Goldman: Process Reliabilism

[0:00]You're watching the news, and the confident, well-dressed expert says something that sounds about right. And so you believe them. But why? You haven't checked what they said, and you haven't cross-referenced anything. But the anchor seemed pretty respectable, and the news channel is trustworthy enough. And so you think you've arrived at your belief by a process you think is good enough. This is the basis of what's known as 'process reliabilism' in epistemology, and it goes back to Alvin Goldman. Reliabilism is the idea that we are justified in our beliefs, not because of how they feel from the inside, but because of the process that produced them. If your belief comes from your good eyesight in good light, then that is a justified process, and a justified belief. But if your belief comes from wishful thinking, based upon preexisting biases, well, that is an unreliable process, and an unjustified belief. But the question then becomes, what makes a process reliable or not? And here Goldman says it's all to do with past success rate. If your dad is right about most things, most of the time, and across a variety of subjects, he has what's called 'global reliability'. And so you're justified in believing what he says. However, if somebody is known for lying, or making things up, or being confidently wrong, they earn the label 'unreliable', and you are not justified in believing what they say. Reliabilism teaches us that the origin of our belief is just as important as how certain it feels. And in an age of misinformation and fake news, the question is not so much what I believe, but how did that belief get there?