Talk:Reliabilism

I appreciate the work that went into the earlier drafts of this article, but basically, they were obviously written by someone who lacks the philosophical sophistication to do this topic justice. It would have been OK if I had to rearrange a little here and there, change a few words, add a few qualifiers. In fact, I had to completely rewrite the thing--nary a sentence was left standing in its original form. Maybe I'm a little sensitive since Swain was on my dissertation committee, but jeez.

Basically, I think we should write articles about what we know enough about to be able to do an acceptable job, where "acceptable job" means "a job such that an expert on the topic would not have to completely rewrite the article from the beginning and change every sentence in it." Unless we have this attitude when we work on the 'pedia, it's going to get filled up with a lot of really bad cruft. --Larry_Sanger

Plantinga at least, would resist your assertion that reliabilism can be understood as just a further analysis of what justificaiton means. His book "Warrant the Current Debate" clearly possitions his views as a departure from the classical view of justification. In fact, he intentionally refuses to use the word justification in describing his own theory of knowlege.Mark Christensen

It's been a while since I've read that book, but I disagree that it offers a radical departure from the classical view of justification. He says, as most epistemologists do, that justification is a deontological concept (as I say in Ch. 1, Sect. 1 of my dissertation), and says that warrant, allegedly not a deontological concept, is a more interesting concept to analyze--that's how I remember it. In fact, I believe it's of the concept of warrant that Plantinga gives his account, not either of knowledge or of justification. Besides, on any account Plantinga would certainly not deny that reliabilism can be understood as an analysis of what justification means; any epistemologist knows that. --Larry_Sanger

That's true as far as it goes, but you have to admit that warrant, knowlege and justification are inherently going to be bound together conceptually, so that one cannot give a full acount of one of the three without at least commenting on the other two. If my memory serves, Plantinga argues that the deontological nature of classical justification is an inherent flaw, which can best be addressed by accepting his particular brand of externalist reliabilism based on an analysis of proper function. His account of warrant is thus intended to be free from both the normative and internalist aspects of classical justification (which he takes to be the two essential components of a theory of justification), and is therefore intended as an account of a reliabilism as a theory of knowledge which is explicitly not just a clarification of the classical notion of justification.

It may be that Plantinga is wrong, and that his view is actually compatible with the classical understanding of justification, or it may be that Plantinga's view is inherently problematic, but unless my memory is very faulty, Plantinga is very intentional about attempting to offer a critique of, and an alternative to, the classical view of justification. Mark Christensen

I'm not sure what your point with this long discussion is, Mark. Yes, your interpretation of Plantinga is correct. It doesn't have a lot of bearing on the present article, though. --LMS