A RELIABILISM BUILT ON COGNITIVE CONVERGENCE: AN EMPIRICALLY GROUNDED SOLUTION TO THE GENERALITY PROBLEM

Abstract Process-reliabilist analyses of justification and knowledge face the generality problem. Recent discussion of this problem turns on certain untested empirical assumptions that this paper investigates. Three experiments are reported: two are free-naming studies that support the existence of a basic level in the previously unexplored domain of names for belief-forming processes; the third demonstrates that reliability judgments for the basic-level belief-forming process types are very strongly correlated with the corresponding justification and knowledge judgments. I argue that these results lend support to process-reliabilism; I then go on to explore several different ways to make use of them in solutions to the generality problem.