PHIL 2100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Virtue Epistemology, Reliabilism, Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski
Document Summary
Last week, we looked at an account of justification called process reliabilism or the idea that a belief is justified if it is the product of reliable processes. We also looked at how those reliabilists were able to deal with a major criticism: the problem of generality. Only certain psychological processes are relevant to justification; namely, those which are involved in belief formation. Some reliabilists think that alston"s proposed solution don"t believe it fully solves the problem. They take issue with the idea that what an agent does is somehow irrelevant to the question of reliability. These are called, interchangeably, either virtue epistemologists or agent reliabilists. Two of the heavy-hitters in this area are john greco and linda zagzebski. Together these form what greco calls the problem of strange and fleeting processes". The problem is that process reliabilism has no way to filter out these silly- but reliable- belief forming processes.