Maria grew up in a normal environment and forms accurate visual beliefs about her surroundings. She has never studied optics or cognitive science and cannot explain why vision is reliable. According to reliabilism, are her visual beliefs justified?
ANo — she cannot articulate reasons or evidence for her beliefs, so they lack justification by definition
BYes — if her visual system reliably produces true beliefs, the beliefs are justified regardless of whether she can access or explain the reliability facts
COnly partially — she needs at least some introspective awareness of what makes her perception reliable
DNo — justification requires that the believer be able to provide a defense of their belief if challenged
This is the core externalist claim of reliabilism: justification is constituted by the actual relationship between the cognitive process and truth, not by what the believer can introspect or articulate. Maria's visual system reliably tracks features of her environment — that fact holds regardless of whether she knows it. Options A, C, and D all require the believer to have internal access to something (reasons, evidence, awareness, the ability to defend). These are internalist requirements that reliabilism explicitly rejects. Externalism explains how children and animals can have justified beliefs without any capacity for epistemic self-reflection.
Question 2 Multiple Choice
The generality problem challenges reliabilism because:
AReliable processes sometimes produce false beliefs, which shows reliability isn't sufficient for justification
BAny token belief-forming event can be described at many levels of generality — different descriptions yield different reliability assessments, and reliabilism provides no principled way to pick the right one
CReliabilism cannot explain how we know which of our cognitive processes to trust without circular reasoning
DThe theory depends on possible-worlds semantics, which cannot be empirically verified
The generality problem arises because process types are not given by nature — they are individuated by description. My current visual belief was produced by 'using perception,' 'using vision in good lighting,' 'using vision while wearing my glasses,' 'using vision in this room on this day,' etc. These differ in reliability: 'perception in general' is highly reliable; 'perception under these specific unusual conditions' might not be. Without a principled criterion for which description is the relevant one, reliabilism cannot deliver a determinate verdict on whether any particular belief is justified. This is a technical gap in the theory, not necessarily a fatal refutation.
Question 3 True / False
Reliabilism is an internalist theory of justification because it focuses on the reliability of cognitive processes, which the believer can introspect and verify.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: False
Reliabilism is explicitly externalist. Justification depends on whether the belief-producing process is actually reliable in the world — a fact the believer need not and often cannot access. Goldman's own examples make this clear: a clairvoyant who produces reliably true beliefs about distant events is justified (on reliabilism) even if she doesn't know why she has these beliefs or what process produces them. This contrasts with internalist theories (like classical foundationalism or coherentism) that require justification to supervene on facts the believer can in principle recognize from their first-person perspective.
Question 4 True / False
Process reliabilism can in principle explain why both a child perceiving the world accurately and a logician applying valid deductive inference both count as having justified beliefs, because in both cases the relevant cognitive process tends to produce true beliefs.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: True
This is one of reliabilism's genuine advantages over internalist theories. The child's perceptual system reliably tracks environmental features even though the child cannot articulate why. The logician's deductive inference preserves truth necessarily (if premises are true and the inference valid, the conclusion must be true — maximum reliability). Both processes satisfy the reliability criterion. Classical internalist accounts struggled with children and animals because they couldn't provide reasons or engage in epistemic reflection; reliabilism handles both naturally by shifting focus from the believer's introspective access to the actual truth-tracking properties of the process.
Question 5 Short Answer
What does it mean to say that reliabilism is an 'externalist' theory of justification, and why is this a departure from classical accounts like foundationalism?
Think about your answer, then reveal below.
Model answer: Externalism means that the facts that constitute justification — specifically, whether the belief-forming process is reliable — are not required to be accessible to the believer from their first-person perspective. A belief can be justified even if the believer has no idea that the process that produced it is reliable. Classical foundationalism is internalist: it requires that basic beliefs be self-evident or incorrigible to the believer, and that inferential beliefs trace their justification to foundations the believer can recognize. Reliabilism replaces this first-person accessibility requirement with a third-person, world-involving condition: does the process actually track truth?
The externalist move is motivated by real problems with internalism. Internalism struggles to explain animal and infant knowledge (they can't access justificatory reasons), and it risks skeptical regress (how do you justify your justifiers?). By grounding justification in the actual reliability of processes rather than in the believer's reflective access, reliabilism avoids these problems. The trade-off is that reliability is a fact about the external world, raising new questions: reliable in what environment? Across what reference class of situations? These questions animate the generality problem and subsequent reliabilist literature.