Philosophical Topics

ABSTRACT:

According to process reliabilism, a person's belief is justified just in case it is generated by a reliable belief-forming process. If somebody merely wishes that P is true, and proceeds to believe it for that reason only, the belief is not justified. Some critics of reliabilism, however, point out that each token process that causes a particular belief is of numerous different types, which can vary in reliability. So, which type must be sufficiently reliable? Process reliabilism needs to solve this "generality" problem. However, I argue that this requirement is overly stringent. As long as a target believer actually does employ a reliable belief forming process to arrive at his/her belief, that believer can rightly be credited with holding the belief justifiedly. The believer need not know what the details of the process are.