Reliabilist Epistemology
Updated 2026-09-10
INTRODUCTION
English translation pending.
CORE DEFINITION
Reliabilism holds that to explain when a belief has a positive epistemic status such as justification or knowledge, one must mention whether the process that produced the belief is reliable, or more generally, truth-conducive. It is a form of epistemic externalism and belongs to naturalized epistemology. Its best-known challenge is the generality problem of how finely to specify the relevant process.
SCAFFOLDING EFFECT
Reduce cognitive load
- Process review: ask not what arguments you can give, but by what process the belief was produced. - Expert trust: provide a basis for relying on the diagnoses of others and on instrument readings. - Cognitive improvement: reduce error by fixing information sources rather than debating each belief one by one.
Anchor fast decisions
Reliabilism moves justification from what is internally accessible to the subject to the actual process of belief formation: a belief is justified if and only if it is produced by a process with a high ratio of true beliefs in the relevant environment. Justification then no longer requires the subject to produce an argument, but requires a stable truth-directed connection between the subject and the world.
MINIMUM ACTION
In progress 0/1Practice this model in one real situation:
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Source support: Explicit
- plato.stanford.eduhttps://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reliabilism/verified
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