Volume V (2022) (2015)
accounting for by allowing for more than one process per belief). For example, the exact mental
events that led Jones to believe there is a flying saucer outside would include his seeing the flying
saucer, his existing biases regarding flying saucers, and his remembering that he had given his
daughter a light-up frisbee. There may even be more, but already we see three clearly distinct
processes. There is no reason to take all of these to be one process, even if they all contribute to the
formation of one belief. There are cases in which it may be difficult to parse if two processes are
distinct or not (such as vision and night vision), but in cases where each of the processes have
distinct inputs, there is no reason to assume them to be the same process. I find it difficult to
believe that there is an “exact process” for any belief that encompasses all mental events that
contributed to that belief without it being made of several distinct processes. In which case, adding
the exact process to the equation would be redundant since all of the individual processes are
assumedly already accounted for.
The second uncertainty Feldman and Conee address is that the notion of “reliable” is not
well agreed upon. They list several di fferent ways of defining “reliable,” including processes that
have led to true beliefs more often than not in the past, processes that lead to true beliefs more
often than not in the past and future, processes that lead to true beliefs more often than not in the
nearest possible worlds, and processes that lead to true beliefs more often than not in all possible
worlds. Feldman and Conee conclude from this that, “Because there are such drastically different ways of filling in the details of reliabilism the a pplication of the theory is far from clear.” 8 I am
unsure how this counts as a problem with the system. It seems to me that this is simply a case of
many thinkers disagreeing. Rather than being one large, confused theory, it seems to me this is just
a case of having several clear options to choose from. The fact that many thinkers disagree on
which is best is hardly a detriment to the theory overall, so long as anyone putting forth their
version of reliabilism is clear about which they endorse, or are at least careful to highlight that the
distinction does not matter to them (admittedly, the distinction does not yet concern me, at least not
for the purposes of this paper). All the examples given also have a common agreement, that reliable
processes lead to true beliefs more often than not. The differences between them seem minor. I
would also argue that a similar question can be made of evidentialism; what makes a belief fit the
evidence? This is an interesting question that I am sure many evidentialists have an answer for; I
would not say it was a flaw in evidentialism if different evidentialists gave different answers to this
8 Feldman and Conee, “Evidentialism,” 26.
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