All Embracing But Underwhelming…

Goldman, Alvin I., ‘What is Justified Belief?’ in ‘Epistemology: An Anthology,’ eds. Ernest Sosa and Jaegwon Kim, Blackwell Publishers, Massachusetts, 2000

p. 340 - ‘Many epistemologists have been interested in justification because of its presumed close relationship to knowledge.’

Is proposing an account that claims that justified belief is necessary for knowledge and is closely related to it.

Is avoiding epistemic terms in his account; he wants a theory of justified belief that specifies, in non-epistemic terms, when a belief is justified.

p. 340-1 - Theory needs to not only state necessary and sufficient conditions but it also must be appropiately deep and revelatory.

p. 341 - Leaves open the question of whether an agent will know that her belief is justified or whether an agent needs to be able to give a justification for their justified belief. Justification comes from the process or properties of how the belief is acquired.

p. 344 - Thinks that the lack of a causal story to how beliefs are justified accounts for the failure of many accounts of how beliefs are justified and that it is the faultiness of belief-forming processes that inclines us, intuitively, to regard certain beliefs as unjustified [so very important to the essay].

p. 345 - ‘My positive proposal, then, is this. The justificational status of a belief is a function of the reliability of the process or processes that cause it, where (as a first approximation) reliability consists in the tendency of a process to produce beliefs that are true rather than false.’

p. 346 - Is vague on whether we talk about justification-processes having a ‘tendency’ to produce beliefs that are true rather than false as being a frequency (past-looking) or a propensity (forward-looking) because, he claims, we are vague in our language use in this regard and because we often think the two to be the same (i.e we think frequencies will remain constant).

‘We need to say more about the notion of a belief-forming “process.” Let us mean by a “process” a functional operation or procedure, i.e., something that generates a mapping from certain states - “inputs” - into other states - “outputs.” The outputs in the present case are states of believing this or that proposition at a given moment. On this interpretation, a process is a type as opposed to a token. This is fully appropiate, since it is only types that have statistical properties such as producing truth 80 per cent of the time; and it is precisely such statistical properties that determine the reliability of a process. Of course, we also want to speak of a process as causing a belief, and it looks as if types are incapable of being causes. But when we say that a belief is caused by a given process, understood as a functional procedure, we may interpret this to mean that it is caused by the particular inputs to the process (and by the intervening events “through which” the functional procedure carries the inputs into the output) on the occasion in question.’

There is a question as to how narrow or broad our input-output relations should be specified.

Suggests that processes are content-neutral.

p. 347 - Reasoning procedures cannot produce true beliefs from false premises: ‘What we need for reasoning and memory, then, is a notion of “conditionally reliability.” A process is conditionally reliable when a sufficient proportion of its output-beliefs are true given that its input-beliefs are true.’

Proposes an historical, or genetic theory of justified belif where a belief is well-formed only it it has an ancestry of reliable (or conditionally reliable) cognitive operations (i.e. memory beliefs are still justified if formed properly at the time even if you can’t remember the justification now). This is contrasted with Current Time-Slice theories of justification which focus on the justification of a belief to an agent right here and now.

Argues that foundationalism is a form of the current time-slice theory, as are coherence theories of justification.

p. 349 - Argues that we should talk about reliabilty in this world and not in worlds of Cartesian demons, et al.

Also argues that we need an explanation of why we count certain beliefs as justified and unjustified which would refer to what we believe about reliability rather than the actual facts of the matter.

p. 351 - ‘Furthermore, it seems implausible to say that all “available” processes ought to be used, at least if we include such processes as gathering new evidence. Surely a belief can sometimes be justified even if addtional evidence-gathering would yield a different doxastic attitude.’