Reliabilism and Externalist Theories of Justification

Process reliabilism, the most influential externalist theory of justification, was given its classic statement by Alvin Goldman in "What Is Justified Belief?", a paper published in Justification and Knowledge, edited by George Pappas (D. Reidel, 1979). Goldman proposes that a belief is justified if and only if it is produced, or sustained, by a cognitive process that is reliable, meaning a process type that tends, across the range of situations in which it typically operates, to produce a sufficiently high ratio of true beliefs to false ones. Paradigm reliable processes include ordinary perception under normal conditions, memory, valid deductive and reasonably strong inductive inference, and introspection, while paradigm unreliable processes include wishful thinking, guessing, and reasoning from unsupported prejudice; on this view what makes a belief justified is a matter of objective, causal-statistical fact about the process that generated it, not a matter of what reasons or evidence the believer can consciously cite or introspectively access.