A Critical Analysis of Process Reliabilism in "What is justified belief?"

Abstract

Process reliabilism is one of the most important, and impressive theories in epistemology that was formulated by Alvin Goldman in "What is justified belief?" in 1970s. In this paper, first, we describe process reliablism in a simple form. Then, we criticize this theory and explain it's advantages as well as it's dark points. Descartian evil demon problem, generality problem, lacking any reason for taking the process as a reliable process and the status of the beliefs results from introspection, are the most important problems of this version of the reliabilism. In other section of the paper, we explore the validity of these problems. Finally, it will be illustrated that process reliabilism has the capacity to solve some of the epistemic problems, such as Gettier counter examples.

Keywords

• alvin goldman
• process reliabilism
• internalism
• externalism
• evil demon problem
• generality problem
• introspection