Volume V (2022) (2015)
question. Feldman and Conee then move on to an example originally given by Lawrence Bonjour. 9
Suppose someone with genuine clairvoyance comes to believe the President is in New York as a
result of their clairvoyance. The President is indeed in New York, but they have no other evidence
of this, and they have no evidence that they are clairvoyant, much less evidence that clairvoyance is
reliable. Yet, since the clairvoyance does work, and is, therefore, a reliable belief-forming process
(on the traditional view of reliabilism), their belief should be considered justified. Reliabilists must
either adjust their thesis to get around this is sue or admit that this clairvoyant’s belief is justified.
My adjustments can account for this scenario. In the example, the clairvoyant simply comes to
believe the president is in New York but has no evidence for this belief, not even in the form of
mental experience - the belief simply appears on account of his clairvoyance, and he does not
question it. Since the process by which he formed the belief did not use evidence as an input, it
cannot be considered a reliable belief-forming process. Part of what the clairvoyant example
succeeds in showing is how important evidence is as a component of justified beliefs. Reliabilism
often does not account for this importance, which is why it is so difficult for it to deal with this
counterexample. Since my adjustments to reliabilism allow it to account for the importance of
evidence, it thereby allows reliabilism to account for this counterexample without much issue.
III. In Favor of Reliabilism
I have shown that my adjustments to reliabilism have allowed it to stand up to Feldman and
Conee’s arguments against reliabilism. However, I have not given much reason to prefer
reliabilism over evidentialism. After all, Feldman and Conee could be wrong about every one of
their objections to reliabilism, but it could still be true that evidentialism could do everything
reliabilism does better. To make the case for reliabilism, I wish to highlight why I find reliabilism
to be the more plausible of the two theories.
Feldman and Conee compare reliabilism to their notion of well-foundedness. WF is a
response to an obvious flaw with evidentialism; what if someone has a belief that fits their
evidence, but believes it for reasons other than the evidence they have? It seems their having the
belief and their having the evidence would be unrelated, and they would only have a belief that fits
their evidence by coincidence. WF states that the belief must be based on the evidence to be
9 Laurence Bonjour, “Externalist Theories of Empirical Knowledge , ” ( Midwest Studies in Philosophy 5, no. 1 (1980)): 69.
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