So today we discussed Goldman's reliabilism about justification. We considered some objections to his account. Any reactions to those objections? Do you think that reliabilism is in trouble as a result? Or are there good replies on behalf of reliabilism?
Before class I understood how reliabilism failed to be sufficient for justification but I didn't quite see how Feldman showed how it also failed to be necessary for justification. I now see that Feldman did show this with the Brain/Brian case. So there does seem to be significant objections to reliabilism that cannot be overcome. However, reliabilism seems to have some sort of merit. We tend to accept a belief if we have evidence that our process for forming that belief is reliable over a belief that we have seen is not reliable. So there seems to be some sort of relation between the reliability of a process and someones justification for having a particular belief. Possibly believing that you have a reliable process counts as a kind of evidence towards believing a proposition? If the evidence for two opposing beliefs is exactly the same but the evidence for how reliable my process is for each belief is different it seems that I would be more justified in believing the proposition that had the more reliable process. Such as if I went around without my glasses on I would be less justified that my visual process in seeing that there is a maple tree in front of me is more reliable than if I employed my sense of touch instead since I have no reason to think that sense organ is not working properly while I do have some evidence that my visual perception is not right. I guess my intuition says that having a reliable process is better than having an unreliable process but we have also shown that having a reliable process is not always needed and is not necessary for justification. I suppose another problem is that we don't really know what is reliable and what is not because we have no standard to compare our processes to in order to find out if we are all just brains living in vats or being controled by evil demons or actually living in a perfectly normal world.
ReplyDeleteI agree…….
ReplyDeletewith Rebekah, reliabilism does seem to have objection that I don’t see any way for it to be overcome, but it does seem to have a kind of merit. I really liked what she said at the end of her blog, “we don't really know what is reliable and what is not because we have no standard to compare our processes to in order to find out if we are all just brains living in vats or being controlled by evil demons or actually living in a perfectly normal world.”
The truth does seem to be that we really don’t know want is completely reliable. In the Greek myth of Perseus his mother was locked into a room because her father-the king learned that her child world kill him. While his mother was locked in the room she was impregnated by a god and gave birth to Perseus. For the first few years of his life Perseus had no human contact (besides his mother) and never knew about an outside world. What to say that the same has happened to us, the vast majority of the world locked away from us and all we can experience is a limited (if even that). For all we know all of our reliable knowledge about the world could be based of misconceptions.
Another possibility is that our idea of what is reliable is false. A child does not have a good understanding of what is reliable. Reliability is something that seem to be learned, so what we are taught wrongly. An example could be spelling, I could have been taught the spelling rule wrong by my parents as a child as so I would always spell words incorrectly ( or at least until I was corrected).
So can we realy know what is reliable?
-Chad Goodremote
Yeah, I definitely agree with the consensus:
ReplyDeleteBrain in the vat: I do not see how a reliabilist could respond to this example in a way that is consistent. If a reliabilist tried to argue that the processes by which Brain is accumulating knowledge is unreliable, whereas Brian’s way is, they violate the SE principle.
With C2 of the objections, I see a legitimate problem as well: the person cannot think they are reasonable if they are not sure their method of knowledge is reliable.
C3 is definitely the biggest concern for reliability. There needs to be standards for what we can consider to be reliable and until that, we can only evaluate on a case by case basis.
Another thing I have been thinking about is reliabilism’s relationship with evidentialism. Couldn’t someone argue that we rely on evidence to evince reliability? I think I could argue that the inference I make that leads to another inference because I have seen in the past that it is reliable (evidence).
I tried to look up some reliabilist responses, especially to generality, but I haven’t found any. I can’t come up with any responses on my own, so until I see actual reliabilist responses, I can’t find any ways of getting around the problem of generality.