Reliability: an introduction

Abstract

How we can reliably draw inferences from data, evidence and/or experience has been and continues to be a pressing question in everyday life, the sciences, politics and a number of branches in philosophy (traditional epistemology, social epistemology, formal epistemology, logic and philosophy of the sciences). In a world in which we can now longer fully rely on our experiences, interlocutors, measurement instruments, data collection and storage systems and even news outlets to draw reliable inferences, the issue becomes even more pressing. While we were working on this question using a formal epistemology approach Landes and Osimani (2020); De Pretis et al. (2019); Osimani and Landes (2020); Osimani (2020), we realised that the width of current active interests in the notion of reliability was much broader than we initially thought. Given the breadth of approaches and angles present in philosophy (even in this journal Schubert 2012; Avigad 2021;

Variety of evidence and the elimination of hypotheses

“…8 Osimani and Landes (2020) think that it is more appropriate for modern-day science that even reliable sources of evidence for scientific inference get things wrong, from time to time. For more debate on the notion of reliability (see Landes and Osimani 2020;Bonzio et al 2020). Hence, even reliable sources make Type I (falsely reporting that the hypothesis holds) and Type II (falsely reporting that the hypothesis fails) errors.…”