Virtue Epistemology

Abstract

In chapter 1 we encountered a simple form of reliabilism about knowledge, called process reliabilism. This held that knowledge is true belief that is formed via a reliable process, where a reliable process is one that tends to lead to true beliefs rather than false beliefs. We noted that process reliabilism cannot deal with Gettier-style cases, and hence that it cannot be a fully adequate account of knowledge, at least as it stands. Given that Gettier-style cases essentially trade on the anti-luck intuition — the intuition that knowledge involves a true belief that is not true simply as a matter of luck — it follows that process reliabilism cannot accommodate this platitude about knowledge.