responding to the objection from lack of warrant in the manner above by denying that justification is warrant reveals another problem with TJ internalism. In the same paper, he tells us that maintaining that Barry and Larry's testimonial beliefs are equally justified despite their difference in warrant “amounts to a serious concession from the internalist, however, since it devalues justification, as internalists conceive of it, detaching it from knowledge” (Wright Reference Wright2016b: 73, fn 10). In other words, Wright thinks that if we deny that justification is warrant, thereby also denying that justification, together with true belief, is sufficient for knowledge, justification appears to lose the epistemic value that we (intuitively) want to accord it. After all, why should we care more about having justified true beliefs than mere true beliefs if the former isn't sufficient for knowledge?

As far as I can see, there is only one reason why one might think that denying Wright's view of justification automatically devalues it, and it is as follows. If you are a monist about epistemic value, thinking that only knowledge is of intrinsic epistemic importance, then justification might appear to become trivial unless it is sufficient for turning true belief into knowledge. Then, and only then, does justification have instrumental epistemic value as a means to knowledge – the only epistemic property that is valuable in and of itself – or so it might be argued.Footnote ¹⁷

However, there are a couple of problems with this kind of objection. First, the internalist isn't committed to the view that the value of epistemic justification is exhausted by the fact that it is a means to knowledge. Alternatively, the internalist can argue that justification either has instrumental value insofar as it is means to satisfying some other (epistemic) property besides knowledge, or that it has value in and of itself. And, moreover, both these views can be found in the literature. Let me give a couple of examples. On the one hand, Declan Smithies (Reference Smithies, Henderson and Greco2015) supports the first kind of view and argues that justification has instrumental value insofar as it is means to having beliefs that are stable under rational reflection, and that being able to have beliefs that are stable under rational reflection is the sine qua non of being a person, which is of intrinsic value. On the other hand, Madison (Reference Madison2017) supports the second kind of view and argues, using Keith Lehrer and Stewart Cohen's (Reference Lehrer and Cohen1983) New Evil Demon scenario, that we have good reason to believe that justification is valuable in and of itself, for its own sake. So, in other words, there is no reason – at least not any that Wright provides us with – why the internalist should endorse the view that justification only has instrumental value and that this value is exhausted as a means to knowledge.

Second, another problem with the objection from lack of epistemic value is that it assumes that the internalist, by denying that justification is warrant, somehow “detaches” justification from knowledge (in a way that devalues it). But this, however, need not be the case. The proponent of TJ internalism can affirm that justification is connected with knowledge because it is a necessary condition of it (cf. Madison Reference Madison2016: 747–8). Indeed, not only is this the standard internalist view,Footnote ¹⁸ it also doesn't devalue justification. As we saw in the previous paragraph, one can maintain that justification is necessary for knowledge and also claim that it either is of instrumental value as a means to satisfying some other (epistemic) property besides knowledge, or that it is of intrinsic epistemic value. For these two reasons, Wright's second objection therefore fails to undermine TJ internalism as it relies on implausible or unmotivated assumptions.Footnote ¹⁹

5. THE OBJECTION FROM CIRCULAR TESTIMONY

The third objection Wright offers does, at least to my mind, pose a much bigger threat to TJ internalism. In a different paper, Wright (Reference Wright2016a) argues that there are scenarios involving circular testimony where the internalist is committed to saying that circular testimony, contrary to intuition, generates justification. And since the intuitions elicited by cases of circular testimony (sometimes) speak against TJ internalism, the argument from section 2 fails to provide sufficient support for it.

Testimonial chains can be circular. This happens whenever you have an epistemic agent a, who tells something to another agent b, who then tells that same (or a relevantly similar) thing to c, who then tells that same (or a relevantly similar) thing to … n, who then tells that same (or a relevantly similar) thing to a. Let's call this an instance of circular testimony or, more specifically, an n-sized circular testimonial chain. Now, Wright thinks there are cases of circular testimony that threaten TJ internalism. Consider the following scenario:

CIRCLE presents us with an instance of circular testimony – or a 4-sized circular testimonial chain – where Agatha hears from Stacy that Jesus College is on fire. However, according to Wright, since Agatha is responsible for both initiating and terminating the circle, intuitively, she does not receive any testimonial justification for her belief that the college is on fire. Although her belief presumably already is justified by her visual experience, the fact that Stacy tells her that the college is on fire does not further add to the justification of Agatha's belief.

Yet, Wright does not think that all cases of circular testimony fail to generate justification. There must, he thinks, be some other condition that together with the fact that Agatha both initiates and terminates the circle is sufficient for inhibiting the generation of testimonial justification. To indicate what this further condition is, he has us consider the following variation on the first scenario:

Intuitively, Wright thinks that Agatha does receive justification from Stacy's testimony in CIRCLE* – or at the very least he is open to the possibility. What differentiates the two scenarios and makes it the case that only the former kind of circular testimony fails to generate justification is that the listeners in CIRCLE unhesitatingly believe what they're told. In CIRCLE*, however, the listeners critically reflect on the plausibility of what they hear, which opens for the possibility that their testimonies can add to the justification of Agatha's belief. This is how Wright puts it:

According to Wright, all cases of circular testimony where the listeners unhesitatingly believe what they are told therefore fail to generate justification. Thus, CIRCLE, but not CIRCLE*, is analogous to the following case where a piece of information uncritically is passed along to an agent:

In both cases a source of information (Stacy's testimony in Circle and the screen in INSTRUMENTS) is dependent on another source (Agatha's perception in CIRCLE and the gauge in INSTRUMENTS), and uncritically passes the information to an epistemic agent. However, since any case of circular testimony where the listeners (or receivers of information) unhesitatingly (or uncritically) respond to what they are told (or informed about) fails to generate justification, neither Stacy's testimony nor the screen does anything for Agatha or Charlie's belief.

Now, the reason Wright thinks this is problematic for internalism is that if TJ internalism is true, then Agatha's belief in CIRCLE does receive justification from Stacy's testimony. Since Stacy's testimony adds to Agatha's internal reasons for thinking that Jesus College is on fire, it should provide testimonial justification to her belief in that proposition. However, intuitively, it does not. Since the listeners in CIRCLE unhesitatingly believe what they're told, Agatha cannot receive justification from Stacy's testimony.Footnote ²⁰, Footnote ²¹

I will respond by denying that the CIRCLE scenario makes it intuitively plausible that Agatha doesn't receive testimonial justification, instead of failing to receive (or increase) some other epistemic property. To see how exactly this response goes, consider the CIRCLE scenario again. If we evaluate Agatha's epistemic position at the end of the scenario, it is clear that there are several ways in which it is the same or worse than it was at the beginning of the scenario. For example, on the one hand, her belief that Jesus College is on fire is no more warranted after listening to Stacy's testimony. If Agatha's visual experience somehow fails to put her in a position to know that the school is on fire, then listening to Stacy's testimony doesn't all of a sudden put her in a position to know that it is. Moreover, on the other hand, her belief that Jesus College is on fire is no more entitled after listening to Stacy's testimony. Quite to the contrary, it might actually make it less entitled; the reason being that beliefs formed on the basis of visual experiences might actually be more reliable than beliefs formed on the basis of visual experiences and circular testimony where the listeners unhesitatingly believe what they hear.Footnote ²² Indeed, there appears to be several ways in which Agatha's epistemic position either stays the same or worsens in CIRCLE.

However, there is also a way in which her epistemic position appears to improve. After all, Stacy's testimony (despite its circular character) does provide Agatha with an (additional) internal reason for believing that Jesus College is on fire. And since there is nothing in the CIRCLE scenario that tells us otherwise, we can account for the presence of this reason by claiming that it adds to Agatha's justification. The proponent of TJ internalism is therefore free to say that the circular testimony in CIRCLE does provide Agatha's belief with testimonial justification, but that it fails to confer any warrant or entitlement upon it. Moreover, the same reply is also available in the INSTRUMENTS scenario. Clearly, the presence of the screen doesn't confer any warrant or entitlement upon Charlie's belief, even though it does contribute to its justification.

Wright, however, recognizes this response, but thinks that it fails because the intuitions that CIRCLE elicits primarily are about Agatha's epistemic position in general, and not just about justification. This is what he says:

Of course, Wright is correct when he claims that we do have certain intuitions about Agatha's epistemic position. But (1*) is not one of them. Let me elaborate.

First of all, most philosophers agree that Agatha's epistemic position changes when Stacy tells her that Jesus College is on fire; her testimony gives Agatha another internal reason for holding her belief. Wright can of course claim that Stacy's testimony doesn't change Agatha's epistemic position at all. However, Agatha plausibly comes to believe that a friend whom she considers trustworthy thinks that Jesus College is on fire when Stacy tells her that it is. Moreover, denying that this somehow changes Agatha's epistemic position would seem to involve a commitment to the view that Agatha's new belief cannot, in any sense, provide her with another reason to believe that the school is on fire. But this clearly seems to be false. Even though it might not provide her with an external or objective reason to hold that belief, it does provide her with an internal or subjective reason.Footnote ²³ So the question is whether or not this internal reason somehow improves her epistemic position. According to Wright, it doesn't. Moreover, this is just an intuition with which everyone should agree, or so he claims. The problem, however, is that, uncontroversially, there are certain internalist conditions that supervene upon one's internal reasons and that do improve one's epistemic position. For example, internalists and externalists generally agree that epistemic blamelessness (or excusability) is an internalist epistemic property.Footnote ^24, Footnote ²⁵ If, say, you are in a skeptical scenario where most or all of your beliefs about the external world are false, it can still be the case that those beliefs are blameless. If your internal reasons indicate that the world is different from how it really is, then you have an excuse which guarantees that beliefs properly based on those reasons are blameless – even though they might be radically unreliable. What's more, all else being equal, having blameless beliefs does constitute an epistemic improvement over having blameworthy beliefs.Footnote ²⁶ Indeed, a common strategy used by epistemic externalists to argue that intuitions about Lehrer and Cohen's (Reference Lehrer and Cohen1983) New Evil Demon Scenario fail to support internalism is to explain our dispositions to positively evaluate the victim's beliefs by saying that they are blameless but unjustified.Footnote ²⁷ So, in other words, there are internalist epistemic properties that do improve one's epistemic position, blamelessness being a case in point. And given that Stacy's testimony provides Agatha with another internal reason for believing that the school is on fire, Agatha's belief does become blameless to an even greater degree, thereby improving her epistemic position. Hence, (1*) is false and the motivation for (1) undermined.

In sum, my response to the objection from circular testimony is that cases like CIRCLE and INSTRUMENTS don't reveal anything special about testimonial justification, rather than some other epistemic property. The internalist, in other words, is free to characterize Agatha as receiving testimonial justification, while failing to receive any entitlement or warrant. Moreover, as we've seen, Wright's counterargument that

1. 1. Agatha's epistemic position doesn't improve in the CIRCLE scenario.

2. 2. If Agatha's epistemic position doesn't improve in the CIRCLE scenario, then she doesn't receive any testimonial justification.

3. 3. Therefore, Agatha's doesn't receive any testimonial justification.

fails since the first premise is false. Intuitively, there are internalist epistemic conditions, like blamelessness, that do improve Agatha's epistemic position. And given that Wright's third objection against the argument from section 2 doesn't succeed, TJ internalism remains well-motivated.

6. WRIGHT'S “HALFWAY EXTERNALISM”

Having offered his objection from circular testimony against TJ internalism, Wright ends his (Reference Wright2016a) paper by trying to differentiate his views from the wholesale externalism of Jennifer Lackey. Lackey (Reference Lackey2008) argues against TJ internalismFootnote ²⁸ by presenting a scenario purporting to elicit intuitions to the effect that reliable or truth-conducive testimony is a necessary condition for testimonial justification.Footnote ²⁹ Now, if her argument is sound, then it follows that a listener's internal reasons alone never are sufficient for justifying belief in a speaker's testimony; there is, as she points out, an additional “speaker-condition” on testimonial justification (Lackey Reference Lackey2008: 150).Footnote ³⁰ This, however, is highly problematic according to Wright. If Lackey is correct, then the internalist story is simply false: having internal reasons are never sufficient for having testimonial justification. But this, he thinks, amounts to radical skepticism when it comes to the epistemic importance of internal reasons. Instead, Wright claims that TJ internalism tells a true story about testimonial justification when it comes to certain cases, but that it isn't the full story:

So, in other words, Wright thinks (i) that Lackey's wholesale externalism commits her to skepticism about the epistemic importance of internal reasons, and (ii) that we therefore should adopt some sort of “halfway externalism,” according to which a hearer's internal reasons sometimes, but not always, are sufficient for testimonial justification.

However, there are a couple of reasons why these views are problematic. First, Lackey's claim that internal reasons aren't sufficient for testimonial justification doesn't commit her to skepticism about the epistemic importance of such reasons since it can still be the case that they are necessary for testimonial justification or some other epistemic property. For example, she can argue that internal reasons are a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for having testimonially justified beliefs. In that case, internal reasons play a key role in avoiding skepticism. In addition, just because one thinks that a certain set of states (like one's internal reasons) is insufficient for producing certain effects (like a change in one's testimonial justification), it doesn't follow that that set of states is insufficient for producing any relevant effect (like a change in blamelessness). Thus, Wright's criticism of Lackey and her externalist views undermines nothing other than a strawman.

Second, claiming that TJ internalism is correct insofar as internal reasons sometimes are sufficient for testimonial justification doesn't only undermine Lackey's view, but also appears to undermine Wright's own “halfway externalism.” To see why this is so, consider the following passage from the end of his paper:

What Wright here says is that unless we claim that wholesale externalism (which really just is regular externalism) is true, then it is hard to see why the listener's belief in Lackey's scenario, or any other (relevantly similar) scenario, should fail to receive testimonial justification from his internal reasons.Footnote ³¹ Or, in other words, if we either adopt TJ internalism or Wright's own “halfway externalism,” then none of the scenarios we can come up with will appear to undermine the view that the listener's internal reasons in that scenario are sufficient for testimonial justification. However, if there are no such cases – i.e., no counterexamples – then not only does that undermine Wright's own objections against the internalist, it also seems to constitute an argument in favor of TJ internalism. Let me be more precise.

First, if there are no counterexamples to TJ internalism, then neither his scenario in the (Reference Wright2016b) paper nor the CIRCLE scenario can provide the intuitive basis for an argument against it. And, as we've seen above, neither of those scenarios appears to provide such a basis (or so I have argued). Second, if TJ internalism tells a true story about the determinants of testimonial justification, and there aren't any counterexamples, then we have good reason to believe that it also is the whole story. The different (internalist or externalist) theories of justification on the market all rely, for their support, on intuitions elicited by various scenarios. Moreover, if only one of these theories – namely, TJ internalism – plausibly is able to account for all of these intuitions, then, unless there are other theoretical considerations that weigh heavier than the intuitions and that count against it, that theory remains well-motivated. For these reasons, I conclude that Wright's “halfway externalism” doesn't constitute a theoretically viable position, but rather must collapse into wholesale externalism or internalism about testimonial justification.