try to explain knowledge or justification in terms of the
truth-conduciveness of the process by which an agent forms a true
belief. Process reliabilism is the most common type of reliabilism.
The simplest form of process reliabilism regarding knowledge of some
proposition p implies that agent S knows that p if and only if S
believes that p, and p is true, and S's belief that p is formed by a
reliable process. A truth-conducive or reliable process is sometimes
described as a belief-forming process that produces either mostly true
beliefs or a high ratio of true to false beliefs. Process reliabilism
regarding justification, rather than knowledge, says that S's belief
that p is justified if and only if S's belief that p is formed by a
reliable process. This article discusses process reliabilism,
including its background, motivations, and well-known problems.
Although the article primarily emphasizes justification, it also
discusses knowledge, followed by brief descriptions of other versions
of reliabilism such as proper function theory, agent and virtue
reliabilism, and tracking theories.
1. Background and Anti-Luck Predecessors of Process Reliabilism
1a. Brief Background
The nature of the knowledge-constituting link between truth and belief
is a principal issue in epistemology. Nearly all philosophers accept
that a person, S, knows that p (where p is a proposition), only if S
believes that p and p is true. But true belief alone is insufficient
for knowledge because S may believe that p without adequate or perhaps
any grounds or evidence. If, for example, S believes that p merely
because he or she guesses that p, then the connection between S's
belief that p and the truth that p is too flimsy to count as
knowledge. S might just as easily have guessed that not-p and thus
have been wrong.
Dating back to Plato's Theaetetus, philosophical tradition held that
knowledge is justified true belief (although it is debatable whether
Plato's 'logos', often translated simply as account, corresponds to
the contemporary idea of justification, while Plato himself found the
true belief with logos explication of knowledge wanting). Although
the nature of justification is a matter of considerable debate, a
central idea is that when a belief is justified it is far likelier to
be true than when it is not justified. Reliabilists put this notion
of truth-conduciveness front-and-center in their accounts of
justification and knowledge.
F.P. Ramsey (1931) is often credited with the first articulation of a
reliabilist account of knowledge. He claimed that knowledge is true
belief that is certain and obtained by a reliable process. That idea
lay more-or-less dormant until the 1960s, when reliabilist theories
emerged in earnest. A crucial development occurred when Edmund
Gettier (1963) demonstrated that even justified true belief is
insufficient for knowledge. The diagnosis of the counterexamples
Gettier provided is that an agent can obtain true beliefs with very
solid grounds and yet still be wrong. It is only by luck or
coincidence that the agent's source of justification leads to true
belief. That is, the agent's true belief is infected by
knowledge-precluding "epistemic luck." It is difficult to say just how
much Gettier's paper motivated reliabilist accounts of justification
and knowledge, especially since, as discussed below, process
reliabilism regarding justification is somewhat detached from concerns
about epistemic luck. It is nonetheless clear that Gettier's
counterexamples led to fresh thinking about the knowledge-constituting
link between belief and truth, and that process reliabilism emerged as
a theory-type from some of the responses to Gettier. This section
briefly addresses precursors to process reliabilism that aim to
eliminate luck, with the aim of giving a partial, reconstructed
genealogy of process reliabilism. Section 5 discusses other versions
of reliabilism that explicitly address epistemic luck.
1b. Anti-Luck Predecessors of Process Reliabilism
Alvin Goldman is perhaps the most influential proponent of
reliabilism. Goldman (1967) responded to Gettier by arguing that
knowledge is true belief caused in an appropriate way. Goldman left
the notion of "appropriate" open-ended, awaiting scientific discovery
of causal mechanisms that reliably yield true belief. To see how
Goldman's causal theory attempts to eliminate epistemic luck, consider
the following Gettier counterexample. Smith has very good evidence
that Jones owns a Ford, but has no idea of the whereabouts of his
friend, Brown. Smith forms the belief, via competent deduction from
the justified premise that Jones owns a Ford, that either Jones owns a
Ford or Brown is in Barcelona. It turns out that Jones does not own a
Ford—perhaps Jones showed Smith a fake title while giving Smith a ride
home in the Ford—but Brown is, by coincidence, in Barcelona. Smith's
disjunctive belief is true and justified, but clearly not a case of
knowledge. Goldman's causal theory correctly diagnoses this case,
because the specific fact that makes Smith's disjunctive belief
true—that Brown is in Barcelona—is not a causal antecedent of Smith's
belief. Rather, Smith believes what he does because he has evidence
that Jones owns a Ford.
Goldman recognized that his causal theory still permitted
knowledge-precluding epistemic luck (Goldman, 1976). A crucial
counterexample to the causal theory (and to many others) is the famous
barn facsimile case. Driving through the countryside, Henry points
out a barn to his son, saying, "That's a barn." It so happens that
all the other "barns" in the area are mere façades meant to look
exactly like barns from the road. Does Henry know that the ostended
object is a barn? On Goldman's causal theory, the answer is "yes,"
since perception of the actual barn causes Henry to believe that it is
a barn. But Henry just got lucky. He could very easily have pointed
to a façade and formed the false belief that it is a barn, and
therefore Henry does not know that the object he pointed to is a barn.
Although the fake barn example does not fit the precise mold of
Gettier's cases, it is nonetheless a case of epistemic luck, whose
common feature is that the agent has a true belief that could easily
have been false—the link between belief and truth is too weak to
constitute knowledge. To shore up that link, Goldman (1976)
introduced his discrimination account of perceptual knowledge.
Goldman says, "S has perceptual knowledge if and only if not only does
his perceptual mechanism produce true belief, but there are no
relevant counterfactual situations in which the same belief would be
produced via an equivalent percept and in which the belief would be
false" (Goldman 1976, 786). In the fake barns case, because the
countryside is filled with barn façades that Henry cannot distinguish
from actual barns, there is a relevant counterfactual situation where
what Henry sees matches his perception of the real barn, leading him
to believe falsely that he sees a barn. Because Henry's belief
thereby fails to satisfy Goldman's discrimination requirement, Henry
does not know that what he sees is a barn.
Goldman's discrimination theory makes reference to the notion of a
relevant alternative, which is now a staple of epistemological
theorizing. Usually, when a theorist exploits the idea of relevant
alternatives, it signals a commitment to fallibilism. In many cases,
an agent knows that p because she can distinguish the state of affairs
where p is true from possibilities where p is false—she can "rule out"
those other possibilities. For example, S knows the cat is on the mat
when she sees that it is, because if the cat were not on the mat she
would see that it is not and would not believe that the cat is on the
mat. But S cannot and, on many relevant alternatives accounts, need
not rule out all logical counter-possibilities, such as a scenario
where S is a brain-in-a-vat (BIV), having her experiences "fed" to her
by a mad scientist through electrodes connected to the brain, in which
case all her beliefs about the external world would be false. S knows
(says the fallibilist) but she is not infallible.
A full discussion of the myriad ways in which philosophers construe
relevant alternatives is beyond the scope of this article. On
Goldman's discrimination account, an alternative is relevant if it is
a situation that occurs in a nearby possible world. Though appeals to
possible worlds are controversial—which worlds are possible? How do
we know which are nearby and which are distant?—intuitively, a
possible world where the cat is not on the mat but is on her
bird-watching perch is closer to the actual world than one where S is
a BIV having cat-on-the-mat images fed directly to her brain. This
may sound question-begging against the skeptic who insists that, for
all S knows, the actual world could be one where S is a BIV, and so S
cannot achieve any empirical knowledge because she cannot rule out
that possibility. However, it is uncontroversial that S knows that p
only if p is true. So when analyzing 'S knows that p'—that is, when
explicating the conditions in which 'S knows that p' is true—the
actual world is one where p is true; where, for example, the cat is on
the mat. (More on the distinction between formulating necessary and
sufficient conditions for 'S knows that p' and arguing that human
agents in fact have knowledge, below.) Given that it is true that the
cat is on the mat, the possibility that the cat is on her perch is far
closer to the actual world than the possibility that there are no
cats, mats or perches and that S is just a BIV being fed such images.
To this point, there has been little discussion of process
reliabilism. But the preceding description of Goldman's early views
is useful because it provides the background to his well-known
reliabilist theory of justification. In addition, when the previous
discussion is coupled with the following section on reliabilism
regarding justification, a broader picture of the basic theoretical
commitments of process reliabilism emerges. The following section
looks first at process reliabilism (2a) and then, after canvassing
some of its unresolved issues (2b), aims to unpack some of its basic
theoretical commitments (2c). Section 5 of this article discusses
tracking theories, often seen as versions of reliabilism that are
close in spirit to, and aim to eliminate the kind of epistemic luck
revealed in, Goldman's discrimination account.
2. Process Reliabilist Theories of Justification and Knowledge
Goldman's process reliabilism is a descendant of his earlier causal
and discrimination accounts of knowledge, but constitutes a major
change of focus. For one thing, neither of the earlier theories is
explicitly intended as an account of epistemic justification, whereas
providing such an account is a central project of Goldman's process
reliabilism. For another, the requisite knowledge-constituting link
between belief and truth, whether or not conceived of as a form of
justification, is radically reconstrued. The causal account asks
whether the specific cause of a true belief is sufficient for
knowledge. The discrimination account asks whether there are relevant
counterfactual situations in which the percept upon which the a given
true belief is based would lead S to form a false belief, in which
case S does not know that p in the actual case. Because both accounts
focus on specific features of a particular belief , they are versions
of local reliabilism. Process reliabilism, by contrast, asks whether
the general belief-forming process by which S formed the belief that p
would produce a high ratio of true beliefs to false beliefs. As with
the causal and discrimination accounts, the central question is
whether the belief at issue is reliably formed. But here the answer
is determined not by the belief's unique causal ancestry, or by the
nature of the specific percept upon which the belief is based, but by
appeal to the truth-conduciveness of the general cognitive process by
which it was formed. This is sometimes called global reliabilism. It
should be noted, however, that Goldman gestures in the direction of
process reliabilism, of a global account, in his discrimination paper
when he says: "a cognitive mechanism or process is reliable if it not
only produces true beliefs in actual situations, but would produce
true beliefs…in relevant counterfactual situations" (1976, 771).
2a. Goldman's "What Is Justified Belief?"
Goldman proposed an account of process (or global) reliabilist
justification in "What Is Justified Belief?" (1979). In the causal and
discrimination accounts discussed above, Goldman demurred from
describing the knowledge-constituting link between belief and truth as
justification. In summarizing his discrimination theory, Goldman
said, "If one wishes, one can so employ the term 'justification'
[such] that belief causation of [the discriminatory] kind counts as
justification. In this sense, of course, my theory does require
justification. But this is entirely different from the sort of
justification demanded by Cartesianism" (1979, 790). At least since
Descartes, philosophers have traditionally thought of justification
internalistically, such that S's belief is justified only if S is in a
position to produce reasons or evidence to support her belief.
Goldman balked at the claim that he was offering a theory of
justification because his theories do not require justification as
traditionally conceived. On the other hand, what one calls
"justification" is a matter of debate, so it is not implausible to
think of any theory aiming to explicate the knowledge-constituting
link between truth and belief as a theory of justification. If,
however, one insists that the very idea of justification demands being
in a position to offer grounds for belief, one will refrain from
calling Goldman's causal and discrimination accounts theories of
justification. That leaves open the possibility that one could accept
some version of a causal or discrimination account of the belief-truth
link as a theory of knowledge, and simply deny that knowledge requires
justification. (See Kornblith (2008). Internalists about knowledge
will still be unsatisfied, as they will demand that knowledge itself
requires being in a position to offer grounds for belief. An early
and influential version of reliabilism about knowledge is David
Armstrong's Belief, Truth and Knowledge.)
The main point of contention here revolves around how one understands
the word "justification". The term connotes having good reasons or
even the act of giving good reasons. Thus it is not surprising that
many philosophers would reject a theory of justification that did not
require an agent at least to be able to give reasons for her belief.
But if one thinks of epistemic justification as whatever sufficiently
ties an agent's belief to the truth, externalist accounts like
Goldman's will count as theories of justification. The debate about
justification is why some reliabilists, local and/or global, eschew
justification altogether, aiming to directly explicate "knowledge" as
true belief with an appropriate link between belief and truth. These
are reliabilist theories of knowledge as opposed to accounts of
justification.
(The preceding discussion may seem to suggest that debates about
justification are merely terminological, based solely on whether the
term "justified" is applicable to a belief when the agent lacks
cognitive access to the factors that tie her belief to the truth.
That is, perhaps, too simplistic. See, for example, Bergmann's
Justification Without Awareness for an extended study and defense of
externalism that directly engages internalist arguments and
positions.)
Goldman (1979) sets out to provide substantive conditions for when a
belief is justified (hence this version is explicitly a reliabilist
theory of justification as a necessary condition for knowledge). Now,
"justified" is both an epistemic and an evaluative term, and
presumably evaluative because epistemic. If knowledge is justified
true belief, the only epistemic constituent of knowledge is
justification. Belief is a psychological notion, and truth is a
metaphysical or semantic— at any rate not epistemic— concept. In
addition, the concepts of belief and truth are not evaluative—to
believe that p is by itself neither good nor bad, and the truth by
itself is neither good nor bad. (One might think, though, that true
belief (or having a true belief) is good. But as we have seen, an
agent can acquire a true belief in all kinds of bad ways—guessing,
wishful thinking, hasty generalization, and the like. There may of
course be some instrumental value in having a true belief through some
such means—it may help the agent achieve some end—but acquiring a true
belief in some such deficient way warrants a negative appraisal of the
agent's belief. In addition, even if it makes sense to say that true
belief is good, it does not follow that truth or belief themselves
are good; thus of the three constituents of knowledge, only
'justification' is by itself an evaluative term, and it is also the
only epistemic one.)
Why must a substantive (or illuminating) account of justification
eschew epistemic-cum-evaluative terms? Consider a couple rudimentary
alternatives. 1) A belief that p is justified for an agent S if and
only if S has good reasons to believe that p. 2) A belief that p is
justified for an agent S if and only if S has solid evidence that p.
In both cases there is an obvious next question: Q1) What are good
reasons? Q2) What is solid evidence? Because the notions of "good
reasons" and "solid evidence" are similarly evaluative, they do not
cast much light on the epistemic and evaluative concept of
justification. Goldman canvasses several possible theories of
justification to show that, when construed as free of epistemic terms,
they do not plausibly explicate the notion of justification, and when
construed as containing epistemic terms, they leave open the central
questions about justification, as seen in our two questions above.
Goldman diagnoses the failure of putative theories or analyses of
justification that are properly cashed out in non-epistemic terms.
Though he does not use this terminology (in this paper, but see
Goldman (2008)), it will be helpful to introduce the distinct concepts
of propositional and doxastic justification. Suppose we have an
analysis of justification which says that a belief that p is justified
for S if and only if (some condition) x obtains. We can then say that
a proposition p is justified for S if and only if, whether or not S
believes that p, x obtains. Here, S may not believe that p but may be
considering whether p. Now suppose that S does believe that p. Then,
S is doxastically justified in believing that p if and only if p is
propositionally justified for S and S believes that p because x
obtains. Suppose, for example, that Jones sees a blue jay in her back
yard and is thus justified in believing there is a blue jay in the
back yard. The existence of a blue jay in the back yard entails that
there is at least one animal in the back yard. Whether or not Jones
draws that inference, the proposition that there is at least one
animal in the back yard is propositionally justified for Jones. Now
suppose Jones believes that there is at least one animal in the back
yard. Is that belief doxastically justified? Not if Jones believes
it because a notorious liar asserted it. That there exists
propositional justification for an agent does not entail that the
agent is doxastically justified in believing the proposition.
Goldman's insight is that doxastic justification requires that the
belief has an appropriate cause, and he goes on to characterize
"appropriate cause" as having been produced by a reliable
belief-forming process— that is, a process that produces mostly true
beliefs or a high ratio of true to false beliefs. Guessing, wishful
thinking, and hasty generalization are unreliable, whereas believing
on the basis of a distinct memory, attentive viewing, or valid
deduction is reliable.
Philosophers sometimes use other terminology to draw a distinction
similar to the one between propositional and doxastic justification.
Feldman and Conee (1985) distinguish justification from
"well-foundedness", where the latter requires not only that the agent
have (propositional) justification, but also that the agent's belief
is based on that justification. Others (for example, Moser (1989))
employ the notion of a founding relation to distinguish between an
agent's (merely) having a reason to believe and an agent's believing
because of that reason. Knowledge requires doxastic justification, or
well-founded belief, or belief based on reasons or formed on the basis
of a reliable process.
Goldman also distinguishes between basic beliefs and non-basic
beliefs. Basic beliefs are not justified by reference to other
beliefs, whereas non-basic beliefs are so justified. Basic beliefs
are justified if and only if they result from (are causal outputs of)
an unconditionally reliable process—a process none of whose inputs
consist of other beliefs (perceptual beliefs are plausible candidates
here). Non-basic beliefs are justified if and only if they result
from a belief-dependent process that is conditionally reliable— that
is, a process whose inputs consist partially of other beliefs and
which, given that the inputs are true, produces beliefs that are
likely to be true. Memory, which is based on previously formed
beliefs, induction on a large and varied base, and deduction might be
considered reliable belief-dependent processes.
Because basic beliefs do not have other beliefs as sources of
justification, they invite no regress of reasons or justification.
The traditional internalist who insists that justification requires
that the agent be in a position to give reasons in support of her
belief encounters trouble here. Where does the justification end? If
an agent offers her belief that q in support of her belief that p, the
obvious question is: Why believe that q? If the answer is, "because
r"', a potential regress threatens. It may be infinite, and one might
wonder whether an embodied human agent can make use of such an
infinite chain to justify her beliefs, or whether such a regress is
vicious. (For a defense of infinitism, see Klein (1999).)
Alternatively, the chain of justification might go round in a circle,
where no single belief is independently justified, which raises the
concern that the circle is vicious. Toy version: S believes that p on
the basis of q, q on the basis of r, and r on the basis of p. Third,
all of one's beliefs might be deemed justified because they properly
cohere in the sense that they are interdependent and mutually
supporting. But one can have interdependent and mutually supporting
beliefs all of which are false. Whatever else justification is, we
noted above that a common thread in epistemological discussions is
that a justified belief is more likely to be true than one that is not
justified, whereas coherence is compatible with one's having all false
beliefs. The reliabilist externalist simply opts out of the
requirement that reasons are reflectively accessible to the agent by
identifying justified beliefs with those that are the outputs of
reliable processes, whether or not the process itself includes other
beliefs. If it does not, then the process is belief-independent and
the beliefs produced by it are basic. Put differently, reliabilism
makes plausible a form of structural foundationalism which stops the
regress of justification, whereas it is difficult for the internalist
to cite regress-stopping basic beliefs that are justified but not by
other beliefs.
BonJour (1985, chapter 2) presents a master argument against
foundationalism in general, and then (chapter 4) presents a dilemma
faced by internalist foundationalists who appeal to "the given" as
foundational. The latter goes something like this. If the given, as
what constitutes the justificatory foundation, itself has
propositional content, then for that reason it may provide rational
justification for the beliefs based on it, but then one wants to know
how the foundation is justified, and the regress begins. If, on the
other hand, the given does not have propositional content, then it's
not the sort of thing that needs justification, but then how can it be
a reason at all? How can it justify other beliefs? This dilemma is
part of Bonjour's larger argument against foundationalism in general,
because he recognizes that one could avoid the dilemma faced by
internalists by 'going externalist'— that is, by not requiring that
all beliefs must be supported by reflectively accessible reasons (by
other justified beliefs) to be justified, so long as they are the
result of a reliable process. BonJour rejects this maneuver because
he thinks the very ideas of knowledge and justification require
reflectively accessible reasons.
One feature Goldman's account is the idea that process reliabilism
is an historical theory. Whereas traditional Cartesian justification
and many other theories construe justification as a function of only
current mental states of an agent, Goldman emphasizes the belief's
causal history. An historical account is naturally coupled with
externalism because on the traditional internalist theory of
justification one's reasons must be reflectively accessible at the
time of belief. If the latter requirement is rejected, it opens the
possibility that a belief may be partly justified by past events in
the causal chain leading to belief. And if those justificatory
factors were reflectively accessible at the time of belief, that they
occurred in the past would be irrelevant. Thus reflective
accessibility (internalism) naturally pairs with what Goldman calls
"current time-slice" theories, whereas externalism naturally pairs
with an historical theory.
When naturally coupled with externalism, an historical conception of
justification makes intelligible some intuitive cases of knowledge
that an internalist conception fails to capture. For example, suppose
S read years ago about a certain fact in a reliable source. S now
recalls that fact, but cannot remember the source from which she
obtained it. S is not in a position to offer reasons for her belief—
when challenged she may say, "I just do"—but if her memory is reliable
then the belief might plausibly be considered justified.
As mentioned briefly in §1, Goldman's process reliabilism is not
designed to handle some forms of epistemic luck, such as Gettier's
cases. It is conceived, rather, as an alternative to (and improvement
over) traditional theories of justification, and we saw above how a
belief can be true and justified but not a case of knowledge because
of luck. Thus Goldman: "Justified beliefs…have appropriate causal
histories; but they may fail to be knowledge either because they are
false or because they founder on some other requirement for knowing of
the kind discussed in the post-Gettier knowledge-trade" (1979, 15).
In sum, Goldman proposes a theory of justification according to which
a belief is doxastically justified for an agent S just in case S's
belief is formed from a reliable, that is truth-conducive,
belief-independent process (for basic beliefs) or from a conditionally
reliable belief-dependent process (for non-basic beliefs). Further
details need to be filled in, but on some of these issues Goldman
offers suggestions but remains agnostic.
2b. Some Unresolved Issues
First, what exactly does one mean by a process that is
"truth-conducive" or "has a tendency to produce true belief"? Does it
mean that, in the long run, the process actually produces mostly true
beliefs? Or does it mean that it would produce mostly true beliefs if
it were used? For example, suppose that Jones, blind from birth,
undergoes new eye surgery that provides him with 20-20 vision. He
wakes up, sees a very realistic-looking stuffed cat hears a creature
"meowing" nearby, and forms the false belief that the stuffed cat is
a real cat. Deathly afraid of cats, he goes into cardiac arrest and
dies. He has formed one belief based on vision, but it is false.
Ought we to conclude that his vision is unreliable because it produced
only false belief? Presumably not, and so reliability should not be
construed in terms of the actual outputs of a process. Goldman sees
this and says: "For the most part, we simply assume that the
'observed' frequency of truth versus error would be approximately
replicated in the actual long-run, and also in relevant counterfactual
situations, i.e. ones that are highly 'realistic', or conform closely
to circumstances of the actual world" (1979, 11). Is the suggestion,
then, that we use observed frequency as a guide to what would happen
in the long run, or in worlds similar to the actual world? This won't
work in the case just described. Or is the suggestion that we can
dispense with observed frequency and think instead in terms of how the
process would perform in the long run or in close possible worlds?
And if so, what is the basis of our understanding of how it would
perform? Reliabilists owe answers to these questions, but so far no
one set of answers is generally accepted.
Second, which are the worlds in which a process must be reliable to
constitute justification? Suppose there is a possible world where a
benevolent demon arranges things such that beliefs based on
wishful-thinking always turn out to be true. Wishful-thinking would
be truth-conducive, but we would hesitate to say that those beliefs
are justified. One way to repair this defect is to say that a belief
in a possible world w is justified if and only if it is formed from a
process that is reliable in the actual world. But what if,
unbeknownst to us, wishful-thinking is reliable in the actual world?
Goldman's suggestion here is that what we seek is an explanation of
why we deem some beliefs justified and others not, and what we deem
justified depends not on actual facts about reliability but on what we
believe about reliability. So even if wishful-thinking were in fact
reliable, because we do not believe it to be, it would not count as a
basis for justification.
It is worth pausing here to note a consequence of the distinction
between reliabilist theories of justification and reliabilist theories
of knowledge. The consequence is not a logical one, but it appears
real enough. Goldman wants to improve upon the traditional notion of
justification, and as a result he must take seriously basic judgments
about when a belief is justified. Because it seems counterintuitive
to deem wishful-thinking a basis for justification (even in a
benevolent demon world), Goldman suggests a shift from actual
reliability to what we believe about reliability as the basis for
justification. But in so doing, the original novel insight that
justification depends on facts, some historical, about reliability
loses its grip. If, on the other hand, a theorist were not concerned
to elucidate "justification" in a reliabilist theory of knowledge, she
would be less inclined to feel the pull of intuitions about
justification. She could say that knowledge is reliably formed true
belief and leave it at that. If some cases of knowledge lacked
features typically associated with justification, so be it.
Third, what is a process? Fundamentally, it simply takes inputs (such
as percepts or other beliefs) and yields belief outputs. But how are
processes individuated? Is vision a process? Vision in good lighting
conditions might well be reliable, but vision in the dark is not. The
point is that processes can be individuated coarsely, such as a
process by which beliefs are formed on the basis of vision, or finely,
such as where beliefs are formed on the basis of vision in good
lighting at close range, and so forth. Such questions about process
individuation must be settled in advance of answers to questions about
justification. This is, again, because process reliabilism is
intended to be a substantive account of justification, such that
whether a belief is justified is determined by whether the process is
reliable. Because processes can be individuated in myriad ways, one
could always cite some suitably refined reliable process to answer to
the antecedent judgment that a belief is justified. But this gets
things backwards, since the reliabilist wants to derive facts about
justification from antecedent understanding of when a belief is
reliably produced. This is the heart of the generality problem for
reliabilism, which will be discussed further in the following section.
2c. Some Theoretical Commitments of Reliabilism
Having described both process reliabilism and its historical
predecessors, some theoretical commitments common to both come to
light.
First, it was noted earlier (1a) that Goldman's early appeal to
relevant alternatives signals a commitment to fallibilism. Process
reliabilism is also fallibilist. So long as a belief-forming process
produces mostly true beliefs, it is a source of justification and
knowledge that p, even if the process does not provide the agent with
the ability to rule out all counter-possibilities where not-p. On
this view, a belief can be justified but false (which is generally
accepted), and, more importantly, S can know that p even when S is
susceptible to error because she cannot rule out all the possibilities
in which not-p.
Second, closely related to the commitment to fallibilism is a strategy
to undermine the skeptic. The skeptic says that, because S cannot
rule out the possibility that she is a BIV (or is dreaming or is
deceived by an evil demon), S cannot know even mundane truths about
her environment, for example that the cat is on the mat. But if it is
correct that the BIV scenario is an irrelevant alternative, and that
one need rule out only relevant alternatives to know that p, it
follows that one can know ordinary empirical truths even though the
skeptic may be right that one cannot know that one is not a BIV.
Reliabilists need not be committed to the claim that one cannot know
that radical skeptical hypotheses, like the BIV scenario, are false,
and there are strong theoretical considerations for rejecting it.
Suppose S knows (on some or other reliable grounds) that the cat is on
the mat. Upon reflection, S will also know that if the cat is on the
mat, then S is not a BIV (because, ex hypothesi, there are no real
cats and mats in the BIV world). And it would seem that S could
easily know, by deduction from known premises, which is a paradigm
reliable process, that she is not a BIV. To claim that there are
cases where S cannot achieve knowledge through valid logical deduction
from known premises is to deny the principle that knowledge is closed
under known entailment, which strikes many as preposterous. And
accepting the closure principle appears to imply either that we can
know that radical skeptical hypotheses are false, which strikes many
as intuitively incorrect, or that we know nothing about the external
world, because if we did, we could logically infer that radical
skeptical hypotheses are false. This issue arises again in section 5
when the discussion turns to particular reliabilist tracking theories
that explicitly deny closure.
Third, it is important to understand that the reliabilist primarily
aims to produce an account of the nature of knowledge, whereas it is a
secondary objective to show that human agents in fact have knowledge.
The skeptical appeal to the BIV scenario is meant as the basis of an a
priori argument that knowledge is impossible: S knows a priori that
she cannot rule out the BIV possibility because any perceptual
experience she could have is compatible with the BIV scenario, and the
skeptic argues a priori that S therefore cannot even know that the cat
is on the mat, because for all S knows she is a BIV. Goldman's causal
and discrimination accounts and his subsequent process reliabilist
theory counter the skeptic's claim by saying that if, as a matter of
fact, S's belief that p is caused in the right way (or S can
discriminate p from close counter-possibilities or S's belief is
formed from a reliable process), then S knows that p. Surely any or
all of these conditions might hold for S's belief, and no a priori
skeptical argument can demonstrate otherwise. This is a significant
advance against skepticism, because the skeptic must adopt the more
defensive position of having to show that these conditions never hold,
which is not something that can be proved a priori. On the other
hand, when the reliabilist goes further and tries to show that
empirical knowledge is not only possible but actual, she needs to show
that her favored conditions for knowledge in fact obtain, and that is
a far more difficult task. This also raises a concern about
bootstrapping—where one uses some or other reliable process to infer
that her belief-forming processes are in fact reliable—and this smacks
of question-begging. (See "the problem of easy knowledge," section
3.)
Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, reliabilism is typically
construed as a paradigm version of epistemological externalism, which
is the thesis that not all aspects of the knowledge-constituting link
between belief and truth need be cognitively available to the agent.
(See Steup (2003) for a defense of the claim that any factors that
justify belief or constitute the requisite link between belief and
truth must be cognitively available to the agent, or "recognizable on
reflection".) When the skeptic claims that S cannot know that p
because, for all S knows, she might be a BIV, the externalist replies
that, if in fact the relevant causal, discriminatory, or process
reliabilist conditions obtain, whether or not the agent is able to
recognize on reflection that they do, and in general whether or not
facts about their obtaining are cognitively available to her, S knows
that p. Internalists are often seen as playing into the hands of the
skeptic because the cognitively available factors that confer
justification on one's empirical beliefs, such as perceptual evidence,
are compatible with the BIV scenario. Because there are no further
means cognitively available to rule out the BIV scenario, the
skeptic's claim that one cannot achieve even ordinary empirical
knowledge appears to be more damaging to the internalist than to the
externalist.
The points about anti-skepticism and externalism can be brought out in
another way. Because internalists typically demand reflectively
accessible reasons for justification, they encounter more difficulty
in accounting for cases of unreflective knowledge in adults, and of
the kind of knowledge had by unsophisticated or unreflective persons,
or perhaps even animals. A stock example is the chicken-sexer, a
person who can reliably determine the sex of a young chick, but does
not know how she does it. If asked, "How do you know that one is
male?" the chicken-sexer can offer no reasons. Still, for many it is
quite plausible to say that the chicken-sexer knows the sex of the
chick simply because, somehow, she is very successful in
distinguishing males from females. The point generalizes. Many true
beliefs held by very young people, who are less reflective than
adults, and basic perceptually based beliefs even in adults, plausibly
count as cases of knowledge because the processes from which those
beliefs are formed allow the believer to distinguish what is true (for
example, that the chick is male) from what is false (that the chick is
female). The externalist can account for these more easily than the
internalist can, and such cases suggest that both the skeptic and the
internalist may be setting the bar for knowledge too high. For fuller
discussion, see "Grandma, Timmy, and Lassie."
Finally, it is worthwhile to note further theoretical inspirations for
process reliabilism. One inspiration is epistemological naturalism—
very roughly, the view that finding answers to epistemological
questions requires more than just armchair inquiry, but also empirical
investigation. Some naturalists, for instance Quine (1969), will find
this characterization too weak-kneed, arguing that armchair
epistemological inquiry should be replaced by scientific investigation
into what actually produces true beliefs. Present purposes allow us
to construe naturalism more broadly, because the crucial idea is that
science can inform philosophy, which undermines the "traditional" idea
of philosophy as providing the foundation of science. ("Traditional"
is in scare quotes because the history of philosophy prior to the
twentieth century shows that the relationship between philosophy and
science has not always been conceived of as that between foundation
and superstructure.) In particular, reliabilists look to cognitive
science to understand the nature of our belief-forming processes and
to tell us which among them are reliable. Goldman himself is a
leading figure in naturalistic epistemology, and has held joint
appointments in philosophy and cognitive science. Reliabilism
intimately connects what previously were considered two distinct
inquiries—the nature of cognition and the nature of knowledge.
3. Objections and Replies
3a. Reliably Formed True Belief Is Insufficient for Justification
Perhaps the most basic objection to reliabilism is that reliably
formed belief is not sufficient for justification. Laurence BonJour
(1980) has famously argued this point by way of counterexample.
Suppose S is reliably clairvoyant but has reason to believe there is
no such thing as clairvoyance. Still, on the basis of her clairvoyant
powers, she believes truly that the President is in New York City.
Bonjour argues that S's belief is not justified because S is being
irrational—believing on the basis of a power she believes not to
exist. Goldman (1979) "replies" to this sort of problem (though
Goldman's paper came first) by tweaking his account of reliability.
For S's belief that p to be justified, not only must it be produced by
a reliable process, but there must be no other reliable process
available to S such that, had S used that process, S would not believe
that p. Suppose S has scientific evidence that clairvoyance does not
exist, scientific evidence typically being a reliable source of
knowledge. Had S based her belief on that evidence, it would override
her clairvoyance-based belief, hence she would not believe that the
President is in New York, supporting the conclusion that her actual
belief is not in fact justified.
But what if, BonJour asks, S has no evidence in support of or against
the existence of clairvoyance? Then, there would be no other reliable
process available to her such that, had her belief been based on it,
she would not believe what she does. In that case, S seems to believe
blindly where, unlike typical perceptually based beliefs, she has no
reason to think her clairvoyant powers are real. A similar case is
provided by Keith Lehrer (1990). Mr. Truetemp has had a device
implanted in his head, a "tempucomp", which is an accurate thermometer
"hooked up" to his brain in such a way that he automatically forms
true beliefs about the ambient temperature but does not know anything
about the thermometer. Imagine that it was implanted while he was in
the hospital for some other procedure. Truetemp has reliably formed
beliefs about the temperature, but does he know the temperature? Here
again, he appears to believe blindly, which seems irrational, hence
unjustified. A thoroughgoing externalist about knowledge may be
willing to bite this bullet and say that S knows that the President is
in New York (and that Truetemp knows the temperature), citing the
reliability of the basis of the belief. An externalist about
justification might also bite this bullet and say that S's belief is
justified, but this seems to some a bit harder to swallow, since blind
belief appears to undermine justification.
In Epistemology and Cognition (Goldman, 1986), Goldman suggested that
a belief is justified if and only if it is reliable in normal worlds.
Normal worlds are those that are consistent with our most "general
beliefs about the sorts of objects, events, and changes that occur in"
the actual world (Goldman 1986, 107). The suggestion addresses the
benevolent demon and clairvoyance objections, and perhaps too the
Truetemp objection, because none of those scenarios is consistent with
our general beliefs about the actual world (though this is less clear
for the Truetemp case). Thus on the normal worlds approach, beliefs
based on help from the demon, on clairvoyance, and on a thermometer
implanted in one's head "feeding" temperature data directly into one's
cognition would not count as genuinely reliable, and so are not
justified.
As an account of when we would deem a belief justified, the normal
worlds approach is promising, but one might wonder whether it is a
plausible account of when one is actually justified. After all, if
our general beliefs about the actual world are not themselves
justified, it would seem that beliefs formed against that backdrop are
unjustified. (See Pollock and Cruz (1999).)
Sensitive to this kind of objection, Goldman proposed yet another
version of process reliabilism in his "Strong and Weak Justification"
(Goldman, 1988). The basic idea is that a belief is strongly
justified when formed from a process that is actually reliable, but
weakly justified when formed by a process that is deemed reliable
(say, by one's community). As we have seen, the two kinds of
justification can come apart. Imagine a community where astrology is
deemed reliable and where an agent has no reason to believe that his
community's beliefs about which processes typically yield true beliefs
are false or misguided. Because the agent's beliefs are blameless—she
would not be faulted by her community peers for forming her
astrology-based beliefs—there is a sense in which her beliefs are
justified. This is weak justification and is a plausible basis for
when justification is properly attributed to an agent's belief or
believing. But because astrology is not in fact reliable, she is not
strongly justified. On the other hand, reliably formed beliefs in the
benevolent demon world, and beliefs formed from clairvoyance or from a
tempucomp implanted in one's head, are strongly justified. However,
because our community does not recognize such processes as actually
reliable (or existent), such beliefs are not weakly justified. In
addition, one could view weak justification as an account of when it
is proper to attribute justification, and strong justification as an
account of when one is actually justified. (Or, one could say that a
belief is fully justified only if it is both strongly and weakly
justified.)
Goldman subsequently offers another theory of justification
attribution in "Epistemic Folkways and Scientific Epistemology"
(Goldman, 1992), which proceeds in two stages. In the first stage, an
agent constructs a mental list based her community's beliefs about
which processes are reliable. Processes deemed reliable are thought
of as virtuous, others as vicious. In the second stage, the agent
attributes justification only if a belief is virtuously formed— that
is, formed according to whether the belief-forming process is on her
list of virtues. Most of us do not have clairvoyance or
benevolent-helper-demon processes on our list of virtues, which
explains why we do not attribute justification to beliefs formed on
those bases. Analogous to Goldman's earlier strong and weak
distinction, here a belief is deemed justified only if formed from a
process that appears on one's list of virtues, but is actually
justified only if formed from a process that is in fact reliable.
This discussion of the non-sufficiency objection to reliabilism
reveals how accounting for de facto reliability and believed
reliability make different demands on the theorist, requiring her to
distinguish actual world reliable processes from processes that may
not actually be reliable, but because they answer to our basic beliefs
about what is reliable, they form the basis of our practices of
attributing justification.
3b. Reliably Formed True Belief Is Not Necessary for Justification
A second objection to reliabilism holds that reliably formed belief is
not even necessary for justification. Suppose there is a world where
an evil demon furnishes people with false perceptions, such that their
senses are unreliable bases of belief (Cohen, 1984; sometimes called
'the New Evil Demon problem'). In the actual world, many of our
beliefs are justified on the basis of perception, and in the evil
demon world, people's perceptions are just like ours. It would seem
to follow that their beliefs are justified to the same extent as ours,
in which case reliability is not necessary for justification. Here
again one can see the pressure exerted on reliabilist attempts to
capture the intuitive notion of justification within an externalist
framework.
Though the first and second objections to reliabilism are clearly
distinct, the former challenging the sufficiency of reliably formed
belief for justification, the latter the necessity of reliably formed
belief, one or another of the strategies countenanced above to reply
to the sufficiency objection may also help here. Once one
distinguishes the grounds for how we attribute justification from the
grounds for when a belief is actually justified—believed reliability
from factual reliability—one could say that in the new evil demon
world, attributions of justification are appropriate because
perception is believed to be reliable. Goldman's distinction between
strong and weak justification can help here, as can his proposal in
"Epistemic Folkways," and perhaps even the normal worlds approach,
because even in the demon world, we attribute justification to
perceptually grounded beliefs because it is consistent with our
general beliefs about that world.
3c. The Problem of Easy Knowledge
A third problem which has stimulated much recent discussion charges
reliabilism with illicit bootstrapping (or circularity), allowing
knowledge (and justification) to be achieved too easily—the "problem
of easy knowledge". (See, for example, Jonathan Vogel (2000) and
Stewart Cohen (2002).) Cohen is explicit that the concern about "easy
knowledge" reaches beyond reliabilism; in fact, in the paper cited, he
presents it as a worry for evidentialism as well. Because the problem
arises, according to Cohen, for any view with a basic knowledge
structure—that is, in Cohen's usage, any view which denies that one
must know that one's source of belief is reliable in order to obtain
knowledge from that source—it is unclear to what extent reliabilism in
particular is threatened by it. (Cohen's overall strategy is to force
a dilemma: if one denies basic knowledge, insisting that a belief
source must be known to be reliable in order for one to achieve
knowledge from that source, skepticism becomes a threat. This
motivates a consideration of basic knowledge, which leads to the
problem of easy knowledge.)
Cohen presents two versions of the problem. One begins with the
closure principle—that if S knows that p and S knows that p entails q,
then S is in a position to know that q, via competent deduction from
what she knows. If a theorist makes space for basic knowledge, here's
an illustration of the problem. S knows that the table is red on the
(reliable) basis of its looking red and without having certified that
what looks red usually is red—again, we begin with basic knowledge.
But S also knows that if the table is red, then it is not merely white
and illuminated by red light, creating the red appearance, and by
closure S knows the latter. And if S knows that, it's a short step
from to concluding that visual appearances are reliable indicators of
the truth. So from basic knowledge that does not require knowledge of
the reliability of its source, we somehow obtain knowledge of the
reliability of the source. Could it really be that easy? (No, it
would seem.)
Here is Cohen's other version, which echoes presentations of the
problem by Vogel (2000) and Richard Fumerton (1995):
Suppose I have reliable color vision. Then I can come to know e.g.
that the table is red, even though I do not know that my color vision
is reliable. But then I can note that my belief that the table is red
was produced by my color vision. Combining this knowledge with my
knowledge that the table is red, I can infer that in this instance, my
color vision worked correctly. By repeating this process enough
times, I would seem to be able to amass considerable evidence that my
color vision is reliable, enough for me to come to know my color
vision is reliable (316).
This smacks of illicit bootstrapping because one's only grounds for
concluding that one's color vision is reliable are basic beliefs that,
while by hypothesis de facto reliable, were never certified as such.
See Cohen's paper and Peter Markie (2005) for two proposed solutions
that incorporate basic knowledge.
3d. The Value Problem for Reliabilism
A fourth problem for reliabilism has also received a lot of attention
recently, namely, the value problem for reliabilism. What the many
forms of reliabilism have in common, as noted at the outset, is a
concern to explicate the way in which knowledge and/or justification
requires that beliefs are formed on a truth-conducive basis,
highlighting the crucial link between belief and truth that
constitutes knowledge. The value problem begins with the thought,
expressed in Plato's Meno, that knowledge, whatever it is, is surely
more valuable than mere true belief. But given reliabilism's
exclusive focus on truth-conduciveness, it seems hard-pressed to
explain why knowledge is more valuable than true belief. After all,
if one has a true belief, one already has what matters to the
reliabilist, so how could it matter whether the belief is reliably
formed? How could that add any value? Linda Zagzebski (2003) offers
the following analogy. If what you care about is a good cup of
espresso (/truth), it does not matter to you, once you have it,
whether it was made from a reliable espresso maker (/belief forming
process) or not. A good cup of espresso is not made better by having
been reliably produced.
Here again, this problem plausibly extends to any theory of
justification (or knowledge) where the crucial knowledge-constituting
link between truth and belief is cast in truth-conducivist terms.
Zagzebski (2003, 16) argues this point, citing BonJour's (1985) claim
that "the basic role of justification is that of a means to truth."
It is important here not to be misled by adjectives that indicate a
positive evaluation of belief, like 'justified' and 'reliable' (or
'reliably formed'). One might easily think that being justified is a
good thing, hence that a justified true belief is better than a mere
true belief—a quick "solution" to the value problem. But if
justification is understood primarily as a means to truth, the
implication is that truth is the source of value, and we're back to
the value problem: once an agent has true belief, she has what is
valuable, so who cares how she got it? So again, it's not clear
whether the reliabilist in particular needs a response. That said,
the reliabilist is not without resources. Wayne Riggs (2002),
although not a reliabilist, has argued that the added value of
reliably formed belief might accrue to the agent insofar as it was to
the agent's credit that she formed a true belief. When one achieves
true belief unreliably, perhaps merely luckily, no such credit accrues
to the agent. A similar approach is to focus on the agent directly
(as opposed to indirectly, through her reliable processes). Roughly,
when an agent forms true beliefs on the basis of good epistemic
character traits or virtues, she is due credit, which explains the
extra "goodness" accruing to knowledge over mere true belief. This
sort of position will be discussed further in section 4, below.
3e. The Generality Problem
The final objection to reliabilism discussed herein—the previously
mentioned generality problem—is especially thorny because it appears
to imply that, even if it is conceded that reliability could be a
plausible basis for justification and knowledge, the reliabilist
project cannot succeed even on its own terms. One begins to see the
generality problem by noticing that every belief token is formed from
a process that instantiates many types of process, and then wondering
which process type is relevant to assessing reliability. After all,
on one way of individuating the relevant process, it may be
truth-conducive (/reliable), whereas on another, it may not be
truth-conducive (/may not be reliable). "For example, the process
token leading to my current belief that it is sunny today is an
instance of all the following types: the perceptual process, the
visual process, processes that occur on Wednesday, processes that lead
to true beliefs, etc. Note that these process types are not equally
reliable. Obviously, then, one of these types must be the one whose
reliability is relevant to the assessment of my belief" (Feldman 1985,
159-60). If the question about process type individuation cannot be
answered independently of our basic judgments about when a belief is
justified, reliabilism will not be a substantive, informative theory
of justified belief. (See also Conee and Feldman, 1998.)
Another way to understand the difficulty of the problem is to present
it as a dilemma. If processes are individuated too narrowly, the
process will be applicable to only one instance of belief formation.
But then the reliability of the process will be determined simply by
whether the one belief in question is true (because its truth ratio
will be either horrible or impeccable), which is implausible. If
processes are individuated too widely, then every belief formed from
the process will be deemed either reliable or unreliable, depending on
the truth-conduciveness of that process, whereas, intuitively, some of
those beliefs will be justified and others not. Feldman dubs the
former horn of the dilemma "the single case problem," and the latter
horn "the no-distinction problem" (Feldman 1985, 161). A solution to
the generality problem, then, requires a principled means of
individuating processes that steers between the single case and the
no-distinction problems, and which also plausibly answers to judgments
about justification.
The generality problem has spawned a lot of philosophical work, and as
of now it's fair to say that there is no widely accepted solution to
it. Conee and Feldman (1998) provide a nice survey and critique of
possible solutions, finding them wanting. Since then a variety of new
solutions have been proposed. Mark Heller (1996) argues that the
context of evaluation partly determines whether a process is rightly
deemed reliable, hence that context is useful for individuating
process types. Juan Comesaña (2006) argues that any theory of
justification needs to incorporate an account of the basing relation.
Recall the distinction between propositional and doxastic
justification (from section 2). Doxastic justification demands not
only that one has adequate grounds for belief, or (for the
reliabilist) not only that one possesses a process that would be
reliable if used, but that the belief is actually based on those
grounds or that reliable process. Comesaña argues that an adequate
account of the basing relation can solve the generality problem, and
because everyone owes an account of the basing relation, the
reliabilist is in no worse shape than anyone else. If that's right,
then perhaps the generality problem, like the bootstrapping and value
problems, is not unique to reliabilism after all.
James Beebe (2004) proposes a two-stage approach to solving the
generality problem. The first stage narrows the field of relevant
process types, including only those that: (i) solve the same type of
information-processing problem as the token process at issue; (ii) use
the same information-processing procedure; and (iii) share the same
cognitive architecture. Beebe notes that this still leaves a range of
possible process types. At the second stage, then, Beebe argues that
we can further define the relevant process by partitioning the
remaining candidate processes, concluding that "the relevant process
type for any process token t is the subclass of [the candidates
remaining from stage one] which is the broadest objectively
homogeneous subclass of [the candidates] within which t falls. A
subclass S is objectively homogeneous if there are no statistically
relevant partitions of S that can be effected" (Beebe 2004, 181).
Finally, Kelly Becker (2008) approaches the problem from the
perspective of epistemic luck, and argues that an anti-luck
epistemology requires both local and global (or process) reliability
conditions. Satisfying the local condition ensures that the truth of
the acquired belief will not be due merely to some coincidental but
fortuitous feature of the specific, actual circumstances in which the
belief is formed. (More on "local" reliabilism in section 5.) The
suggestion is that the local condition eliminates luck accruing to
specific instances—single cases—of belief formation. We are then free
to characterize the relevant global process very narrowly, including
in its description any and all features of the process that are
causally operative in producing belief, short of implicating the
specific content of the belief in the description. We thereby avoid
the no-distinction problem, given the specificity of the process
description, and the single-case problem, since the process is
repeatable, given that it is applicable to beliefs with contents other
than the specific content of the target belief.
4. Proper Function and Agent and Virtue Reliabilism
There are relatives of process reliabilism that deserve mention in
this article. This section includes a discussion of global
alternatives to process reliabilism, and the following section
discusses local alternatives. Because the central topic of this
article is process reliabilism, these final two sections will be
rather brief.
4a. Plantinga's Proper Function Account
Alvin Plantinga (1993) argues that not just any de facto reliable
process provides a basis for justified belief. For example, suppose S
has a brain lesion that causes her to believe that she has a brain
lesion, but she has no other evidence for that belief (and perhaps has
some evidence against it). Is her belief that she has a brain lesion
warranted? Plantinga things not, and concludes that a belief is
warranted, hence constitutes knowledge, only if formed from a properly
functioning cognitive process or faculty. Because it is natural to
suppose that the brain lesion case involves an improperly functioning
process, one can conclude that S's belief is unwarranted.
John Greco (2003) cites cases from Oliver Sacks that suggest that the
proper function requirement is too strong. One is the case of
autistic twins with extraordinary mathematical abilities, another of
"a man whose illness resulted in an increase in detail and vividness
concerning childhood memory" (Greco 2003, 357). If one wants to say
that these are not improperly functioning faculties, then one might
say the same about the brain lesion. More plausibly, one would say
that, like the brain lesion case, there is a reliable but improperly
functioning process at work. And because it is intuitively arbitrary,
or just wrong, to say that the autistic twins are not warranted (or
justified) in their mathematical beliefs, and that the man's illness
induced abilities cannot be the basis of warranted belief, it follows
that the proper functioning of one's cognitive processes is not
required for warrant (/justification) and knowledge.
4b. Agent and Virtue Reliabilism
Greco concludes that what really matters is whether belief is formed
from a stable character trait, and this brings us to agent
reliabilism. One crucial insight here is that a true belief
constitutes knowledge only if having achieved that true belief can be
credited to the agent. This helps to eliminate the possibility that
mere luck is responsible for one's true belief, and it discounts very
strange and fleeting processes as a basis for knowledgeable beliefs
because they are not stable. The brain lesion case might be such a
fleeting process, if we imagine that there are lots of nearby worlds
where it fails to produce true beliefs, whereas the Oliver Sacks cases
involves processes that are not so susceptible to failure.
Ernest Sosa's virtue reliabilism (1991 and 2007) bears an important
similarity to Greco's agent reliabilism. The basis idea is that one
knows that p only if one's belief that p is formed from an epistemic
virtue that reliably produces true belief. S's belief that p can be
true but not based on an epistemic virtue, just as someone with little
skill can sometimes make a shot in basketball. S's belief can be true
and based on an epistemic virtue but not a case of knowledge because S
does not achieve true belief because it was based on the epistemic
virtue, just as a skilled shooter can make a basket even when the ball
is partially blocked by a defender. The shot is skillful—it
demonstrates his basketball virtue—but it went in the basket because
the trajectory was altered. Finally, S's belief that p can be true,
based on an epistemic virtue, and true because based on that virtue.
Only then is the true belief a case of knowledge. It is not just a
matter of luck, as it is in the cases of the unskilled shooter and the
skilled shooter whose shot is blocked.
With these distinctions in place, Sosa then distinguishes animal
knowledge and reflective knowledge such that, roughly, animal
knowledge is based on an epistemic virtue (say, on vision) and is thus
reliably produced and non-accidental, whereas reflective knowledge is
animal knowledge plus an understanding of how the bit of animal
knowledge at issue came about. That is, reflective knowledge requires
metabeliefs about, among other things, how one's target object-level
belief was produced and how it coheres with one's other object-level
beliefs. One potential problem here—and pretty much anywhere that
meta-belief is introduced as a necessary condition—is the threat of
regress. If meta-belief is required to certify an instance of
reflective knowledge, then what certifies that meta-belief? A
meta-meta-belief? And if that question-and-answer is proper, then
what principle can be presented to stop the question from being asked
anew? That is, what prevents us from rightly asking about the
meta-meta-belief?
If we think of Greco's stable character traits as epistemic virtues,
then Greco's and Sosa's positions are both virtue epistemologies—they
both say that knowledge is true belief formed from epistemically
virtuous processes or faculties, and that it is to the agent's credit
that she has achieved true belief. Virtue or agent reliabilism is
also touted as the basis of a solution to the value problem for
reliabilism, discussed above. The idea is that knowledge is more
valuable than true belief, but the added value is not in the belief
itself, but "in" the agent, insofar as she deserves credit for her
true belief.
5. Tracking and Anti-Luck Theories
This final section discusses local versions of reliabilism, whose aim
is to develop an account of knowledge that eliminates
knowledge-precluding epistemic luck. Instead of focusing on the
reliability of general processes with a view toward explicating
justification, they focus on the specific belief at issue, together
with the token method by which the belief is formed, and ask, "Though
the belief is true, might it have easily been false?" If "yes," this
is an indication that the belief is true partly by luck, and is thus
not an instance of knowledge. If the answer is "no," then the belief,
given the method by which it was formed, tracks the truth, is
therefore not merely lucky, and is a case of knowledge. Because the
theories discussed in this section share process reliabilism's
commitments to externalism and fallibilism, and because these theories
aim to explicate how knowledge requires more than an accidental
connection between belief and truth—it requires a reliable link—they
belong in the reliabilist family.
5a. Sensitivity
Perhaps the most well-known, widely discussed, but also widely
criticized tracking theory is Robert Nozick's (1981) sensitivity
theory. Nozick presents two tracking conditions necessary for
knowledge, both modalized— that is, both appealing to considerations
about what would be the case in nearby possible worlds. He calls the
combination of the two conditions "sensitivity".
The first condition is variance: S knows that p only if, were p false,
S would not believe that p. For example, suppose Smith believes truly
that the cat is on the mat, but the method by which she forms the
belief is tea-leaf reading. On the plausible assumption that this
method is not a good means to form true belief, if it were false that
the cat is on the mat, Smith would believe it anyway, using her
method. She is just lucky to have actually achieved true belief, and
thus does not know.
Second, adherence: S knows that p only if, were p true, S would believe that p.
Suppose Jones believes truly that today is Friday, but her method is
to believe that it is Friday whenever Johnson wears a green shirt. If
Johnson had shown up wearing a red shirt on a Friday, Jones would
believe that it is not Friday, violating the adherence condition.
Jones would have a lucky true belief, which is not a case of
knowledge.
Somehow over the intervening three decades since Nozick's book was
published, the term "sensitivity" has come to apply just to the
variance condition, which is arguably the most interesting and crucial
of the two because it clearly establishes a discrimination requirement
for knowledge—one knows that p only if one can discriminate the actual
world where p is true from various close worlds where p is false.
(See also Dretske (1971) and Goldman (1976) for versions of a
discrimination requirement that anticipate Nozick's sensitivity.) The
ensuing discussion focuses on variance, which will be referred to as
"sensitivity".
Sensitivity has faced numerous problems in the literature. First, it
appears to violate the very plausible principle that knowledge is
closed under known entailment—that if S knows that p, and S knows that
p entails q, then S is at least in a position to know that q (and
would know that q if she deduced it from what she knows). For
example, suppose that S knows she is typing at her computer. If it
were false, she would not believe it based on her actual method of
forming belief, which involves, say, at least vision, because she
would be doing something else and would see that she's not typing. S
knows, too, that if she is typing at her computer, then she is not a
BIV. Among other things, BIVs don't have hands, so they cannot type.
It would seem that, by closure, S could simply deduce that she's not a
BIV. But that belief is insensitive—by hypothesis, if S were a BIV,
she would not believe that she is, because she would have exactly the
same experiences she does in the actual world. Closure failure. Tim
Black (2002) argues for a version of Nozickean sensitivity that
construes the methods by which one forms belief externalistically,
thereby showing how sensitivity-based knowledge that one is not a BIV
is possible, thus restoring closure. The basic idea is that one can
know one is not a BIV because, in a BIV world, one's method would be
different than the method one uses in the actual world; in particular,
BIV world beliefs are not really perceptual (because BIVs don't have
the normal sensory apparatus). Thus one's actual perceptual method (on
this construal of methods) would not lead one to believe, in a BIV
world, that one is not a BIV. Some other method would or might do
this, but not the actual method.
Second and third, it has been argued that sensitivity is incompatible
with higher-level knowledge (Vogel, 2000)—knowledge that one knows—and
with inductive knowledge (Vogel 2000; Sosa 1999). Suppose that S
knows that p. Does she know that she knows that p, or even that she
has a true belief that p? Of course, many philosophers reject the
thesis that knowledge requires knowing that one knows, but the
objection is that sensitivity is incompatible with ever knowing that
one knows. Why? Because if it were false that one knows that p, one
would still believe that one knows that p. (See Vogel for a precisely
rendered version of this argument. See Becker (2006a) for a
counterargument meant to show how sensitivity is compatible with
higher-level knowledge.) Sensitivity is claimed to be incompatible
with inductive knowledge because when one's true belief is formed from
reliable induction, there are nearby worlds where one's inductive base
is the same and so one forms the same belief, but the belief is false.
Sosa's trash chute case is a widely cited example. As I often do, I
go to the trash chute to dump some garbage and believe that it will
fall to the basement. But if it were false that it will fall, I would
still believe that it will fall. Sosa argues that his preferred
safety condition, the second of the two tracking conditions to be
discussed herein, can handle inductive knowledge better than
sensitivity.
A fourth problem for sensitivity is based on Timothy Williamson's
(2000) margins-for-error considerations. Suppose Jones is
six-foot-ten, and Smith believes that Jones is at least six feet tall.
If Jones were only five-foot-eleven-and-a-half inches tall, Smith
might very well believe that Jones is at least six feet tall. Smith
is a decent judge of height, but not perfect. Sensitivity is violated
even though, intuitively, surely Smith knows that [the six-foot-ten]
Jones is at least six feet tall. The problem is that knowledge (or
knowledgeable belief) requires a margin for error. Williamson argues
that the need for an error margin motivates a safety condition on
knowledge. Becker (2009) argues that, on a Nozickean construal of the
methods by which one forms belief, Williamson's counterexamples can be
defanged. The idea, applied to the present case, is to distinguish
the method that Smith actually uses in coming to believe that Jones is
at least six feet tall from the method that Smith would use in
believing that Jones is at least six feet tall if Jones were only
five-foot-eleven-and-a-half. If the methods are distinct, then one
can say that Smith would not believe, using her actual method, that
Jones is at least six feet tall in the closest worlds where this is
false, hence Smith actually knows that Jones is at least six feet
tall. And if the methods were not distinguishable, one might rightly
argue that Smith is simply a terrible judge of height and does not
know that Jones is at least six feet tall in the actual case.
5b. Safety
There is another anti-luck condition receiving a lot of recent
attention, and it was designed in large part as a response to the
problems with sensitivity. It is called "safety", and, like
sensitivity, is sometimes cast in subjunctive terms, but often given a
possible worlds construal. Safety says that S knows that p only if,
were S to believe that p, p would be true. Alternatively put, S knows
that p only if, in many, most, nearly all, or all nearby worlds
(depending on the strength of the principle endorsed by the particular
theorist) where S believes that p, p is true. The anti-luck intuition
at the heart of safety is that S knows that p only if S's belief could
not easily have been false. That safety requires true belief
throughout nearby worlds ensures this result.
Notice that safety sounds, on first hearing, like the contrapositive
of sensitivity. ("If S were to believe that p, p would be true"
versus "If p were false, S would not believe that p.") It is
important to see that subjunctive conditionals do not contrapose, else
the principles would be equivalent. The difference can be illustrated
by means of an example, which also serves to demonstrate one of the
major advantages claimed for safety over sensitivity. Take the
proposition I am not a BIV (where "I" refers to the agent, S). If
that were false, by hypothesis, S would believe that it is true
anyway, and therefore, according to the sensitivity principle, S does
not know that she is not a BIV. But in all the nearby worlds were S
believes that she is not a BIV, it is true (assuming, of course, that
the actual world is rather like we believe it to be). So safety is
compatible with knowledge that radical skeptical hypotheses are false,
and in turn safety upholds the closure principle. For example, S
knows—has a safe belief—that she is typing at her computer, that this
entails that she is not a BIV, and also that she is not a BIV.
Safety, then, promises a Moorean response to the skeptic, thereby
achieving a stronger anti-skeptical result than sensitivity, and is
not committed to obvious closure violations.
Sosa (1999) explains how safety overcomes the higher-level knowledge
and inductive knowledge objections to sensitivity. Suppose S knows
that p. Is safety compatible with S's knowing that she knows that p?
Because her belief that p is safe, p is true in the nearby worlds
where she believes that p. Then, S's belief that her belief that p is
also safe, because the first-level belief is true throughout nearby
worlds, and in those worlds, S believes that her first-level belief is
true. That is, S's belief that q—her belief that p is true—is true
throughout nearby worlds, because her belief that p is true is itself
true throughout nearby worlds.
Safety also appears to be compatible with inductive knowledge. In the
previously mentioned trash chute case, S's belief is safe because, in
most nearby worlds where S believes that the garbage will fall to the
basement, it is true. John Greco (2003) questions this result by
juxtaposing two cases. In order to reconcile safety with inductive
knowledge, the principle needs a somewhat weak reading: S's belief is
safe if and only if it is true throughout most nearby worlds. On the
other hand, in order to account for the intuition that one does not
know that one's lottery ticket will lose, safety requires a stronger
formulation: S's belief is safe if and only if it is true throughout
all nearby worlds. Why? Because given the incredible odds against
winning the lottery, say, 1 in 10 million, there are extremely few
nearby worlds where one wins. If we carry the strong reading over to
the trash chute case, then it would seem that S's belief is not safe.
After all, there are many nearby possible worlds where, for whatever
reason, the bag does not fall to the basement. Presumably, S would
believe that the bag will fall anyway, and therefore her belief
violates safety.
Duncan Pritchard (2005, chapter 6) argues that this conflict is
illusory, and that paying close attention to the details of the cases
described can resolve it. "As Sosa describes [the trash chute case],
there clearly isn't meant to be a nearby possible world where the bag
snags on the way down" (Pritchard 2005, 164). Thus even the
strengthened version of safety is claimed to be compatible with
inductive knowledge in the trash chute case. On the other hand, if
there are nearby worlds where the bag gets snagged, then safety is
violated, but in that case, perhaps it is correct to say that S does
not knows that the bag will drop.
It is worth noting, too, that Pritchard's path to endorsing the safety
principle begins with his general characterization of luck, the
central element of which is this: "If an event is lucky, then it is an
event that occurs in the actual world but which does not occur in a
wide class of the nearest possible worlds where the relevant initial
conditions for that event are the same as in the actual world"
(Pritchard 2005, 128). Knowledge-precluding epistemic luck, then,
occurs where one's belief is true, but there are nearby worlds where
her belief, formed in the same way as in the actual world, is false.
Thus Pritchard has a more general, independent motivation for safety
than just a desire to overcome problems with sensitivity.
Timothy Williamson (2000) has also advocated safety. One crucial
consideration in his work is that knowledge, as we saw above in the
discussion of sensitivity, requires a margin for error. He argues
that sensitivity does not always respect those margins. (Recall the
case of Smith's belief that Jones [who is six-foot-ten] is at least
six feet tall—if Jones were five-eleven-and-a-half, Smith (by
hypothesis) would believe falsely that Jones is at least six feet
tall, even though Jones knows in the actual case.) Safety is designed
with the need for an error margin in mind, precisely because it
requires that S's belief is true throughout nearby worlds.
One of safety's central positive features also constitutes a potential
problem for it—that it grounds the Moorean strategy for defeating the
skeptic and thereby upholds closure. For many philosophers, it is
very difficult to see how a person could know she is not a BIV.
Putting the point in a way that perhaps sounds question-begging in
favor of sensitivity, one might say that S simply cannot know that
radical skeptical hypotheses are false because she would believe, for
example, that she is not a BIV even if she were one—she simply cannot
tell the difference between BIV worlds and normal worlds. Whether one
deems this a serious problem depends on whether one believes that
knowledge always requires a capacity to discriminate worlds where p is
true from worlds where p is false. If one is not moved by any such
discrimination requirement, one will not be moved by this objection.
See Becker (2006b) for a criticism of safety that does not hinge on
discrimination per se, but which shows how safety is compatible with
knowledge-precluding luck when a safe belief is formed by an
unreliable belief forming process. Sosa (2000, note 10) seems to have
anticipated a similar concern: "what is required for a belief to be
safe is not just that it would be held only if true, but rather that
it be held on a reliable indication," whereas Becker's examples hinge
on unreliably formed belief. Whether the reliability requirement
ought to be built into safety or added as a further necessary
condition for knowledge is a separate issue.
This section provided an overview of the two main anti-luck tracking
principles discussed in the contemporary literature. Together with
the preceding discussions of precursors to process reliabilism,
process reliabilism itself, and close cousins, such as proper function
theory and agent reliabilism, the reader should now be well-placed to
investigate the varieties of reliabilism in some depth.
6. Conclusion
There are many possible motivations for a reliabilist account of
knowledge: its naturalistic orientation makes it ripe for
interdisciplinary investigation, particularly with cognitive science;
its externalist underpinning makes possible both an account of
unreflective knowledge and a strategy against the skeptic; its aim to
elucidate a real link between belief and truth makes it a plausible
basis for justification and suggests ways of handling
knowledge-precluding luck. Though reliabilism takes many forms, each
focuses on the truth-conduciveness of the process or specific method
through which belief is formed. Reliabilism makes no antecedent
commitment to traditional ideas about knowledge— for example, that one
must have accessible reasons for belief, or that one must fulfill
one's epistemic duty to count as knowing— and therefore admits of more
flexibility in its possible developments.
7. References and Further Reading
* Armstrong, D. 1973. Belief, Truth, and Knowledge (London:
Cambridge University Press).
o This is an early reliabilist account of knowledge,
according to which knowledge requires a law-like connection between
the state of affairs that p and one's belief that p.
* Becker, K. 2006a. "Is Counterfactual Reliabilism Compatible with
Higher-Level Knowledge?" dialectica 60:1, 79-84.
o Replies to Vogel's (2000) argument that sensitivity is
incompatible with knowing that one knows, or knowing that one has a
true belief.
* Becker, K. 2006b. "Reliabilism and Safety," Metaphilosophy 37:5, 691-704.
o Argues that safety (or any tracking principle) is
insufficient, by itself, to eliminate knowledge-precluding luck due to
faulty belief-forming processes.
* Becker, K. 2008. "Epistemic Luck and The Generality Problem,"
Philosophical Studies 139, 353-66.
o Argues that there are two distinct sources of epistemic
luck, so an anti-luck theory requires two distinct "reliability"
conditions: one local, one global. Together, the two conditions
provide a basis for a solution to the generality problem.
* Becker, K. 2009. "Margins for Error and Sensitivity: What Nozick
Might Have Said," Acta Analytica 24:1, 17-31.
o Explains how, on a particular Nozickean conception of the
methods by which an agent forms belief, sensitivity theorists can
avoid Timothy Williamson's counterexamples to sensitivity that are
based on the plausible idea that knowledge requires a margin for
error.
* Beebe, J. 2004. "The Generality Problem, Statistical Relevance
and the Tri-Level Hypothesis," Noûs 38:1, 177-95.
o Argues that the generality problem can be solved by appeal
to the tri-level hypothesis for cognitive processing, which
distinguishes three basis levels of explanation: computational,
algorithmic, and implementation.
* Bergmann, M. 2006. Justification Without Awareness (Oxford:
Oxford University Press).
o Defends externalism about justification, after presenting
a dilemma for internalism—that it leads either to vicious regress or
to skepticism.
* Black, T. 2002. "A Moorean Response to Brain-in-a-vat
Skepticism," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 80, 148–163.
o Explains how, on an externalist conception of the methods
by which one forms belief, Nozickean sensitivity can account for
knowledge that radical skeptical hypotheses are false, which in turn
can allow sensitivity theorists to uphold closure.
* BonJour, L. 1980. "Externalist Theories of Empirical Knowledge,"
Midwest Studies in Philosophy 5, 53-73.
o Argues that externalist theories of justification and
knowledge are insufficient because one can have, say, reliably formed
belief, but in some cases those beliefs will be irrational.
* BonJour, L. 1985. The Structure of Empirical Knowledge
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
o Presents a master argument against foundationalism, and
then a dilemma for internalist foundationalists who appeal to "the
given", while arguing that externalism, as a plausible way out of the
dilemma, fails to answer to our concept of justification.
* Cohen, S. 1984. "Justification and Truth," Philosophical Studies
46:3, 279-95.
o Presents the New Evil Demon problem, which aims to show
that one could have lots of justified beliefs, all of which are false.
* Cohen, S. 2002. "Basic Knowledge and the Problem of Easy
Knowledge," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LXV:2, 309-29.
o Presents two arguments to show that theories that allow
basic knowledge—knowledge from a reliable source but where one need
not know that the source is reliable—permit implausible bootstrapping
from the basic source to achieve knowledge that the source itself is
reliable.
* Comesaña, J. 2006. "A Well-Founded Solution to the Generality
Problem," Philosophical Studies 129, 27-47.
o Argues that any adequate epistemological theory requires
an account of the basing relation, and that such an account can be the
basis of a solution to the generality problem for reliabilism.
* Conee, E. and Feldman, R. 1998. "The Generality Problem for
Reliabilism," Philosophical Studies 89, 1-2
o Formulates the generality problem for reliabilism and
argues that proffered solutions extant in the literature fail to solve
it.
* Dretske, F. 1971. "Conclusive Reasons," Australasian Journal of
Philosophy 49:1, 1-22.
o Presents an account of knowledge-constituting reasons that
anticipates Nozick's variance condition (which has come to be known as
sensitivity).
* Feldman, R. 1985. "Reliability and Justification," The Monist
68:2, 159-74.
o Formulates the generality problem for reliabilism in terms
of a dilemma, where one horn is the single case problem, and the other
horn is the no-distinction problem.
* Feldman, R. and Conee, E. 1985. "Evidentialism," Philosophical
Studies 48, 15-34.
o Offers an account of justification and well-foundedness in
terms of the fit between one's doxastic attitude and one's evidence.
* Fumerton, R. 1995. Metaepistemology and Skepticism (Rowman &
Littlefield, Lanham, MD).
o Elicits relationships between metaepistemological topics,
such as the analysis of knowledge, and skepticism, and argues that
externalism fails to take skeptical concerns seriously.
* Gettier, E. 1963. "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" Analysis
23:6, 121-2
o Presents two widely accepted counterexamples to the
tripartite analysis of knowledge as justified true belief.
* Goldman, A. 1967. "A Causal Theory of Knowing," Journal of
Philosophy 64:12, 355-72.
o Argues that knowledge requires a causal connection between
an agent's belief and the state of affairs that makes the belief true,
partly motivated by Gettier's counterexamples.
* Goldman, A. 1976. "Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge,"
Journal of Philosophy 73:20, 771-91.
o Argues that perceptual knowledge requires a capacity to
distinguish the fact that p from close possibilities where p is false,
anticipating Nozick's sensitivity condition.
* Goldman, A. 1979. "What Is Justified Belief?" in G. Pappas, ed.
Justification and Knowledge (Dordrecht: D. Reidel), 1-23.
o Aims to provide a substantive account of justification, in
non-evaluative terms, by reference to reliable, that is,
truth-conducive, belief-forming processes.
* Goldman, A. 1986. Epistemology and Cognition (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press).
o Continues and elaborates the reliabilist theory of
justification. Explains how thinking of reliability in terms of
truth-conduciveness in "normal worlds" helps to answer the objection
that (actual) reliably formed belief is insufficient for
justification.
* Goldman, A. 1988. "Strong and Weak Justification," in J.
Tomberlin, ed. Philosophical Perspectives 2, 51-69.
o By distinguishing strong justification (as actually
reliably formed belief) from weak justification (as believed reliably
formed belief), replies to the objections that reliability is neither
necessary nor sufficient for justification.
* Goldman, A. 1992. "Epistemic Folkways and Scientific
Epistemology," Liaisons: Philosophy Meets the Cognitive and Social
Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 155-75.
o Offers a virtue-theoretic approach to understanding
reliably formed belief, which in turn is the basis for justification.
* Goldman, A. 2008. "Immediate Justification and Process
Reliabilism," in Q. Smith, ed. Epistemology: New Essays (Oxford:
Oxford University Press), 63-82.
o Argues that reliabilism is uniquely suited to account for
basic beliefs—those not justified by reference to other
beliefs—thereby permitting a foundational epistemology that is not
threatened by a regress of reasons.
* Greco, J. 2003. "Virtue and Luck, Epistemic and Otherwise,"
Metaphilosophy 34:3, 353-66.
o Argues that epistemic luck is better handled by agent
reliabilism, where knowledge requires true belief acquired through the
exercise of an agent's character traits, than it is by extant versions
of modal principles (like safety) or by proper function accounts.
* Heller, M. 1995. "The Simple Solution to the Problem of
Generality," Noûs 29, 501-515.
o Argues that the notion of reliability is
context-sensitive, which provides a basis for a solution to the
generality problem.
* Klein, P. 1999. "Human Knowledge and the Infinite Regress of
Reasons," in J. Tomberlin, ed. Philosophical Perspectives 13, 297-325.
o Argues that an infinite regress of reasons is not always
vicious and thus infinitism is a better alternative to foundationalism
and coherentism.
* Kornblith, H. 2008. "Knowledge Needs No Justification," in Q.
Smith, ed. Epistemology: New Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press),
5-23.
o See the title.
* Lehrer, K. 1990. Theory of Knowledge (Boulder: Westview Press).
o His "Truetemp" example aims to show that reliably formed
true belief is sufficient neither for justification nor for knowledge.
* Markie, P. 2005. "Easy Knowledge," Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research LXX:2, 406-16.
o Aims to avoid the problem of easy knowledge for theories
that allow basic beliefs to be justified, by distinguishing between
when a belief is justified—say, the belief that one's belief-forming
process is reliable—and when that justification is of use against the
skeptic. We can bootstrap our way into the former justification, but
it does not put us in a position to satisfy the skeptic.
* Moser, P. 1989. Knowledge and Evidence (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press).
o Presents a causal theory of the basing relation—of the
reasons for which a belief is held.
* Nozick, R. 1981. Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press).
o Epistemological concerns constitute less than one-fourth
of this impressive book (which also includes discussions of
metaphysics, ethics, and the meaning of life). Nozick presents his
subjunctive conditional, or 'tracking' theory, which includes his
variance condition, now known simply as sensitivity.
* Plantinga, A. 1993. Warrant and Proper Function (New York:
Oxford University Press).
o Argues that warrant—whatever it is that ties one's belief
to the truth, constituting knowledge—depends on the proper functioning
of cognitive faculties.
* Plato. Meno. (Many translations)
o A dialogue on the nature of virtue and whether it can be
taught. The question of the value of knowledge is first presented
here.
* Plato. Theaetetus. (Many translations)
o A dialogue on the nature of knowledge. Near the end,
Socrates considers the view that knowledge is true opinion or judgment
with an account, closely related to the traditional tripartite
analysis of knowledge as justified true belief, and finds it
deficient.
* Pollock, J. and Cruz, J. 1999. Contemporary Theories of
Knowledge, 2nd edition (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield).
o Surveys contemporary epistemology and its problems. Also
presents a problem for Goldman's 'normal worlds' approach to
understanding reliability.
* Pritchard, D. 2005. Epistemic Luck (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
o Offers a general characterization of luck, in which terms
epistemic luck is formulated. Argues that epistemic luck is best
eliminated by a safety condition on knowledge.
* Quine, W.V. 1969. "Epistemology Naturalized," Ontological
Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press),
69-90.
o Argues, largely on the basis of failed attempts to
understand how philosophy can provide foundations for science, that
science itself needs to be pressed into the service of answering
philosophical questions.
* Ramsey, F.P. 1931. "Knowledge," in R.B. Braithwaite, ed. The
Foundations of Mathematics and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt
Brace).
o Proposes the first version of a reliabilist account of knowledge.
* Riggs, W. 2002. "Reliability and the Value of Knowledge,"
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64:1, 79-96.
o Argues that reliabilists can cite a source of value in
reliably formed belief because the latter indicates credit due to the
agent.
* Sosa, E. 1991. Knowledge in Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press).
o Presents a virtue-theoretic account of justification,
where the concept of justification attaches primarily to beliefs
formed from intellectual virtues, or stable dispositions for acquiring
beliefs.
* Sosa, E. 1991. 1999. "How to Defeat Opposition to Moore,"
Philosophical Perspectives 13, 141-53.
o Criticizes sensitivity on the grounds that it is
incompatible with inductive and higher-level knowledge, and argues
that safety better handles these kinds of knowledge and provides the
basis for a neo-Moorean anti-skeptical strategy.
* Sosa, E.. 2000. "Skepticism and Contextualism," Philosophical
Issues 10, 1-18.
o Criticizes contextualism but, more importantly for present
purposes, claims that safety must somehow be wedded to a "reliable
indication" requirement to be sufficient, in addition to true belief,
for knowledge.
* Sosa, E.. 2007. A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective
Knowledge,Volume I (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
o Distinguishes animal knowledge (apt belief) from adult
human, or reflective knowledge, and takes a virtue-theoretic approach
to both.
* Steup, M. 2003. "A Defense of Internalism," in L. Pojman, ed.
The Theory of Knowledge, 3rd edition (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth), 310-21.
o Defends internalism about justification, and characterizes
internalism as the thesis that all factors that justify belief must be
recognizable on reflection, thus discounting mere de facto reliability
as justificatory.
* Vogel, J. 2000. "Reliabilism Leveled," The Journal of Philosophy
97:11, 602-23.
o Criticizes both local and global versions of reliabilism.
Among other things, on the former, Vogel argues that sensitivity is
incompatible with knowing that one has a true belief, and on the
latter, presents the problem of easy knowledge.
* Williamson, T. 2000. Knowledge and its Limits (New York: Oxford
University Press).
o Presents a wide range of novel theses about knowledge,
including the claims that knowledge is a mental state, that it cannot
be analyzed, and that it requires a margin for error, which prompts
Williamson to argue for a version of safety.
* Zagzebski, L. 2003. "The Search for the Source of Epistemic
Good," Metaphilosophy 34:1/2, 12-28.
o Criticizes the machine-product model of knowledge on which
reliabilism seems to depend for not being able to explain the unique
value of knowledge. Replaces this model with an agent-act model.
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