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According to the received view, externalist grounds or reasons need not be introspectively accessible. Roughly speaking, from an externalist point of view, a belief will be epistemically justified, iff it is based upon facts that make its truth objectively highly likely. This condition can be satisfied, even if the epistemic agent does not have actual or potential awareness of the justifying facts. No inner perspective on the belief-forming mechanism and its truth-ratio is needed for a belief to be justified. In my view, this is not the whole story. While I agree that introspective access to our reasons is a defining feature of justification for the access internalist, not the externalist, I will argue that even for the latter, some kind of introspective access is an epistemic desideratum. Yet, even given that I am right, the desirable might not be achievable for us. Recent psychological research suggests that we do not dispose of reliable introspection into the sources of our own beliefs. This seems to undermine the claim that we can introspectively know about the reasons upon which our beliefs are based. In this paper I will therefore additionally show why these results do not threaten the kind of introspective access desirable from an externalist point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The title of GAP.10, "Plurality in Philosophy and Beyond", reflects the recent (re)appraisal of plurality and diversity in analytic philosophy. With its more than 300 talks, poster presentations, colloquia, and symposia, GAP.10 set an impressive example of how contemporary analytic philosophy might handle the plurality in philosophy and beyond in its actual philosophical practice. The four papers in the present special issue of I Erkenntnis i are based on the four keynote lectures of GAP.10 - and they, too, reflect the plurality of topics and approaches in present analytic philosophy. [Extracted from the article]

The article introduces the issue which includes papers taken from the conference "First Person Authority: Its Nature, Source, Limits, and Use," that was held from September 10-13, 2007 at the University of Duisburg-Essen, and discusses subjects such as first person authority, self-knowledge, and externalism.