Met aknowledge: Undefeated justification

Internalism and externalism are both false. What is needed to convert true belief into knowledge is the appropriate blend of subjective and objective factors to yield the appropriate sort of connection between mind and the world. The sort of knowledge explicated is calledmetaknowledge and is knowledge that involves the evaluation of incoming information in terms of a background system. It is proposed that knowledge is equivalent to undefeated justification which is justification on the basis of every system that eliminates or corrects any error in what a person accepts. The system of such system is called the ultrasystem of the person. This account appeals both to internal factors and external factors and involves appeal to both normative requirements and empirical constraints. Justification is defined in terms of a comparative notion of rationality adapted from Chisholm.Research for this paper was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. I am indebted to the members of the Summer Institute in the Theory of Knowledge, Boulder, Colorado, 1986, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities under the auspices of the Council for Philosophical Studies for helpful criticism of the ideas contained in this paper as well as to Scott Sturgeon, Peter Klein, Steven Luper-Foy and to T. Kuys for a positive proposal cited below.