Reliability and Justification

Feldman, Richard

doi:10.5840/monist198568226

Cited by 157 publications

(66 citation statements)

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“…The problem that Brandom invokes to undermine reliabilism is what has come to be known as the problem of generality, first noted by Goldman (1979) and developed in detail by Feldman (1985) and Conee and Feldman (1998). In Goldman's presentation, the problem arises from the fact that the process-token that produces a belief will be an instance of several process-types.…”

Section: Barn Facadesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inferentialism and knowledge: Brandom’s arguments against reliabilism

Zalabardo

2017

Synthese

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I take issue with Robert Brandom's claim that on an analysis of knowledge based on objective probabilities it is not possible to provide a stable answer to the question whether a belief has the status of knowledge. I argue that the version of the problem of generality developed by Brandom doesn't undermine a truth-tracking account of noninferential knowledge that construes truth-tacking in terms of conditional probabilities. I then consider Sherrilyn Roush's claim that an account of knowledge based on probabilistic tracking faces a version of the problem of generality. I argue that the problems she raises are specific to her account, and do not affect the version of the view that I have advanced. I then consider Brandom's argument that the cases that motivate reliabilist epistemologies are in principle exceptional. I argue that he has failed to make a cogent case for this claim. I close with the suggestion that the representationalist approach to knowledge that I endorse and Brandom rejects is in principle compatible with the kind of pragmatist approach to belief and truth that both Brandom and I endorse.Keywords Reliabilism · Truth tracking · Probabilistic tracking · Problem of generality · Pragmatism · Representationalism · Knowledge · Belief · Truth · Robert Brandom · Inferentialism Representationalism and pragmatismSuppose we have a range of objects, the As, and we want to explain the meaning of classifying them as Bs or not Bs. What form should this explanation take? One obvious B José L. Zalabardo

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Section: Barn Facadesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inferentialism and knowledge: Brandom’s arguments against reliabilism

Zalabardo

2017

Synthese

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“…7 Feldman (1985) 8 Technically, T 1 , as it is described here, is repeatable. A more fully described version of T 1 would include the year, millisecond, etc., at which the inference took place.…”

Section: No-distinction Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

A New Statistical Solution to the Generality Problem

Kampa¹

2017

Episteme

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The Generality Problem is widely recognized to be a serious problem for reliabilist theories of justification. James R. Beebe's Statistical Solution is one of only a handful of attempted solutions that has garnered serious attention in the literature. In their recent response to Beebe, Julien Dutant and Erik J. Olsson successfully refute Beebe's Statistical Solution. This paper presents a New Statistical Solution that countenances Dutant and Olsson's objections, dodges the serious problems that trouble rival solutions, and retains the theoretical virtues that made Beebe's solution so attractive in the first place. There indeed exists a principled, rigorous, conceptually sparse, and plausible solution to the Generality Problem: it is the New Statistical Solution.

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“…But in the case of this move to a proposition-relative conception of epistemic value, the relativization in question does not decrease the number of cases of conflicts or competition between items of final epistemic value or disvalue since one can come to believe that p at the same time as one comes to, or continues to, believe that q (where <p> and <q> are distinct 55 Two ways of resisting this result suggest themselves. The first is to insist that, when I come to believe that 7 is not prime, the relevant process by which my belief is formed is more narrow that the process of forming a belief in <n is not prime> for any natural number n. In a sense, this sort of response is always available to process reliabilists when faced with a putative counterexample, precisely because of another problem that bedevils their view, namely, the generality problem (see Feldman 1985;Conee andFeldman 2004 [1998];and Feldman and Conee 2002). But such a maneuver only deflects this particular example and not the more basic problem: for any given way of specifying the narrowness or broadness of the belief-forming process that, according to process reliabilism, is relevant to the epistemic status of a given belief, it will be possible to construct problem cases with exactly the same structure as the one provided here.…”

Section: Epistemic Trade-offs and The Separateness Of Propositionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Epistemic Teleology and the Separateness of Propositions

Berker

2013

The Philosophical Review

134

101

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Abstract:When it comes to epistemic normativity, should we take the good to be prior to the right? That is, should we ground facts about what we ought and ought not believe on a given occasion in facts about the value of being in certain cognitive states (such as, for example, the value of having true beliefs)? The overwhelming answer among contemporary epistemologists is: "Yes, we should." In this essay I argue to the contrary. Just as taking the good to be prior to the right in ethics often leads one to sanction implausible trade-offs when determining what an agent should do, so too, I argue, taking the good to be prior to the right in epistemology leads one to sanction implausible tradeoffs when determining what a subject should believe. Epistemic value-and, by extension, epistemic goals-are not the explanatory foundation upon which all other normative notions in epistemology rest.

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Reliability and Justification

Cited by 157 publications

References 1 publication

Inferentialism and knowledge: Brandom’s arguments against reliabilism

Inferentialism and knowledge: Brandom’s arguments against reliabilism

A New Statistical Solution to the Generality Problem

Epistemic Teleology and the Separateness of Propositions

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