Alston's Concept of Justification

The controversy between "internalism" and "externalism" is one of the most heated in epistemology. At stake is what confers justification (or warrant) or on what converts true belief into knowledge. Although most epistemologists are epistemic internalists or externalists, a few purport to reconcile these apparently disparate epistemic positions. Most notable of these synthesizers is William Alston. He argues that to be justified in believing that p is for that belief to be based on some accessible psychological state (internalism) that is a reliable indicator of the truth of p (externalism), and for this justification not to be overridden by anything else the subject experiences or believes (internalism). In this paper, I argue that although a recent criticism of Plantinga's counts against Alston's theory of justification, his theory can be modified so as to accommodate this criticism without at the same time abandoning internalism, as Plantinga recommends