  One may well wonder why the thesis that the concept of epistemic justification is deontological has any connection to internalism. That the justification of a belief is a matter of living up to one's intellectual duties, after all, has no obvious bearing on accessibility to the justifiers for any given belief, nor to any special view as to the nature of those justifiers, such as may be given in mentalism. This question is addressed more fully below. At this point what we can say is that the deontological concept of justification has some internalist component because it seems related to a kind of control over beliefs that the epistemic agent may be thought to have. If one is intellectually obligated to take on a belief given one's evidence, then one must be capable of doing so. This point is underwritten by the general principle that Ought implies Can, i.e., one has an obligation to do action A only if one can do A. If one has the ability to take on new beliefs given one's evidence, then one has some form of control over belief formation, a control that is lodged in the epistemic agent. This is the sense of “internal” ingredient in the deontological conception of justification, and it is this that makes that concept a species of epistemic internalism.