Day 8: Introduction to Reliabilism

•      Review

•      Robert Nozick’s Tracking Analysis of Knowledge (simple version)

•      Objections and Revisions

•      Can Knowledge be Analyzed?

•      Read Brandom's "Insights and Blindspots of Reliabilism"

Review: Robert Nozick’s Tracking Analysis

•      Simple version: S knows that p iff

   (i) p is true, and

   (ii) S believes that p

   (iii) if p were not true, S would not believe that p

   (iv) if p is (were) true, S believes (would believe) p

Review: Objections and Revisions

•      Objections to the simple version

•      Nozick’s refined version:

   (iii) if p weren’t true and S were to use M to arrive at a belief whether (or not) p, then S wouldn’t believe, via M, that p.

   (iv) if p were true and S were to use M to arrive at a belief whether (or not) p, then S would believe, via M, that p.

Review: Some Strengths

•      Deals with Gettier problems

•      Appears to handle knowledge in empirical and mathematical (or other abstract) domains in a more unified, elegant way than, say, causal theory

Review: Some Concerns

•      There may still be some counter examples to the revised conditions

•      Counterfactuals and subjunctives are difficult to analyse

•      Difficult to get clear on what a method is and how broadly to construe it

–  the generality problem

Can Knowledge be Analyzed?

•      Wittgenstein on family resemblance

–   “game” and other such-like terms

•      What’s to be said for analysis in terms of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions?

•      Might knowledge be primitive?  A (unfortunately) quick discussion of Timothy Williamson (Knowledge and its Limits, 2000)

Kinds of Reliabilism

•      Reliabilism w.r.t knowledge

•      Reliabilism w.r.t. justification

•      The basic idea: both knowledge and justification involve reliably caused true beliefs

•      Reliable indicator approaches

•      Reliable process approaches

Goldman on Reliabilism

•      Reliable processes and reliable methods

•      How do we define reliability?  Why?

Key Methodological Moves

•      Epistemic (normative or prescriptive) terms are defined in terms of non-epistemic (non-normative or descriptive) terms

•      The rules being sought are not guidance rules

Goldman on Justification & Knowledge

•      Justification (roughly): belief formed from a reliable process, and no other reliable process exists that the agent could or should have used that would have changed the agent’s belief

•      Knowledge (roughly): reliable true belief where there are no relevant alternatives that pose a problem