Online research in philosophy

According to reliabilists about epistemic justification, what makes a belief epistemically justified is that it was produced by a reliable process of belief-formation. Earl Conee and Richard Feldman have forcefully presented a problem for such reliabilism, "the generality problem."? The generality problem arises once we realize that the notion of reliability applies straightforwardly only to types of process--for only types of process are repeatable entities which can produce true or false beliefs in each of their instances. Moreover, any token process will be an instance of indefinitely many types of process. Which of these types must be reliable for my belief to be justified, according to reliabilism? That question, generalized to cover every case of belief-formation, is the generality problem for reliabilism. In this paper I propose a solution to the generality problem. The solution makes use of the basing relation, and so, given that it isn't clear how to characterize that relation, it might be thought to replace one problem with another. I argue that, however difficult it is to characterize the basing relation, every adequate epistemological theory must make use of it implicitly or explicitly. Therefore, it is perfectly legitimate to appeal to the basing relation in solving a problem for an epistemological theory.

In this article I examine several issues concerning reliabilism and deflationism. I critique Alvin Goldman's account of the key differences between correspondence and deflationary theories and his claim that reliabilism can be combined only with those truth theories that maintain a commitment to truthmakers. I then consider how reliability could be analysed from a deflationary perspective and show that deflationism is compatible with reliabilism. I close with a discussion of whether a deflationary theory of knowledge is possible.

Reliabilism about epistemic justification – thethesis that what makes a belief epistemicallyjustified is that it was produced by a reliableprocess of belief-formation – must face twoproblems. First, what has been called ``the newevil demon problem'', which arises from the ideathat the beliefs of victims of an evil demonare as justified as our own beliefs, althoughthey are not – the objector claims – reliablyproduced. And second, the problem of diagnosingwhy skepticism is so appealing despite beingfalse. I present a special version ofreliabilism, ``indexical reliabilism'', based ontwo-dimensional semantics, and show how it cansolve both problems.

In recent years, epistemologists have become increasingly impressed with reliabilist theories of justification. 1 Reliabilism is often formulated as the claim that a belief is justified 2 just in case it is a reliable belief; however, this formulation can be somewhat misleading. There is a sense in which a set of beliefs can be reliable, just as a certain history or testimony can be reliable: what one means is that a certain set of propositions is highly accurate, has mostly true members, or is not wrong in any important way. Reliabilists, though, do not just want to say that a belief is justified just in case it is a member of a type with mostly true members, i.e., just in case it is probably true; they also want to appeal to the notion of reliability in that sense in which we say that persons, processes, proce­dures, tests, and experiments are reliable. Reliabilism is a view both about the reliability of beliefs and about the reliability of the person who has the belief or the procedure that is responsible for the belief.

This paper discusses two versions of reliabilism: modal and probabilistic reliabilism. Modal reliabilism faces the problem of the missing closeness metric for possible worlds while probalistic reliabilism faces the problem of the relevant reference class. Despite the severity of these problems, reliabilism is still very plausible (also for independent reasons). I propose to stick with reliabilism, propose a contextualist (or, alternatively, harmlessly relativist) solution to the above problems and suggest that probabilistic reliabilism has the advantage over modal reliabilism.

Strategic Reliabilism is a framework that yields relative epistemic evaluations of belief-producing cognitive processes. It is a theory of cognitive excellence, or more colloquially, a theory of reasoning excellence (where 'reasoning' is understood very broadly as any sort of cognitive process for coming to judgments or beliefs). First introduced in our book, Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment (henceforth EPHJ), the basic idea behind SR is that epistemically excellent reasoning is efficient reasoning that leads in a robustly reliable fashion to significant, true beliefs. It differs from most contemporary epistemological theories in two ways. First, it is not a theory of justification or knowledge – a theory of epistemically worthy belief. Strategic Reliabilism is a theory of epistemically worthy ways of forming beliefs. And second, Strategic Reliabilism does not attempt to account for an epistemological property that is assumed to be faithfully reflected in the epistemic judgments and intuitions of philosophers. If SR makes recommendations that accord with our reflective epistemic judgments and intuitions, great. If not, then so much the worse for our reflective epistemic judgments and intuitions.

In this paper I present and defend a theory of epistemic justification that combines two competing approaches in contemporary epistemology: reliabilism and evidentialism. Evidentialist reliabilism, as I will call the view, incorporates the best features of reliabilism and evidentialism, while at the same time avoiding their most serious problems. Moreover, evidentialist reliabilism relies on its evidentialist features to overcome some of the problems of reliabilism, and on its reliabilist features to overcome some of the problems of evidentialism. It is, thus, not a chimera, but a well motivated hybrid view. Roughly speaking, reliabilism is the view that all that matters for the justification of a belief is that the belief be produced by a mechanism that tends to produce true beliefs. This pure form of reliabilism must face several problems. Perhaps the most serious problem is that reliabilism seems to imply that a “blind” reliable mechanism—that is, a mechanism that, as a matter of fact, is sensitive to the external environment, but that produces beliefs without the benefit of any conscious reflection, in the subject, of this sensitivity—is good enough to produce justification. According to evidentialism, on the other hand, all that matters for justification is fitness with evidence. Without an independent account of fitness, however, evidentialism amounts to little more than a statement of our pre-theoretic judgments about what beliefs are justified. Reliability without evidence is blind, evidence without reliability is empty. In sections 2 and 3 I present evidentialism and reliabilism, together with some of the problems that these theories must face. In sections 4 through 7 I develop evidentialist reliabilism and explain how it avoids those problems. I then consider, in section 8, some objections to evidentialist reliabilism, and argue that they can be satisfactorily answered. Lastly, in section 9 I specify the senses in which evidentialist reliabilism is an internalist theory and the senses in which it is an externalist theory..

Reliabilism is a general approach to epistemology that emphasizes the truth conduciveness of a belief forming process, method, or other epistemologically relevant factor. The reliability theme appears both in theories of knowledge and theories of justification. ‘Reliabilism’ is sometimes used broadly to refer to any theory of knowledge or justification that emphasizes truth getting or truth indicating properties. These include theories originally proposed under different labels, such as ‘tracking’ theories. More commonly, ‘reliabilism’ is used narrowly to refer to process reliabilism about justification. This entry discusses reliabilism in both broad and narrow senses but concentrates on reliability theories of justified belief, especially process reliabilism.

Reliabilism has come under recent attack for its alleged inability to account for the value we typically ascribe to knowledge. It is charged that a reliably-produced true belief has no more value than does the true belief alone. I reply to these charges on behalf of reliabilism; not because I think reliabilism is the correct theory of knowledge, but rather because being reliably-produced does add value of a sort to true beliefs. The added value stems from the fact that a reliably-held belief is non-accidental in a particular way. While it is widely acknowledged that accidentally true beliefs cannot count as knowledge, it is rarely questioned why this should be so. An answer to this question emerges from the discussion of the value of reliability; an answer that holds interesting implications for the value and nature of knowledge.

The New Evil Demon Problem is supposed to show that straightforward versions of reliabilism are false: reliability is not necessary for justification after all. I argue that it does no such thing. The reliabilist can count a number of beliefs as justified even in demon worlds, others as unjustified but having positive epistemic status nonetheless. The remaining beliefs---primarily perceptual beliefs---are not, on further reflection, intuitively justified after all. The reliabilist is right to count these beliefs as unjustified in demon worlds, and it is a challenge for the internalist to be able to do so as well.