RELIABILISM by Gijo Mathew (09008)

Reliabilism is a general approach to epistemology that emphasizes the truth conduciveness of a belief forming process, method, or other epistemologically relevant factor. The reliability theme appears both in theories of knowledge and theories of justification. Reliabilism is sometimes used broadly to refer to any theory of knowledge or justification that emphasizes truth-getting or truth-indicating properties. These include theories originally proposed under different labels, such as 'tracking' theories.

Reliabilism encompasses a broad range of epistemological theories that try to explain knowledge or justification in terms of the truth-conduciveness of the process by which an agent forms a true belief.   It has been advanced both as a theory of knowledge and of justified belief as well as other varieties as such as positive epistemic status. Process reliabilism is the most common type of reliabilism. It has been used as an argument against philosophical skepticism.  Process reliabilism is also a form of epistemic externalism.

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 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. Reliability theories of knowledge of varying stripes continue to appeal to many epistemologists, and permutations abound.