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I argue against mnemic reliabilism, an influential view that successful remembering must be produced by a reliable memory process. Drawing on empirical evidence from psychology and neuroscience, I refute mnemic reliabilism by demonstrating that: (1) patients with memory impairments (e.g., Alzheimer's disease) can also successfully remember the past despite the unreliability of their corresponding memory processes; (2) some reliability-affecting factors (e.g., stress, divided attention, and insufficient encoding time) can render the memory processes of healthy individuals unreliable without preventing them from occasionally resulting in successful remembering. Potential responses available for mnemic reliabilism are also evaluated. I show that those responses are susceptible to a challenge akin to the generality problem for process reliabilism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to provide a novel response on behalf of Process Reliabilism to the Swamping Problem. Unlike previous responses, the present response does not involve conditional probabilities (as Goldman and Olsson do), it does not appeal to permissivism or attitudes towards epistemic risk (as Pettigrew does), it will not depend on the generality of the problem (as Carter and Jarvis do) and it does not embrace either evidentialism or evidence monism (as Bjelde does). Instead it appeals to the modal properties of those beliefs formed through reliable process-types. What is more, the argument is generalizable: while I will frame my conclusion in Process Reliabilist terms, it should be of interest to anyone who is a truth monist regarding epistemic value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It's one thing to do the right thing. It's another to be creditable for doing the right thing. Being creditable for doing the right thing requires that one does the right thing out of a morally laudable motive and that there is a non‐accidental fit between those two elements. This paper argues that the two main views of morally creditable action – the Right‐Making Features View and the Rightness Itself View – fail to capture that non‐accidentality constraint: the first because it morally credits agents who make heavy‐duty moral mistakes; the second because it fails to generalise and is too conservative – a point which this paper gives renewed defence. The paper then goes on to defend and develop an alternative according to which moral worth is mediated by the agent's knowing how to respond to the reasons of the type which make acting in that way right. It's argued that this view avoids the problems for the alternatives, and it's shown that in order for the view to avoid collapsing into a problematic form of Reliabilism we'll have to think of states of knowing how as essentially successful in character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue that virtue reliabilism and virtue responsibilism are complementary. They do not give competing accounts of epistemic virtue. Rather they explain the excellent functioning of different parts of our cognitive apparatus. Reliabilist virtue designates the excellent functioning of fast and context-specific Type 1 cognitive processes, while responsibilist virtue means an excellent functioning of effortful and reflective Type 2 cognitive processes. This account unifies reliabilist and responsibilist virtue theory. But the virtues are not unified by designating some epistemic norm that both aim at. Instead, I unify them through their cognitive foundations. Because Type 1 and Type 2 cognition are complementary, reliabilist and responsibilist virtues are complementary. Thereby, this dual-process theory of epistemic virtue gives a naturalised account of virtues as well as an explanation of how reliabilism and responsibilism relate. This approach offers a solution for both the generality problem and the situationist challenge to virtue epistemology; additionally it preserves the epistemological autonomy of each virtue type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Alvin Goldman, reliabilists need to distinguish between unconditionally and conditionally reliable processes. The latter category is used to account for processes such as reasoning or memory. In this paper, I will argue that Goldman's account of conditional reliability needs substantial revision in two respects. First, conditional reliability must be reinterpreted in terms of dependent reliability to avoid serious problems. Second, we need a more liberal account that allows dependently reliable processes to operate not only on doxastic but also on non‐doxastic input. Thinking this way advances the explanatory power of reliabilism significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generativism about memory justification is the view that memory can generate epistemic justification. Generativism is gaining popularity, but process reliabilists tend to resist it. Process reliabilism explains the justification of beliefs by way of the reliability of the processes they result from. Some advocates of reliabilism deny various forms of generativism. Other reliabilists reject or remain neutral about only the more extreme forms. I argue that an extreme form of generativism follows from reliabilism. This result weakens a long-standing argument for reliabilism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is it for an imprecise credence to be justified? It might be thought that this is not a particularly urgent question for friends of imprecise credences to answer. For one might think that its answer just depends on how a well-trodden issue in epistemology plays out—namely, that of which theory of doxastic justification, be it reliabilism, evidentialism, or some other theory, is correct. I'll argue, however, that it's difficult for reliabilists to accommodate (the existence of justified) imprecise credences, at least if we understand such credences to be determinate first-order attitudes. If I'm right, reliabilists will have to reject imprecise credences, and friends of imprecise credences will have to reject reliabilism. Near the end of the paper, I'll also consider whether reliabilism can accommodate indeterminate credences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Full aptness is the most important concept in performance-based virtue epistemology. The structure of full aptness, in epistemology and elsewhere, is bilevelled. At the first level, we evaluate beliefs, like performances, on the basis of whether they are successful, competent, and apt—viz successful because competent. But the fact that aptness itself can be fragile—as it is when an apt performance could easily have been inapt—points to a higher zone of quality beyond mere aptness. To break in to this zone, one must not merely perform aptly but also in doing so safeguard in skilled ways against certain risks to inaptness. But how must this be done, exactly? This paper has two central aims. First, I challenge the credentials of mainstream thinking about full aptness by raising some new and serious problems for the view. I then propose a novel account of full aptness—what I call de minimis normativism—which keeps all the advantages of the canonical view, avoids its problems entirely, and offers some additional payoffs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A bi-level account of trust is developed and defended, one with relevance in ethics as well as epistemology. The proposed account of trust—on which trusting is modelled within a virtue-theoretic framework as a performance-type with an aim—distinguishes between two distinct levels of trust, apt and convictive, that take us beyond previous assessments of its nature, value, and relationship to risk assessment. While Sosa (A virtue epistemology: apt belief and reflective knowledge, volume I, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009; Judgment and agency, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015; Epistemology, University Press, Princeton, 2017), in particular, has shown how a performance normativity model may be fruitfully applied to belief, my objective is to apply this kind of model in a novel and principled way to trust. I conclude by outlining some of the key advantages of the performance-theoretic bi-level account of trust defended over more traditional univocal proposals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Street's (Philos Stud 127:109–166, 2006) "Darwinian Dilemma" is a well-known epistemological objection to moral realism. In this paper, I argue that "third-factor" replies to this argument on behalf of the moral realist, as popularized by Enoch (Philos Stud 148(3):413–438, 2010, Taking morality seriously: a defense of robust realism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011), Skarsaune (Philos Stud 152(2):229–243, 2011) and Wielenberg (Ethics 120(3):441–464, 2010, Robust ethics: the metaphysics and epistemology of godless normative realism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014), cannot succeed. This is because they are instances of the illegitimate form of reasoning known as "bootstrapping." The phenomenon of bootstrapping has been discussed in detail, most notably by Vogel (J Philos 97(11):602–623, 2000) and Cohen (Philos Phenomenol Res 65(2):309–329, 2002), in a different context as an objection to reliabilism and related theories of knowledge. I introduce four different characterizations of the error of bootstrapping from the epistemic literature in order to argue that the form of reasoning exemplified by third-factor replies would be deemed illegitimate by every one of them. I conclude that the moral realist should abandon third-factor replies, or else suggest a novel diagnosis for what goes wrong in bootstrapping cases that does not apply equally to the realist's form of argument. However, I am not optimistic about the prospects for this latter strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that reliabilism can plausibly live without epistemic consequentialism, either as part of a non‐consequentialist normative theory or as a non‐normative account of knowledge on a par with certain accounts of the metaphysics of perception and action. It argues moreover that reliabilism should not be defended as a consequentialist theory. Its most plausible versions are not aptly dubbed 'consequentialist' in any sense that genuinely parallels the dominant sense in ethics. Indeed, there is no strong reason to believe reliabilism was ever seriously intended as a form of epistemic consequentialism. At the heart of its original motivation was a concern about the necessity of non‐accidentality for knowledge, a concern quite at home in a non‐consequentialist or non‐normative setting. Reliabilism's connection to epistemic consequentialism was an accretion of the '80s, and a feature of only one of its formulations in that decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The swamping problem is to explain why knowledge is epistemically better than true belief despite being no more true, if truth is the sole fundamental epistemic value. But Carter and Jarvis (2012) argue that the swamping thesis at the heart of the problem 'is problematic whether or not one thinks that truth is the sole epistemic good'. I offer a counterexample to this claim, in the form of a theory of epistemic value for which the swamping thesis is not problematic: evidence monism. Then I argue that another kind of response to the swamping problem given by Sylvan 2018 does not escape the problem unscathed, because it is not only instrumentalism that gives rise to the swamping problem. The upshot is that, given a standard account of fundamental value, the swamping problem favours evidence monism over truth monism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on epistemic non-consequentialism and epistemic consequentialism. Topics include unclear about the dominant position before epistemic utility theorists started treating it as the default approach; discusses relevant themes and lessons from extensive literature in ethics; and prefers reliabilism as it provides explanation of considered epistemic intuitions.

The article explores how to solving the generality problem for reliabilism with development in epistemology and development of a reliability theory of justification. Topics discussed include reliabilism fails to deliver any epistemic verdicts about any particular in hypothetical, beliefs; reliability determines the degree of justification for the belief; and reliabilist is applying the theory to particular cases by consulting her intuitions of justifiedness.

I lay out the challenge posed by testimonial knowledge in young children to virtue reliabilist accounts of knowledge. In particular, I examine accounts from Greco and Pritchard and argue that those accounts are too demanding. More specifically, I make the case that young children can have testimonial knowledge without meeting the ability requirements claimed by Greco and Pritchard. As a virtue theoretic alternative, I argue that an agent's belief must be epistemically virtuous, but that this may sometimes involve belief from a trait rather than an ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Matthew Frise claims that reliabilist theories of justification have a temporality problem—the problem of providing a principled account of the temporal parameters of a process's performance that determine whether that process is reliable at a given time. Frise considers a representative sample of principled temporal parameters and argues that there are serious problems with all of them. He concludes that the prospects for solving the temporality problem are bleak. Importantly, Frise argues that the temporality problem constitutes a new reason to reject reliabilism. On this point, I argue that Frise is mistaken. There are serious interpretive difficulties with Frise's argument. In this essay, I show that there are principled and reasonable temporal parameters for the reliabilist to adopt that successfully undermine the interpretations of Frise's argument that only invoke plausible premises. There are interpretations of Frise's argument that leave reliabilism without a clear parameter solution. However, I argue that these interpretations invoke controversial premises that are at best unmotivated, and at worst they merely re-raise older disputes about reliabilism. In any event, the temporality problem fails to constitute a new reason to reject reliabilism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I criticize 5 arguments for the conclusion that religious belief is unreliably formed and hence epistemically tainted. The arguments draw on scientific evidence from Cognitive Science of Religion. They differ considerably as to why the evidence points to unreliability. Two arguments conclude to unreliability because religious belief is shaped by evolutionary pressures; another argument states that the mechanism responsible for religious belief produces many false god-beliefs; a similar argument claims that the mechanism produces incompatible god-beliefs; and a final argument states that the mechanism is offtrack. I argue that the arguments fail to make the case for unreliability or that the unreliability can be overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I aim to develop a novel virtue reliabilist account of justified belief, which incorporates insights from both process reliabilism and extant versions of virtue reliabilism. Like extant virtue reliabilist accounts of justified belief, the proposed view takes it that justified belief is a kind of competent performance and that competent performances require reliable agent abilities. However, unlike extant versions of virtue reliabilism, the view takes abilities to essentially involve reliable processes. In this way, the proposed view should take a leaf from process reliabilism. Finally, I will provide reason to believe that the view compares favourably with both extant versions of virtue reliabilism and process reliabilism. In particular, I will show that in taking abilities to essentially involve reliable processes, the view has an edge over extant versions of virtue reliabilism. Moreover, I will argue that the proposed view can either solve or defuse a number of classical problems of process reliabilism, including the new evil demon problem, the problem of clairvoyant cases and the generality problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While it may be a datum of common sense that perceptual experiences can justify beliefs, there is no clear consensus about how they can do so. According to what I call "inferentialism," perceptual experiences can justify beliefs because perceptual experiences have propositional contents and thus can serve as reasons for belief. A critical commitment of inferentialism is that justification requires the obtaining of a nonarbitrary or nonaccidental semantic relation between justifier and justified, a requirement that I call semantic appropriateness (SA). By contrast, reliabilists reject SA and argue that perceptual experiences can justify beliefs because perceptual experiences are part of a reliable belief‐forming process. In this paper, I explore whether a commitment to SA inevitably leads to a commitment to inferentialism. This exploration is largely motivated by doubts over whether perceptual experiences have propositional contents. If those doubts prove to be well‐founded, then it seems either that perceptual experiences cannot justify beliefs or that some form of reliabilism is true. I argue that although we should take the doubts seriously, there is a way to make sense of SA that does not require inferentialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to challenge the reliabilist interpretation of William Ockham (ca. 1287-1347)'s epistemology. The discussion proceeds as follows. First, I analyse the reliabilist interpretation into two theses: (1) a negative thesis I call the Anti-Internalism Thesis, according to which, for Ockham, epistemic justification does not depend on any internal factors that are accessible by reflection; (2) a positive thesis I call the Reliability Thesis, according to which epistemic justification in Ockham depends on the reliability of a causal process through which a given judgment is produced. Secondly, I argue that the Anti-Internalism Thesis fails since Ockham's notion of evidentness (evidentia), which is at the heart of his theory of justification, strongly suggests that he posits an indispensable, internalist element of justification. Lastly, I argue that the Reliability Thesis also fails since not only can there be a reliable but inevident judgment in Ockham's framework, his emphasis on causality is best read not as talk of reliability, but as his emphasis on the relation between reason (or evidence) and what is based on reason. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The standard reliabilist line on defeat is open to counterexamples regarding its necessity and sufficiency. In this paper, I present three problems for the standard reliabilist line from the recent literature on defeat before arguing that reliabilists can solve those problems by adopting an account of justification that ties defeat to the evidence possessed by the relevant agent. In doing so, I show that there is a conception of having evidence that reliabilists can adopt without giving up on the core commitments of their research program, namely the reduction of epistemic facts and having a psychologically realistic account of justification. My account of defeat draws on the account of propositional justification, transglobal evidentialism, defended by David Henderson, Terry Horgan, and Matjaž Potrč. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debate rages in virtue epistemology between virtue reliabilists and responsibilists. Here, I develop and argue for a new kind of responsibilism that is more conciliar to reliabilism. First, I argue that competence-based virtue reliabilism(s) cannot adequately ground epistemic credit. Then, with this problem in hand, I show how Aristotle’s virtue theory is motivated by analogous worries. Yet, incorporating too many details of Aristotelian moral theory leads to problems, notably the problem of unmotivated belief. As a result, I suggest a re-turn to Aristotle to develop a distinctively epistemological virtue theory that does not require any motive or affect for epistemic virtue. Nevertheless, my theory affirms that virtues are acquired, agent-expressive traits. The result is a conciliar responsibilism that leans closer to reliabilism. I end by arguing that my virtue responsibilism can solve worries facing both reliabilism and (extant) responsibilism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on concept on how reliabilism runs into special trouble regarding lottery cases. It is mentioned that lottery cases do forceus to pay close attention to the relation between justification and probability. The article adds that reliabilism is one of the leading theories of epistemic justification that appeals to probabilistic considerations and combination of reliability as increase in probability and reliability as high likelihood ratio of cases.

The article presents a front cover of the journal "The Philosophical Forum," and table of content including "Universalizability and the Metaphysics of Moral Particularism, Specified", "Reliabilism, Lotteries, and Safaris", and "Relativism and the Conversation of the World."

The sensitivity of an energetic compound gives its vulnerability to accidental detonation, which is caused by an unintended stimulus. Shock and electric spark sensitivities of energetic compounds are two important sensitivity parameters for assessment of their safety in working places. Several correlations are introduced for reliable prediction of shock sensitivities of energetic compounds at 90, 95, and 98 % of theoretical maximum density (TMD) according to NSWC using Navy small‐scale gap test through their electric spark sensitivities. For 11 explosives, where experimental data of both shock and electric spark sensitivities were available, the predicted results at 90 % of TMD are compared with the quantum mechanical approach. The root‐mean‐square (rms) deviations of the new and complex quantum mechanical methods at 90 % TMD are 2.38 and 3.95 kbar, respectively, which confirmed the high reliability of the new method. For high explosives with 90, 95, and 98 % TMD, it will be shown that the predicted results of the new method are also much more reliable than one of the best available empirical approaches. A correlation between shock sensitivities on the basis of aluminum gaps with different thicknesses and the pressure required to initiate material pressed to 90 % TMD is also derived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an essay titled Aquinas on the Foundations of Knowledge, Eleonore Stump rejects the idea that Aquinas's epistemology is foundationalist. I agree with Stump, and share in her conviction that the Angelic doctor developed instead what can be seen as a kind of theological reliabilism. In this article, I intend to take her position a step further. First, I would like to show that Thomistic reliabilism falls into a vicious circle if seen as based on a merely rational theism. Second, I am going to argue that for Aquinas such reliabilism depends instead on Christian faith, construed as the act of believing the revealed truth by virtue of the love relationship that God allows human beings to have with him. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Generality Problem is widely recognized to be a serious problem for reliabilist theories of justification. James R. Beebe's Statistical Solution is one of only a handful of attempted solutions that has garnered serious attention in the literature. In their recent response to Beebe, Julien Dutant and Erik J. Olsson successfully refute Beebe's Statistical Solution. This paper presents a New Statistical Solution that countenances Dutant and Olsson's objections, dodges the serious problems that trouble rival solutions, and retains the theoretical virtues that made Beebe's solution so attractive in the first place. There indeed exists a principled, rigorous, conceptually sparse, and plausible solution to the Generality Problem: it is the New Statistical Solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to intellectualism, knowing how to V is a matter of knowing a suitable proposition about a way of V‐ing. In this paper, I consider the question of which ways of acting might figure in the propositions that intellectualists claim constitute the object of knowledge‐how. I argue that intellectualists face a version of the generality problem—familiar from discussions of reliabilism—as not all ways of V‐ing are such that knowledge about them suffices for knowledge‐how. I consider various responses to this problem and argue that none are satisfactory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to process reliabilism, a belief produced by a reliable belief-forming process is justified. I introduce problems for this theory on any account of reliability. Does the performance of a process in some domain of worlds settle its reliability? The theories that answer “Yes” typically fail to state the temporal parameters of this performance. I argue that any theory paired with any plausible parameters has implausible implications. The theories that answer “No,” I argue, thereby lack essential support and exacerbate familiar problems. There are new reasons to avoid any reliability conditions on justification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores a structural account of propositional justification in terms of the notion of being in a position to know and negation. Combined with a nonnormal logic for being in a position to know, the account allows for the derivation of plausible principles of justification. The account is neutral on whether justification is grounded in internally individuated mental states, and likewise on whether it is grounded in facts that are already accessible by introspection or reflection alone. To this extent, it is compatible both with internalism and with externalism about justification. Even so, the account allows for the proof of principles that are commonly conceived to depend on an internalist conception of justification. The account likewise coheres both with epistemic contextualism and with its rejection, and is compatible both with the knowledge-first approach and with its rejection. Despite its neutrality on these issues, the account makes propositional justification luminous and so is controversial. However, it proves quite resilient in the light of recent anti-luminosity arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the problem for theories of knowledge that place belief-forming processes center stage. Topics discussed include prominent approaches to the theory of knowledge such as proper functionalism and virtue reliabilism undermined by the shift to explanation indexing; indexing safety to the method of belief formation; and cognitive abilities leading to true belief.

Preservationism is a dominant account of the justification of beliefs formed on the basis of memory. According to preservationism, a memory belief is justified only if that belief was justified when it was initially held. However, we now know that much (if not most) of what we remember is not explicitly stored, but instead reconstructed when we attempt to recall it. Since reconstructive memory beliefs may not have been continuously held by the agent, or never held before at all, a purely preservationist account of memory does not allow for justified reconstructed memory beliefs. In this essay, I show how a process reliabilist account can maintain preservationism about reproductive memory beliefs while accommodating the justification of reconstructive memory beliefs. I argue that reconstructive memory is an inferential process, and that therefore the beliefs it produces are justified in the same way that other inferential beliefs are justified. Accordingly, my process reliabilist account combines a preservationist account of reproductive memory with an inferential account of reconstructive memory. I end by defending this view against objections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imagine I hold up a Granny Smith apple for all to see. You would thereby gain justified beliefs that it was green, that it was apple, and that it is a Granny Smith apple. Under classical foundationalism, such simple visual beliefs are mediately justified on the basis of reasons concerning your experience. Under dogmatism, some or all of these beliefs are justified immediately by your experience and not by reasons you possess. This paper argues for what I call the looks view of the justification of simple visual beliefs. According to the looks view, such beliefs are mediately justified on the basis of reasons concerning how the relevant things look. Unlike under classical foundationalism, under the looks view as I develop it, these reasons are public. They are public with respect to both their content and possession: with respect to content, they are not about ourselves and our experiences, and with respect to their possession, many people can have the very same looks‐related reasons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In what follows I offer a novel knowledge-first account of justification that avoids the pitfalls of existing accounts while preserving the underlying insight of knowledge-first epistemologies: that knowledge comes first. The view is, roughly, this: justification is grounded in our practical knowledge (know-how) concerning the acquisition of propositional knowledge (knowledge-that). The upshot is a virtue-theoretic, knowledge-first view of justification that is internalist-friendly and able to explain more facts about justification than any other available view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The series-resonant converter (SRC) has been used in several application and it recently became popular for smart transformers (STs). In this application, the efficiency and reliability are of paramount importance. Although many papers have addressed the design challenges to improve the converter efficiency, discussions about the reliability are still missing in the literature. In this context, this paper presents a design procedure focusing on the efficiency and reliability improvement of the SRC for ST application. High efficiency is achieved through the use of silicon-carbide MOSFETs, reducing conduction and switching losses, and the detail design procedure based on accurate losses modeling. High reliability is achieved through a fault-tolerant topology and reliability-oriented design of the resonant circuit passive components. Experimental results obtained for the optimized 10 kW SRC has shown an efficiency of 98.61%. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

I propose an amendment to Sosa's virtue reliabilism. Sosa's framework assigns a central role to sophisticated, conceptual, motivational states: 'intentions to affirm aptly'. I argue that the suggestion that ordinary knowers in fact are motivated by such intentions in everyday belief-forming situations is at best problematic, and explore the possibility of an alternative virtue reliabilist framework. In this alternative framework, the role Sosa assigns to 'intentions to affirm aptly' is played instead by non-conceptual motivational states, which I call 'needs'. The first part of the paper sketches Sosa's framework. The second develops the need-based alternative. I close by comparing the two proposals, concluding that the onus is at least on Sosa to say why his intention-based framework should be preferred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The generality problem is commonly seen as one of the most pressing issues for process reliabilism. The generality problem starts with the following question: of all the process types exemplified by a given process token, which type is the relevant one for measuring reliability? Defenders of the generality problem claim that process reliabilists have a burden to produce an informative account of process type relevance. As they argue, without such a successful account, the reasonability of process reliabilism is significantly undermined. One way for the reliabilist to respond is to attempt to construct such a theory of type relevance. But another way of responding is to argue that, if finding an account of type relevance is a burden for the reliabilist, then it is also a burden for everyone (or, mostly everyone) else. Thus, the generality problem doesn't present some unique reason to reject process reliabilism. I call this latter strategy a parrying response. In this essay, I examine the contemporary parrying responses of Michael Bishop and Juan Comesaña, which have both faced recent criticism. I respond to these critics, and argue that parrying responses are far stronger than defenders of the generality problem have appreciated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suppose that there are objective normative facts and our beliefs about such facts are by-and-large true. How did this come to happen? This is the reliability challenge to normative realism. As has been recently noted, the challenge also applies to expressivist 'quasi-realism'. I argue that expressivism is useful in the face of this challenge, in a way that has not been yet properly articulated. In dealing with epistemological issues, quasi-realists typically invoke the desire-like nature of normative judgments. However, this is not enough to prevent the reliability challenge from arising, given that quasi-realists also hold that normative judgments are truth-apt beliefs. To defuse this challenge, we need to isolate a deeper sense in which normative thought is not representational. I propose that we rely on the negative functional thesis of expressivism: normative thought does not have the function of tracking normative facts, or any other kind of facts. This thesis supports an argument to the effect that it is misguided to expect an explanation of our access to normative facts akin to the explanations available in regions of thought that have a tracking function. We should be content with explanations of our reliability that take for granted certain connections between our psychology and the normative truths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human Reliability Analysis (HRA) has always been an essential research issue in safety critical systems. Cognitive Reliability Error Analysis Method (CREAM), as a well-known second generation HRA method is capable of conducting both retrospective and prospective analysis, thus being widely used in many sectors. However, the needs of addressing the use of a deterministic approach to configure common performance conditions (CPCs) and the assignment of the same importance to all the CPCs in a traditional CREAM method reveal a significant research gap to be fulfilled. This paper describes a modified CREAM methodology based on an Evidential Reasoning (ER) approach and a Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) technique for making human error probability quantification in CREAM rational. An illustrative case study associated with maritime operations is presented. The proposed method is validated by sensitivity analysis and the quantitative analysis result is verified through comparing the real data collected from Shanghai coastal waters. Its main contribution lies in that it for the first time addresses the data incompleteness in HEP, given that the previous relevant studies mainly focus on the fuzziness in data. The findings will provide useful insights for quantitative assessment of seafarers' errors to reduce maritime risks due to human errors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reliabilism--the view that a belief is justified iff it is produced by a reliable process--is often characterized as a form of consequentialism. Recently, critics of reliabilism have suggested that since it is a form of consequentialism, reliabilism condones a variety of problematic trade-offs involving cases where someone forms an epistemically deficient belief now that will lead her to more epistemic value later. In the present paper, we argue that the relevant argument against reliabilism fails because it equivocates. While there is a sense in which reliabilism is a kind of consequentialism, it is not of a kind on which we should expect problematic trade-offs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses transmission views of testimony which claim that epistemic states can be transmitted between agents. It highlights the general notion that epistemic states are transmitted from speaker to hearer. It mentions the core idea of the transmission hypothesis that in various cases of testimonial knowledge or justification, the audience receives the speaker's knowledge or justification. Arguments against transmission are outlined.

The aim of this paper is to determine the relevance of an informational theory of knowledge to address recently discussed epistemic problems. I argue that Dretske’s classical approach is equivalent to the safety condition proposed by Pritchard to avoid epistemic luck. However, I claim that Pritchard’s condition has to be modified to avoid the so-called “generality problem” for reliabilism. I propose an alternative version of the requirement to deal with these problems and provide an equivalent informational condition. I conclude that this informational version is preferable since it reveals conceptual relationships between the constituents of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human subjects seem to have a type of introspective access to their mental states that allows them to immediately judge the types and intensities of their occurrent emotions, as well as what those emotions are about or 'directed at'. Such judgments manifest what I call 'emotion-direction beliefs', which, if reliably produced, may constitute emotion-direction knowledge. Many psychologists have argued that the 'directed emotions' such beliefs represent have a componential structure, one that includes feelings of emotional responses and related but independent representations of what those feelings are about. I argue that such componentiality may help to explain how emotion-direction knowledge is achievable. I begin by developing a hybrid view of introspection that combines David Chalmers' phenomenal realism with Alvin Goldman's 'partial redeployment' account of meta-belief content. I then provide a process-reliabilist account of introspectively gained emotion-direction knowledge that outlines the minimum conditions of reliably forming emotion-direction beliefs, and specifies several ways in which the warrant of such beliefs could be defeated by relevant counterfactual alternatives. The overall account suggests how distinct introspective processes might be epistemically synergistic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The questions 'Do I know p?' and 'shall I take p as a reason to act?' seem to belong to different domains -- or so claims Ernest Sosa in his Judgment and Agency (2015), the latest version of his virtue epistemology. According to Sosa, we may formulate the first question in a purely epistemological way -- a matter of knowledge "full stop" --, while the second one is necessarily intruded by pragmatic factors -- a matter of "actionable knowledge". Both should be answered, in his view, considering the reliability of my belief, but the former could be faced in total abstraction from my personal practical concerns. In this paper I dispute Sosa's view, and claim that no purely epistemic level of knowledge "full stop" is conceivable, at least within a reliabilist framework. A case is put forward in order to show that some given belief may not be considered as reliable by itself, as a token, but always as a member of a type, belonging to some class of reference of other beliefs. And the relevant class of reference may only be chosen considering personal practical interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cases of Norman the Clairvoyant and Mr. Truetemp form classic counterexamples to the process reliabilist's claim that reliability is sufficient for prima facie justification. I discuss several ways in which contemporary reliabilists have tried to deal with these counterexamples, and argue that they are all unsuccessful. Instead, I propose that the most promising route lies with an appeal to a specific kind of higher-order defeat that is best cashed out in terms of properly functioning monitoring mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented on epistemology. Topics discussed include reliabilism and skepticism against the objection that it makes incomprehensible how skeptical arguments; utilitarianism as not a thesis about the meaning of right; and the correct concept of neutralization and its disposition based on reliability considerations.

Reliabilists hold that a belief is doxastically justified if and only if it is caused by a reliable process. But since such a process is one that tends to produce a high ratio of true to false beliefs, reliabilism is on the face of it applicable to binary beliefs, but not to degrees of confidence or credences. For while (binary) beliefs admit of truth or falsity, the same cannot be said of credences in general. A natural question now arises: Can reliability theories of justified belief be extended or modified to account for justified credence? In this paper, I address this question. I begin by showing that, as it stands, reliabilism cannot account for justified credence. I then consider three ways in which the reliabilist may try to do so by extending or modifying her theory, but I argue that such attempts face certain problems. After that, I turn to a version of reliabilism that incorporates evidentialist elements and argue that it allows us to avoid the problems that the other theories face. If I am right, this gives reliabilists a reason, aside from those given recently by Comesaña and Goldman, to move towards such a kind of hybrid theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the epistemology of memory and testimony from former self. Topics discussed include the contribution of internal memory and external source of information such as a diary in a person's belief, the asymmetrical theory of testimony like reliabilism or justification to believe, and the normative and descriptive theory of epistemology.

Analytic epistemology is thriving. Many people, however, think that it has gone wrong. They judge that it has become a new scholastics, narrow-minded, obsessed by a small set of problems, most of them examined through repetitive examples, thought experiments and paradoxes, such as the Gettier cases, stories about fake barns, bank cases, brains in vats and evil demons, or the lottery paradox. Philip Kitcher is one of these critics. In an article called "Epistemology without history is blind" published in Erkenntnis in 2011, he takes his stand from William James, "There can be no difference anywhere that doesn't make a difference elsewhere" and judges severely the production of contemporary epistemologists. I disagree. Kitcher's judgment is hasty, and analytic epistemology is not guilty of the sins that he denounces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]