Access internalism and understanding

According to the access internalist core claim, my evidence contributes to my justification because I represent my evidential situation. The representation of the evidential situation is understood as based not on empirical, but rather introspective grounds. The standard formulation of access internalism goes further, grounding access to evidence in reflective knowledge of one’s evidential situation. This paper aims to secure the plausibility of the core claim of access internalism by proposing the alternative to the knowledge view in terms of objectual understanding. In Sect. 2, I separate the core claim of access internalism from its formulation in terms of knowledge. In Sect. 3, I defend the understanding view by explaining the psychological features of understanding that align with the intuition identified in Sect. 2. In Sects. 4 and 5, I refine the proposal by addressing a potential objection concerning sufficiency and necessity of understanding for access, respectively. In Sect. 6, I show how the understanding view avoids the main epistemological difficulty facing the knowledge view. Section 7 concludes.