ABSTRACT
Reliabilism can go some way to capturing the idea that knowledge involves a cognitive success that is creditable to the agent. Like an epistemic virtue, a cognitive faculty enables undergraduates to reliably form true beliefs. One way of staying within the epistemic internalist model while offering a virtue epistemology is to hold that in order to know, such as a chicken-sexing faculty. A chicken-sexer is someone who, by being raised around chickens, has acquired a highly reliable trait which enables them to distinguish between male and female chicks. Chicken-sexers tend to have false beliefs about how they are doing what they do because they tend to suppose that they are distinguishing the chicks on the basis of what they can see and touch. The dispute over the chicken-sexer example is a manifestation of the debate between epistemic externalists and epistemic internalists. Philosophers have a distinction emerging between epistemic externalist versions of virtue epistemology and epistemic internalist versions of virtue epistemology.
