Reliabilism is a category of theories in epistemology advanced as an account of both justification and knowledge, holding roughly that a belief is justified, or counts as knowledge, when it is produced by a cognitive process that reliably yields true beliefs. Process reliabilism, its best known form, has been used as an argument against philosophical skepticism, including skeptical scenarios such as the brain in a vat thought experiment, and is classified as a form of epistemic externalism because it locates justification in a fact about the belief-forming process rather than in anything the believer can access from the inside.
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Source Reliabilist Epistemology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
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1. Reliabilist Epistemology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyReliabilist Epistemology (SEP), introduction
One of the main goals of epistemologists is to provide a substantive and explanatory account of the conditions under which a belief has some desirable epistemic status.
Reliabilist Epistemology (SEP), on Goldman 1979
In 1979 Alvin Goldman published a paper entitled What Is Justified Belief?, which departed from several well-entrenched positions on the nature of epistemic justification.
View the Source Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Description
The generality problem: a token belief-forming process can be "typed" many broader or narrower ways, each with its own reliability level, so reliabilism as stated does not fix which type governs whether a given belief counts as justified. Anticipated by Goldman in his own "What Is Justified Belief?" and pressed more systematically by Feldman (1985) and by Conee and Feldman (1998).
A dissenting reading, from Richard Feldman and Earl ConeeReliabilist Epistemology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the biggest problem with defining reliabilism precisely?
The generality problem: any belief-forming process can be described narrowly or broadly, and each description can carry a different reliability score, so it is unclear which description should count.
Reliabilism holds, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's own words, that "a belief earns the status of 'justified' if it is produced by a process (or series of processes) that has a high truth-ratio," with ordinary perception, memory, reasoning and introspection as its standard examples. The generality problem, anticipated by Alvin Goldman himself and pressed more systematically afterward by Richard Feldman and by Earl Conee and Feldman together, points out that any single token belief-forming process can be classified as an instance of many different process types, narrower or broader, each with its own reliability rating, and the theory does not by itself say which type is the relevant one for judging whether that belief counts as justified.
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