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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Externalism and reliabilism go back at least to the writings of Frank Ramsey early in this century. The generic view has been developed in diverse ways by David Armstrong, Fred Dretske, Alvin Goldman, Robert Nozick, and Marshall Swain.
GENERIC RELIABILISM
Generic reliabilism might be put simply as follows:
S's belief that p at t is justified iff it is the outcome of a process of belief acquisition or retention which is reliable, or leads to a sufficiently high preponderance of true beliefs over false beliefs.
That simple statement of the view is subject to three main problems: the generality problem, the new evil-demon problem, and the meta-incoherence problem (to give it a label). Let us consider these in turn.
The generality problem for such reliabilism is that of how to avoid processes which are too specific or too generic. Thus we must avoid a process with only one output ever, or one artificially selected so that if a belief were the output of such a process it would indeed be true; for every true belief is presumably the outcome of some such too-specific processes, so that if such processes are allowed, then every true belief would result from a reliable process and would be justified.
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