Reliabilism and Relativism

In Proceedings of the 38th International Wittgenstein Society Conference (2015)
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Abstract

Process reliabilism says that a belief is justified iff the belief-forming process that produced it is sufficiently reliable. But any token belief-forming process is an instance of a number of different belief-forming process types. The problem of specifying the relevant type is known as the ‘generality problem’ for process reliabilism. This paper proposes a broadly relativist solution to the generality problem. The thought is that the relevant belief-forming process type is relative to the context. While the basic idea behind the solution is from Mark Heller (1995), the solution defended here departs from Heller on a crucial point. Because of this departure, my solution avoids a serious problem with Heller’s solution.

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Robin McKenna
University of Liverpool

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