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Perhaps the root idea of the tradition I am opposing can be given the label evidence

proportionalism. It is the idea that justifiedness consists in proportioning your degree of


credence in a hypothesis to the weight of your evidence.
—Alvin Goldman
Epistemology and Cognition
Process Reliabilism: Experimental Cognitive Psychology and
Neuroscience

by
David H. Perry

Since the time of Plato’s Theatetus, philosophers such as Plato’s Socrates have asked the
question: what is propositional knowledge? Merely believing something is insufficient for
knowledge because anyone can believe anything without any further stipulations than that the
subject accepts the belief. Even if the beliefs in question are true, knowledge still seems to
require more than a simple approximation to truth by an accepted belief. Plato’s solution to this
problem was to develop three conditions for the transmission of belief into knowledge:
justification, truth, and belief.
Since Plato, a number of thinkers have developed critiques of this paradigm that account
for different criticisms of it. I build on the work of a contemporary epistemologist named Alvin
Goldman who in his seminal work Epistemology and Cognition developed a radical new concept
of justification called process reliabilism. Process reliabilism claims that S knows that p only if
S’s belief in p results from a reliable belief-forming cognitive process. As a result of this work, a
debate sparked in contemporary analytic epistemology between what are traditionally called the
internalists and the externalists. Internalists claim that the determiners of justification must be
internal to the epistemic agent, whereas externalists claim that external reliability is the sole
determiner of justification. In the second chapter of this work, I provide an analysis of this
debate and subsequently argue for the externalist position against a number of contemporary
thinkers who seek to collapse the distinction. In the final section of this thesis, I incorporate
research from experimental cognitive psychology and neuroscience to update the research cited
by Goldman in Epistemology and Cognition.
TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

ABSTRACT v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii
CHAPTER
1 INTRODUCTION
2 INTERNALISM AND EXTERNALISM
2.1 Goldman’s Early Theory of Justification
2.2 Internalism and Externalism Debate
3 MAKING THE TRANSITION TO EXPERIMENTAL COGNITIVE
PSYCHOLOGY
4 COGNITIVE PROCESSES
5 TRANSITIONING FROM COGNITIVE PROCESSES TO NEUROLOGICAL
PROCESSES
6 DISCUSSION
WORKS CITED
CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Since the time of Plato’s Theatetus, philosophers such as Plato’s Socrates have asked the
question: what is propositional knowledge? Merely believing something is insufficient for
knowledge because anyone can believe anything without any further stipulations than that the
subject accepts the belief. I can believe that the alignment of the stars determines my fate or that
the shape of my skull determines whether I am susceptible to mental disease. One may believe a
whole host of things that are wildly incorrect. But even if the beliefs in question are true,
knowledge still seems to require more than a simple approximation to truth by an accepted
belief.
Consider the following example: imagine I believe that when I flip over the top card on a
deck of cards, a 4 of spades will appear. I have no other reason to believe that a 4 of spades will
appear other than that it just seems to me as though it will. Sure enough, once I flip the card
over, it is in fact a 4 of spades. In such an instance, I did believe that the card on the top of the
deck was a 4 of spades and as things turned out it was a 4 of spades. I accepted a belief and the
belief turned out to be true. Intuitively, however, something is still lacking here. It is a far
stretch for any rational mind to believe that a lucky guess such as this one will count as a form of
knowledge. Thus, belief is necessary but itself insufficient for knowledge.
Socrates suggests that the third condition that is needed to transform a true belief into
knowledge is justification. In contemporary Goldmanian terms, justification is a rule-bound
system that allows for a transmission permission of true belief into more respectable knowledge.
The rule or rules that justification cites are meant to act as reasons for why one is justified in
believing beliefs of a given type. Many thinkers have given different accounts of what it means
for a belief to be justified in the Socratic sense. Some of these accounts of justification require
having the “right to be sure”1 or having “adequate evidence” 2 that some proposition is true. For

1
Ayer, The Problem of Knowledge, 1-2.
2
Chisholm, Perceiving: A Philosophical Study, 43.
various reasons that will be discussed in what follows, traditional accounts of justified true belief
have fallen out of favor among a number of philosophers working within contemporary analytic
epistemology. Reliabilists have attempted to move beyond these traditional accounts of
justification by claiming that what makes an epistemic agent justified in holding a belief is the
reliability of the agent, process, or rule that was applied in developing the belief initially. Much
of this work will presuppose the reliabilist thesis. I will address many of the criticisms of this
position, but the thrust of the present research will remain committed to working within the
process-reliabilist paradigm.
The present research has a number of aims. First, I intend to present Alvin Goldman’s
account of process reliabilism as it is found in his book, Epistemology and Cognition. In this
work, he presents a dramatic departure from traditional accounts of justification and opts instead
for a theory of justification that involves assessing the external reliability of belief-forming
mechanisms. This theory is external in the sense that the justification-conferring process is
external to the epistemic subject (objective truth) and transforms true belief into knowledge by
establishing the reliability a belief-forming mechanism has of obtaining external truth. Second, I
will briefly present the debate between the internalists and the externalists with the intent of
arguing for the maintenance of the distinction versus some dissenters who would collapse it. I
will also present a litany of recent data from experimental cognitive psychology (ECP) research
with the intent of updating some of Goldman’s research in this field. The goal I have of arguing
for the externalist thesis is to defend externalism, via process reliabilism, against some of its
recent critics. Furthermore, I shall argue that some data from neuroscience can be used to bolster
Goldman’s analysis of the nature of human propositional knowledge.
Externally true beliefs are beliefs that correspond to features of the world that are true
irrespective of whether or not the reasons for the beliefs are subjectively accessible to the agent.
These are so called “subject-independent” truths. As the designation suggests, a subject-
independent truth differs from a subject-dependent truth insofar as the latter requires an agent to
recognize the conditions that make it true, whereas, in the prior case, the external conditions of
the world make the claim either true or false without needing subjective recognition. An
example of a subject-independent truth is: “The desk on which this computer is sitting is brown.”
Each of the properties described are features of the external world. For example, the beliefs “this
desk is brown” and “the computer is sitting on the brown desk” refer to properties of the world
that are true irrespective of whether or not they are subjectively available for the epistemic agent.
Conversely, consider the claim: “The computer on the desk is two feet away from me.” The
conditions of the world that make the statement true are relative to the indexical relation between
the speaker and some object in the world—namely, in this case, the computer. It requires both
an agent and a particular relation between the agent and the object to make it true. Thus, it can
be said to be subject-dependent.
To understand the role of ECP (and, perhaps, neuroscience) in Goldman’s Epistemology
and Cognition, it is necessary to first understand the justificatory structure of his J-rule
(justification-based) and R-rule (rule-based) frameworks. Goldman understands that a
justification-based framework is needed for three reasons: First, it may be the case that we have a
purely intrinsic interest in when a person’s belief is justified.3 Second, an individual may be
concerned with refuting skepticism, and because justification itself is often a means of combating
skepticism, there is some warrant in determining when one is justified.4 Finally, an interest in
justification may derive from an interest in knowledge.5 The R-rule system is warranted, he
claims, on purely semantic grounds insofar as epistemological propositions always take the form
of knowing that-p. Without an appropriate R-rule framework, competing theories of justification
would fail to resolve relevant disputes between propositions because they would be unresponsive
to the competition’s underlying presuppositions regarding the meaning of p. The reason for
Goldman’s rule framework is to generate a specific paradigm that will effectively adjudicate
between conflicting epistemic, social, and moral evaluative considerations. To do this, however,
Goldman needs to first establish an account of the assessment criteria for examining and
applying the J-rules (justification rules)

3
Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition, 58.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid.
The main thrust of externalist theory is to analyze the ability of an epistemic agent’s
belief-forming processes to determine which produce more external, or subject-independent,
truth claims rather than subject-dependent truth claims relative to some predetermined threshold.
It is in this sense that Goldman’s theory is teleological. Teleological theories are theories that
create normative prescriptions conducive to the production of certain predetermined ends.
Determining which ends are valuable to produce is important because the specifications of the
prescriptive constraints will follow from the ends determined. Goldman argues for an externalist
theory—or one that produces more subject-independent beliefs—by first outlining the following
list of possible options as goals for epistemological analysis. The following is a list of possible
goals for epistemology:6
1. Verific consequences
2. Coherence consequences
3. Explanatory consequences
4. Pragmatic consequences
5. Biological consequences
We are here forced to confront the same challenge as ethical consequentialism—namely,
providing an answer to the questions: Which consequences are valuable to produce? Which
value paradigm ought we accept? Which criteria are valuable in the construction of this
particular J-rule system? To answer these questions, Goldman draws on the motivations for the
project of epistemology itself. Epistemology, he states, is concerned with endorsing particular
methods and procedures in belief formation.7 An epistemological theory is valuable, then,
because it is able to endorse methods and procedures for knowledge acquisition that are better in
some sense than other methods and procedures. If this is the concern of epistemology, then an
account of which methods and procedures for producing knowledge is a necessary component of
a theory. What makes an epistemological theory valuable is that it actually is capable of
obtaining that which epistemologists seek to find: truth. Psychological processes, as those
aspects of our faculties that collect information from the external world, become the evaluative

6
Ibid., 98.
7
The following is a brief synopsis of Goldman’s Epistemology and Cognition Section 5.4.
focus of attention for what Goldman calls “primary justification” only after the criteria
determining which values are to be produced are implemented within the J-rule system.
Second, the goal of epistemology is to provide an analysis of justified true beliefs, or
knowledge. True beliefs, we will assume, are the product of some belief-forming mechanisms
that determine which of these processes is correct and which is not, and in which circumstances.
If it is the case that one is blind, then it is likely the case that one’s vision does not produce
correct accounts of the external world insofar as perceptual facts are concerned. If a person is
blind, then we will likely say that his vision is not a reliable means of achieving an appropriate
relationship with the external world, or the process by which beliefs about the external world are
formed is not a reliable process. Analyzing processes requires determining which process
produces which proportion of true beliefs to false beliefs. Coupled with the first goal of
epistemology, we ought not accept the rightness criterion of the deontological method of belief
formation—where “deontological” is meant to designate a set of conditions that must be met
prior to a belief being justified—because it fails to give an adequate evaluation of how a belief-
forming mechanism produces which proportion of true beliefs to false beliefs or how these
belief-forming mechanisms produce true beliefs. Later on I will discuss Goldman’s argument for
this point.
This brings us back to the candidates we have for justificationally valuable consequences.
What the prior two considerations indicate is that what is needed is a new requirement for
justification—namely, one that understands justification to be the result of a measure of the
reliability of belief-forming processes that produce beliefs. This requirement has a number of
implications. First, it shifts the locus of the truth-conduciveness function away from privately
available introspective states to the external world itself. By doing this, it analyzes beliefs, and
belief-forming processes, in terms of their external truth conduciveness while ignoring the
constraint that they be developed in a particular kind of way (namely, for internalists) from a set
of internal factors necessitating the formation of a belief. Second, it accomplishes one of the
primary goals of epistemology—namely, analyzing the causal processes responsible for the
production of externally true beliefs. Third, it evaluates epistemic agents and causal processes
responsible for belief formation in terms of their effectiveness at producing true beliefs.8
What follows from the above consideration is what Goldman is ultimately concerned
with—namely, the epistemological value of producing a greater degree of “verific”
consequences. If epistemology is the philosophical study of the possibility of human knowledge
and its themes are focused on strategies and methods for delivering truth, then it seems that if it
is going to pursue consequences rather than specific acts, verific consequences are the natural
answer to the question of which consequences are to be produced. Likewise, if justification is an
evaluative concept, and the epistemological properties that externalism assess are verific
consequences, then justification equates to an evaluation of the proportion or importance of
verific consequences produced by a given belief-forming mechanism or epistemic agent.9 The
idea of evaluating the degree of verific consequences produced by a given belief-forming
mechanism or epistemic agent brings us to the concept of reliability.
Assessing reliability is the primary motivation for Goldman. How many true beliefs
versus false beliefs did a given agent or belief-forming mechanism produce? It is only after
arriving at an approximate determination of this statistical figure that we can arrive at an account
of reliability. But the question remains: how many more true beliefs are needed for a belief-
forming mechanism to be reliable? Is having a probability ratio of, say, .51 true beliefs over
false beliefs sufficient? Maybe the answer is .75. The answer is not altogether clear, likely,
because there is no obvious answer. Reliabilist justification depends, instead, on what the
individual epistemic agent will accept as sufficient reliability in a given situation. It seems, then,
that either a historical account of the reliability of each individual belief-forming mechanism is
required or a principle (or a set of principles), previously determined by second-order processing
to produce more true beliefs than false beliefs, is required to establish occurent reliability.10

8
Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition, 98.
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid, Section 5.5.
While it is the case that developing a higher proportion of true beliefs to false beliefs
establishes the historical reliability of a given token, and thus constitutes the criteria for which an
agent or a token will be evaluated within a reliabilist paradigm, it is not always the case that
developing a higher proportion of true beliefs to false beliefs is the sole determiner of evaluation.
What also needs to be taken into consideration in the evaluation of an epistemic agent are the
kinds of beliefs for which the agent will be evaluated. This has a number of implications. First,
having a higher proportion of true beliefs to false beliefs may not always provide justification for
a given token; it may also be that occurrent evaluation entails that the beliefs generated are
relevant to the context in which they are evaluated. Maintaining a high reliability for a given
token is, a priori, of some value to the process reliabilist, but if the token develops a high
proportion of true beliefs that are irrelevant to the context of the evaluation, and subsequently
develops a low proportion of true beliefs that are relevant to the context of the evaluation, then
the token, even if highly reliable, is still to be evaluated lower than a token with a lower
aggregate proportion of true beliefs to false beliefs, but with a higher proportion of true beliefs to
false beliefs that are context sensitive. Secondly, maintaining a higher proportion of true beliefs
to false beliefs may also be less valuable for a token that produces a low number of true beliefs.
For example, an epistemic agent is highly reliable if three of four beliefs in a belief set are
objectively true, but if there are only four beliefs generated by this particular token, then the
token, or the agent, may still be less valuable than a token with a higher number of true beliefs
but a lower proportion. Each of these considerations contributes to the evaluative criteria of the
process-reliabilist paradigm.
Goldman then goes on to identify two principles required for knowledge. The first
principle states:
P1: S knows that p only if S’s belief in p results from a reliable belief-forming
process.11
A belief-forming process is reliable only if it meets a predetermined threshold for reliability
given by the summation of all known beliefs compared to the ratio of known true beliefs to
known false beliefs. This ratio provides the standard by which an epistemic agent will be

11
Ibid., 52.
judged, given a particular threshold. Yet it is not sufficient to establish the reliability of an agent
or a belief-forming mechanism if the assessment is based on nothing more than the reliability of
the agent or mechanism. What is distinctive of Goldman’s theory, however, is that it requires a
further premise:
P2: An acquired belief-forming process (or method) can generate knowledge only if it
is acquired (or sustained) by an appropriate second-order process.12
For Goldman, knowing that-p requires developing a belief based on a final inferential leap from
the information present to the belief in question. He writes: “Not only must the belief result from
a reliable process, or method, the process or method used must have been acquired (or sustained)
by a suitable second-order process.”13 This final inference elicits the proposition that-p as
representative of the epistemic agent actually believing that-p. But because of the causal
condition mentioned earlier, for an epistemic agent to be justified in believing that-p, the agent’s
belief must be derived from this second-order process.
Consider flipping a standard coin in the air and asking your friend to guess whether it is
going to land on heads or tails. We’ll assume that this coin, like most coins, has a heads and a
tails and that flipping it in the air will result in either one or the other. We will further assume
that the probability of the coin landing on heads (.5) is the same as the probability of the coin
landing on tails (.5). Lastly, assume that each party is aware of this probability. Imagine that
your friend insists that the coin is going to land on heads. When you ask your friend why he is
so sure the coin will land on heads, he responds by saying: “It always lands on heads for me.”
After a brief chuckle, you flip the coin in the air and sure enough it lands on heads, and then it
does so again, and then again. Sooner or later one will have to concede that when a friend tells
another friend that the coin will land on heads, it will certainly sound like a reliable process that
generated the belief that the coin will land on heads; after all, every one of the last, say, 10 flips
landed on heads. Yet should we infer that your friend is justified in telling another friend that the
coin will land on heads after the next flip (belief p)? Is the response “It always lands on heads

12
Ibid.
13
Ibid.
for me,” coupled with the fact that it actually does land on heads, sufficient for establishing
justification for the belief p even if the coin has consistently landed on heads after each of the
last 10 flips?
Although there are dissenters—such as David Hume’s famous billiard ball example in
which he argues against deriving a priori knowledge of causality from experience14—intuitively,
we would likely say “no,” your friend is not justified in believing p even in such a circumstance.
Your friend is not justified in believing p, even after reliably predicting that the coin will land on
heads during each of the previous 10 flips because the explanation “It always lands on heads for
me” does not describe any causal process in the world from which the psychological process that
established the belief could be derived. Although we would say that the process that produced
the belief is reliable, we must remain skeptical to deduce anything further from the historical
reliability of the operant belief-forming mechanism because the reliability does not seem to be a
product of natural laws within the world that are indicative of the result given; rather, we would
say that your friend is lucky. Luck may—and certainly has throughout history—contribute to the
accumulation of knowledge, but one cannot be justified solely in virtue of lucky guesses. One
must give, or at least be able to give, an account of the causal relation involved in the process of
belief formation. It is due to considerations such as this that Goldman supplies P2 as a necessary
condition for the justification of a belief.15
Goldman means something very specific when he supplies the added criterion of P2 in
the construction of the J-rule system. Second-order processes are meant to qualify the first-order
processes in terms of the reliability of the first-order processes at producing truth.16 He means
that a first-order process is only capable of producing or assessing knowledge if it is acquired (or
sustained) by an “appropriate” second-order process. An “appropriate” second-order process is a
process that is sufficiently capable of producing processes that are more reliable than other ones
used in similar contexts. Second-order processes meet up with cognitive psychology because

14
Hume and Millican, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section 4.7
15
Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition, 52.
16
Goldman claims in Epistemology and Cognition that “second-order processes are of special importance to
one of the book’s general themes: the link of epistemology to psychology” (53).
cognitive psychology describes processes suitably capable of comparing cognitive processes
operant in a given epistemic context. We therefore qualify processes based on the import of
psychology’s framework and apply this qualification to considerations of justification.
Finally, to make the transition from P2 to belief, one further feature of belief formation is
required: an appeal to an appropriate J-rule. As presented by Goldman, a J-rule is a “schema for
transition permission”17 from the truth of the second-order process given in P2 to the formation
of a belief based on a factually supported rule. To make the transition to belief from P2, one
must be permitted to do so by some representative J-rule. After detailing a number of other
possible principles, he settles on the following18:
P3: S’s believing p at t is justified if:
1. S’s believing p at t is permitted by a right system of J-rules.
2. This permission is not undermined by S’s cognitive state at t.
The question of the rightness criteria of the relevant J-rules is important because of the
importance the J-rules play in Goldman’s theory. To outline the importance of the J-rules in
Goldman’s theory, we must first come to some understanding of the role theorizing plays in
contemporary analytic epistemology. The goal for the process reliabilist, and indeed for each
respective theory of knowledge in the analytic tradition, is to be justified in the belief of some
proposition. Justification refers to the degree in which one is permitted to believe a given
proposition. Justification answers the question of why one should be permitted to hold a
particular belief. Thus, after the argument is made for why some belief is justified, the epistemic
agent is then warranted in adopting this belief. There is a distinction, however, between being
permitted to hold some belief and actually holding the belief. Regardless of this distinction, if an
agent believes some proposition, and is justified in believing this proposition, and has no
cognitive states that undermine the permission to believe the proposition, then the agent has
justified true belief, or knowledge.

17
Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition, 77.
18
Ibid., 63.
There are two ways to undermine the permission to believe some proposition. First, it is
circular for a cognizer to be permitted to believe that a belief is not permitted. Believing that one
does not have permission to believe some proposition entails that one has permission to believe
that one does not have permission. If one has permission to believe that one does not have
permission to believe some proposition, then one must also provide justification for this belief.
Second, the cognizer can believe that some belief is not permitted, even where the higher-order
beliefs that one has to the same effect are not permitted.19 This runs into the same problem noted
above.
Even more difficult to determine is the right system of J-rules. Before determining what
this system is, we must first come to an idea of what J-rules are and what their function is in
Goldman’s overall justificatory framework. Because every belief situation is unique, Goldman’s
reliabilist theory of justification attempts to establish a set of supervening J-rules governing the
application of justification to propositions in all situations. In essence, one goal for epistemology
is to establish one theory that either confers or denies justification for all beliefs. The theory will
apply to all beliefs insofar as all beliefs will be subjected to the same criteria. J-rules operate as a
sufficient condition for transmission permission from conditions governing the attainment of
belief and knowledge.
A few points regarding the construction of J-rules are in order: First, J-rules must be
“right” rules—meaning, they must be principles that either confer or deny justification. To be a
“right” rule, a rule must confer justification once the conditions stipulated by the rule have been
satisfied. If J-rules are to confer justification on beliefs, justification must be the result of only
one set of rules that themselves do not conflict in their application. These rules must supervene
on all justification-conferring situations in the same manner. Thus, to be justified means to be in
conformity with these J-rules and thereby to achieve permission to believe some belief. Finally,
J-rules permit and prohibit beliefs as a function of mental states, relations, or processes of the
cognizer.20 Goldman formulates the preceding points in the following way:

19
Ibid., 62.
20
Ibid., 59-60.
P3: S’s believing p at time t is justified if and only if S’s believing p at t is permitted
by a right system of justificational rules (J-rules).21
Appealing to a right system of J-rules in not merely a matter of establishing that, logically, some
X follows from some Y. Instead, J-rules are restricted to epistemological subjects and mental
content in a natural context. These contents include such facets of cognition as beliefs,
perceptions, memories, and cognitive faculties. We remember from P2 that a belief-forming
process can generate knowledge only if it is acquired or sustained by an appropriate second-order
process. Yet a further component is required before the inferential step to belief can be made.
What is needed is some determination that this second-order process elicits belief. This requires
some rule, or set of rules, that establishes the causal connection between the states of affairs in
the world and the beliefs generated by an agent. Further, this must be mediated by a supervening
principle that establishes the connection. Causal laws that constitute a relation between the
properties in the world and veridical mental content, however, must determine the connection
itself. J-rules provide the epistemic agent with such a connection. These considerations provide
the basis for Goldman’s process reliabilism. 22 A process or an agent is reliable if it meets the
following criteria: it produces more true beliefs than false beliefs over a certain threshold, these
beliefs are given or sustained by an appropriate second-order process, and this process is
determined by an appropriate J-rule to produce reliable beliefs based on the casual properties of
belief-forming mechanisms.

21
Ibid., 59.
22
Ibid., Section 4.2.
CHAPTER 2

INTERNALISM AND EXTERNALISM

In order to determine the causality of belief-forming mechanisms in Goldman’s theory of


justification, it is first necessary to understand how causality contributes to the formation of
beliefs. To explain how this works, I will first explain Goldman’s paper “A Causal Theory of
Knowing” with the intent of articulating the sufficient and necessary conditions of justified belief
formation as they relate to their causal properties. This work by Goldman is important to
understand as a precursor to his more robust reformulation of his position in Epistemology and
Cognition. I will give an analysis of this position with the intent of outlining a brief
rearticulation of his epistemological heritage. After completing this, I will illustrate how this
work by Goldman has contributed to a major rift in contemporary analytic epistemology between
what are called “internalists” and “externalists.” The goal of the present chapter is to analyze
this distinction and ultimately to argue that the distinction is real and that the externalists are
correct in their assessments of it.

2.1 GOLDMAN’S EARLY THEORY OF JUSTIFICATION


The causal theory of knowing is a response to the problems E. Gettier identified
regarding empirical propositions of the form S knows that-p. Gettier identified problems with
the traditional notion of justification as justified true belief on the grounds that one may meet
these criteria for knowledge and still fail to be justified because the belief assented to fails to
meet the conditions that satisfy a belief being justified. To outline Gettier’s criticism, allow me
to provide an original example similar to the one presented by Gettier himself. Suppose Jones is
a teacher walking into a classroom and before he is able to walk through the door, he receives a
phone call from the school’s secretary telling him that the mother of one of his students, Tom’s
mother, has become ill. Jones now walks into the classroom with the belief that the mother of
one of his students is ill. This belief is premised on the further belief that Jones’ secretary is a
reliable source of information, and because it is impossible to collect all the information that can
be collected by oneself, Jones relies on the secretary and ultimately believes that he is justified
when he assents to this belief. The belief that Jones has that the mother of one of the students in
his classroom is sick is also premised on the further beliefs that this student is present; that this
student is Tom; and that this student, Tom, has a mother who is actually sick.
Let us also assume that the belief that the mother of a student in Jones’ class is actually
sick is objectively true. This is to say, objectively, it is true that the mother of one of the students
in Jones’ class is in fact sick. Jones is now justified in his true belief that the mother of one of
the students in his class is sick. Now, let us imagine that the secretary made a mistake. Let us
imagine that Tom’s mother called the secretary to tell her that the mother of Tom’s friend Jack is
sick. Jones’ belief that the mother of one of the students in his class is sick is still true, and
presumably still justified according to many traditional theories of knowledge. What the
justification-conferring process fails to take into account is that the fact that, although the belief
itself is true, one or more of the grounds on which the belief is based is false. In this case, the
ground that is false is that the student in the classroom whose mother is sick is Tom. The
problem that this justification-conferring process has, according to Goldman, is that there is no
external causal connection between the fact that Tom’s mother is sick and Jones’ belief that
Tom’s mother is sick. Goldman’s causal theory of justification attempts to add the requirement
that such a casual connection is a necessary supplement to the traditional analysis. His theory
purports to add the following condition:
S knows that-p if and only if:
The fact p is causally connected in an “appropriate” way with S’s believing p.23
What qualifies as “appropriate” is of central importance to both Goldman’s analysis and the
thoughts presented here, which are built on the groundwork formulated by Goldman’s work. He
claims that the following are “appropriate” knowledge-producing causal processes:
1. Perception
2. Memory
3. A causal chain which is correctly reconstructed by inferences that are warranted
4. Combinations of 1, 2, and 324

23
Goldman, “A Causal Theory of Knowing,” 369.
I will provide an outline of Goldman’s analysis of each of the following knowledge-producing
causal processes, but due to the constraints of the current research, I will focus on perception.
Before I begin the analysis, there is an important point that should be highlighted: what
distinguishes Goldman’s work from the traditional internalist accounts of justification is that any
of these domains qualify as an “appropriate” causal means of forming a belief. Although
seemingly of minor importance, consider the implication this claim has for traditional
epistemology, which typically requires an individual access requirement. Perception is likely the
most cherished, and indeed the most reliable knowledge-producing causal process, yet for
Goldman, it is still only a sufficient condition for knowledge. Memory, inferentially
reconstructed causal chains, and any combination of these domains are also knowledge-
conferring as well, given, of course, that they are developed under the specifications Goldman
goes on to outline. This claim challenges the internalist requirement that all beliefs must be
derived from foundational beliefs that are internally available upon reflection as a necessary
condition.
To be sure, Goldman claims: “The simplest case of a casual chain connecting some fact p
with someone’s belief of p is that of perception.”25 An analysis of the causal connection between
presence and belief is an analysis of the causal processes associated with perceptual stimuli from
the environment and the belief derived from the process that interacts with this environment.
The connection itself, he goes on to state, is a process that is reserved for the relevant sciences to
analyze and dissect.26 It further defends a theory of perception put forward by Paul Grice which
claims, among other things, that referring to a material object and attempting to causally explain
it by reference to its conditions of specification need not require that an object, or a series of
objects, in the casual sequence leading to the present terminus be available perceptually. It must
be possible for these special sciences to reconstruct the relevant stimuli that belong to the objects
present. In fact, Grice claims that it is the role of the philosopher to provide a rational

24
Ibid., 369-70.
25
Ibid., 358.
26
Ibid.
reconstruction of the relevant causal processes leading to the terminus present. It is this causal-
process requirement that makes Goldman’s epistemological theory externalist. It is external
because justification is a result of the veracity of external conditions.27
Although immediate perceptual access may not—and need not—be available for the
causal theory of perception, there must still remain a causal connection between the
specifications of the object present and a reconstruction of the elements in the causal chain
leading to the present terminus. Determining this rational reconstruction is a job for the special
sciences related to the phenomena in question. The rational reconstruction of the elements in the
casual chain leading to the terminus is a reconstruction because it is inferred from perceptual
stimuli. Perceptual stimuli, under the causal theory of perception, are non-inferential, and,
therefore, assuming the appropriate perception conditions and causation, are considered reliable
knowledge.
The second cognitive domain relevant to Goldman’s causal theory of knowing is
memory. To be sure, Goldman claims: “Remembering, like perceiving, must be regarded as a
causal process.”28 To remember some fact p is to believe it at both time t1 and at some later time
t2. It may be possible for someone to believe some fact at both t1 and t2 and it still be incorrect.
Thus, for memory to qualify as knowledge, it must be derived from some combination of
perception and memory, and this combination must be regarded as having been established by a
casual link from perception (or rational reconstruction) at t1 to the instantiated memorial
impression at t2. Knowledge based on memory is, then, knowledge based on inference from the
memorial perception given at t1. The necessity of this combination indicates that memory is
reliant, even if not exclusively, on some third principle providing the causal link between the
memories and the stimuli causing the memorial reconstruction.
The third cognitive domain Goldman considers relevant to the causal theory of knowing
is that of inferential, rational reconstruction of events not based on memory or perception. To
use Goldman’s terminology, he claims: “A necessary condition of S’s knowing p is that his

27
Grice and White, “Symposium: The Causal Theory of Perception,” 121-22.
28
Goldman, “A Causal Theory of Knowing,” 360.
believing p be connected with p by a causal chain.”29 In cases such as rational reconstruction,
the external causal chain is derived from inferences based on facts about the world that may or
may not be given to perception. Consider the following reconstruction: p represents the fact that
a banana fell from a tree at time t1 and q represents the fact that there is a banana presently—
available for present perception—sitting on the ground beneath the tree. B represents the belief
an individual epistemic agent has that p and q are connected by a causal sequence of events
leading continuously from p given at t1 to q given at time t2. R represents a background set of
beliefs that serve to reconstruct the causal sequence of events leading from p to q. Background
beliefs that might serve to assist in this causal reconstruction are: bananas grow on trees; bananas
ripen; when bananas ripen, they often fall from the tree; the force of gravity pulls bananas to the
earth; and so forth. Each of these beliefs, which are reducible in nature to the cause and effect
operations at the elementary particle level of the external world, provide the necessary
components to rationally reconstruct the sequence of events leading to the present perceptual
event q. Thus, the belief p requires not only B, but also the reconstructed beliefs implied by B.
If the accurate causal chain is established—and the degree of certainty one can attribute to the
process is, at best, limited, especially if one fails to consult the elementary particles upon which
all cause and effect orderings are based—then the belief p is a necessary consequence of the
combination, and linear sequential ordering of, the background beliefs R, the current belief B,
and the perceptual event q.
Finally, Goldman goes on to state that any combination of these three domains is also of
relevance for the casual theorist. The point that should be taken from Goldman’s causal theory
of knowing—which is, itself, in some ways, an outgrowth of Grice’s causal theory of
perception—is that there are many different ways of deriving an account of the causal sequence
leading to belief. The import of Grice’s theory that has relevance for Goldman is that these
sequences of events need not necessarily be available for internal perceptual integration to be
considered valuable to the epistemic agent. Further, and more formally, an epistemic agent is
justified in his belief p if and only if that belief p is related in the right kind of way (causally) to

29
Ibid., 361.
the actual event that preceded it. By “causally” Goldman means to denote either a memorial
impression, given by a percept, or a rational reconstruction derived from either a memorial
impression or from an immediate percept that is causally related to states of the world external to
the agent. Thus, for Goldman, the requirement he adds to the traditional analysis, which also
displaces the traditional purely internal access requirement, is that there be a necessary causal
sequence of events leading from the event to the belief p about the event.
To understand how the causal sequence of events is related to justification for Goldman,
we must first understand his account of justified belief. He provides such an account in his work
“What Is Justified True Belief?” The goal of the work is simple: it is to explain why some
beliefs are justified and others are not. More directly, he attempts to explicate our “ordinary
standards” for justification by identifying the standards by which we come to evaluate epistemic
agents.30 “Justified” is here used as an evaluative term rather than a normative term as it is
typically understood in traditional accounts of justified true belief. He identifies the function of
justification as identifying the “substantive conditions that specify when a belief is justified.”31
In order to achieve an explanatory account of justification that identifies these substantive
conditions, he attempts to couch his explanatory theory in non-epistemic terms. The function of
this practice is to ensure that his project is actually clarifying the underlying source of
justification, not what the “correct” or necessary and sufficient conditions are for justification as
is typically done in traditional accounts. Thus, epistemic phrases such as “warrant,” “right to
believe,” and “basic beliefs” will be notoriously absent from Goldman’s theory; instead, they
will be supplanted by phrases such as “cause and effect” and “input and output,” which are
meant to denote objective, material relations between states of the world and beliefs generated in
the subject.
Justification in epistemology is the practice of justifying a belief that-p by providing
reasons why a person believes what she believes. This typically takes the form of a claim to
knowledge that is made, supplemented by an account of how one knows what one knows. This

30
Goldman, “What Is Justified Belief?” 333.
31
Ibid.
is construed as the practice of providing reasons that the epistemic agent can state and/or explain
that provide justification for the belief in question. These reasons are intended not merely to
establish an inferential link between the experiential information that grounds the belief and the
belief itself, but also to defend a belief from those who aim to disprove its efficacy.
Another fundamental divergence between Goldman’s project and the project of many
other traditionalist accounts is that he leaves open the question of whether the epistemic agent
has access to these reasons. Reasons for a belief are important; it is difficult to conceive of a
theory of justification for an agent who is not concerned with providing some reason why a
belief is held. The problem with traditional versions of justification in this regard is that
developing a “correct” source of internally available reasons one has for each belief of a given
class is excessively demanding for many epistemic agents who still seem to have knowledge.
Further, even if it were the case that some internally available reasons could be given for a
particular class of beliefs, it is difficult to conceive of an epistemic agent that has internally
available reasons for all true beliefs, much less a robust theory of normative constraints on the
act of belief formation that covers all such beliefs without conceivable defeaters.
Goldman is not openly hostile to such accounts, but prefers rather to reconsider the
source of our intuitive understanding of what actually makes a person justified in believing
something. Thus, a believer may know the reasons he has for beliefs, and surely if the agent
does and he can state them—assuming they do in fact provide the conditions for the truth of a
class of beliefs—then it is certainly of some epistemic value, but for the present project the
question of whether this is possible for every knowable proposition is left open.32
There is a relevant distinction to be made here between reason-giving and non-reason-
giving justification. For present purposes, we will focus primarily on reason-giving forms of
justification and ignore all non-reason-giving forms of justification. What is not left open,
however, is the assumption that a belief gets the status of being justified from a process or a set
of relevant properties that make it justified. In the years following his article “What Is Justified
Belief?” Goldman gave up the causal connection condition and decided to focus instead on the

32
Ibid., 334.
external truth conduciveness of a given mechanism, or what he would later call “process
reliabilism.” The following is an attempt to recapitulate this position.
Justification does require some justification-conferring process, and, again, the present
project is an attempt to identify the explanatory conditions under which this might be the case.
The concept of justification requires a theory of justification for all beliefs of a given kind. This
is to say, the concept of justification requires a set of principles that specify the justification-
conditions for the schema: S’s belief in p at time t is justified. The goal of setting up such a
theory is to establish (a) an acceptable base-clause principle(s), (b) a set of recursive clauses, and
(c) a closure clause.33 Before turning to Goldman’s principle that establishes the conditions for
his process reliabilism, allow us first to examine some of the base clauses that he rejects. It is
due to the problems identified with the following approaches that he is able to identify the
motivation for his alternative theory. The first clause he considers is the following:
1. If S believes p at t, and p is indubitable for S (at t), then S’s belief in p at t is justified.34
To evaluate this principle, it is necessary to first come to an understanding of the meaning of the
term “indubitable.” The term can be interpreted in one of two of the following ways: First, it can
be understood to mean: “S has no grounds for doubting p.” Thus, the belief that the sun will rise
tomorrow is indubitable because there are no relevant considerations in the belief set that provide
grounds to cast doubt on the belief. On the other hand, the belief that there is an even number of
trees in the world is not indubitable because the belief that there are an odd number of trees in
the world is equally as likely, and thus the epistemic agent has some ground to doubt the stated
proposition. “Indubitable” might also be interpreted as: “S is psychologically incapable of
doubting p.” Apart from external world skeptics, the belief that the reader is reading words on
this page is considered to be psychologically necessary, but the belief that my keys are sitting in
the living room—outside my perceptual reach—or the belief that the gas in my car has not been
siphoned out since I last started it is not necessary.
A quick comment on this point: in a seminal work that criticizes Goldman’s process

33
Ibid.
34
Ibid.
reliabilism, K. Lehrer and S. Cohen argue that reliabilism fails to characterize the truth
connection when determining how best to justify beliefs on grounds similar to the ones
mentioned above. Their argument35 runs as follows: Goldman and process reliabilists claim that
justified beliefs are ones that are produced by cognitive processes that are reliable. This theory
successfully avoids the skepticism of the Cartesian conception of truth. However, the Evil
Demon hypothesis reveals a weakness in the reliabilist outlook. If it is true that an Evil Demon
or a mad scientist could render our belief-forming mechanisms unreliable, then the beliefs
themselves would no longer be justified—under Goldman’s criteria—because they would not be
capable of reliably producing externally true beliefs. The problem is that the truth of the Evil
Demon hypothesis suggests that our experiences and our reasonings are exactly the same as they
would be if our cognitive processes, working properly, were not deceived. It would therefore
seem that an individual epistemic agent would be equally justified in believing something if the
Evil Demon hypothesis were either true or false.
Lehrer and Cohen respond to this by arguing that a better conception of the truth
connection than the one entailed by process reliabilism is coherentism. In coherentism, it is the
coherence of a set of propositions that provide the justification for a belief or a system of beliefs.
More specifically, it is the connection between beliefs, or how they cohere within a given set of
beliefs, that provides the grounds for justification. On this account, perceptual beliefs are both
true and reliable, given the condition that we are not deceived in the way mentioned above.36
If one accepts the relevancy of the Evil Demon argument, then the response above makes
a great deal of sense. However, the preceding criticism of Lehrer and Cohen need not be heeded
on the grounds that the Evil Demon argument is an extreme form of skepticism that not only
needs not to be taken seriously, but also is quite often not taken seriously by epistemic subjects
who we still intuitively consider to be in possession of what we would call “knowledge.” The
Evil Demon argument claims that we cannot be certain about the contents of the external
world—that at any point in time we could be deceived by some external entity manipulating our

35
Lehrer and Cohen, “Justification, Truth, and Coherence,” 192.
36
Ibid., 193.
experiences. This is an extreme form of skepticism known as “external world skepticism.” For
traditional accounts of the problem, especially as posed by Descartes, the only thing that one can
be certain of is that one is thinking. The problem with this analysis is that the operant
conception of certainty is far too strong. It seems to suggest that knowledge can only be
acquired if every possibility imaginable for attaining the truth of some proposition is shown to be
false; this includes such fundamental beliefs as our belief that the external world exists. This
criticism is far too stringent and certainly does not seem to accord with our natural intuitions
about the world or about what we understand certainty to entail. I suggest that certainty, as it is
posed by external world skepticism, is a supererogatory condition on the acquisition of
knowledge and that belief, perception, memory, and rationality suffice as appropriate means of
deriving and processing information about the natural world.37 Supererogatory conditions on the
acquisition or evaluation of knowledge claims need not be heeded.38 Further, if Goldman’s
analysis is an evaluative consideration of how epistemic agents already do evaluate belief-
forming mechanisms, then it is not altogether clear that most, if any, epistemic agents who are
evaluating the processing mechanisms of other epistemic agents take into consideration whether
they have taken into account the possibility that they are being deceived by an Evil Demon.
Thus, I conclude that such considerations have little or no room in naturalistic philosophy. This
implies that my position assumes the following: individual epistemic agents are not deceived by
an Evil Demon and that processing mechanisms, when functioning properly, do derive truths
about the world.
The second principle that Goldman identifies as a possibility is:
2. If S believes p at t is self-evident, then S’s belief in p at t is justified.39
To evaluate this principle, it is important to come to an understanding of what the term “self-
evident” is meant to imply. “Self-evident” could mean “directly justified” or “intuitively

37
This position does not seem to entail an acceptance of either realism or idealism, and instead suggests
merely that there is an external world, whether or not our perceptions, memories, reasoned assumptions, or
memorial re-creations of it adequately match the objective conditions themselves.
38
Lehrer makes a similar point on page 63 of his work Theory of Knowledge.
39
Goldman, “What Is Justified Belief?” 335.
justified” as in the case of some basic belief given by experience non-derivatively: such would
be the case for a foundationalist approach to epistemology that attempts to ground justification
for higher-order beliefs based on these non-derivatively justified basic beliefs. It is also possible
to interpret “self-evident” to mean: “It is impossible to understand p without believing it.”40
Finally, Goldman supplies the following principle as a possible base clause for the justification
of beliefs:
3. If p is a self-presenting proposition, and p is true for S at t, and S believes p at t, then S’s
belief in p at t is justified.41
Likewise, to evaluate this final possible base-clause principle, it is important to come to an
understanding of what “self-presenting” means. “Self-presenting” can be interpreted as being
justified at t and necessarily justified if it is true that it is evident for S at t.
What is inherently wrong with each of these possible formulations of the base-clause
principle is that justification is conferred without considering what causally initiates the belief or
causally sustains it. Each of the preceding formulations is an account of the “correct” act—
construed normatively as a deontological principle—of belief formation for every given belief of
a particular class of beliefs. Yet, to debunk non-causal principles of justifiedness, one needs
merely to find an example of a situation in which the principle’s antecedent sufficient condition
holds and the necessary consequent does not. Recent literature is fraught with examples of
thinkers providing such considerations. The Gettier example is a perfect example of how this
might work. As we saw from the original example provided above, Gettier identifies a situation
in which the traditional formulation of knowledge as justified true belief attains but still fails to
produce what we call knowledge because it is justified by a faulty ground that implies the true
consequent. Thus, justifiedness—as it is traditionally construed as “the right to be sure that p is
true”42 or “having adequate evidence for p”43—is insufficient to produce knowledge because
something further, like a non-defeater clause for example, is required for the translation of true

40
Ibid.
41
Ibid.
42
Ayer, The Problem of Knowledge, 1-2.
43
Chisholm, Perceiving: A Philosophical Study, 43.
belief into knowledge. Yet, even in cases such as these, the operant intuition that disproves the
formulation of the initial condition merely casts doubt on the process of forming belief based on
that condition. The problem with the foregoing conditions of knowledge is that what seems
necessary, or less sufficient, for justification is that the antecedent should guarantee the
consequent. By showing that these various forms of justification do not produce truth in all
cases, one is casting doubt on the process of forming beliefs based on these principles. Thus,
what appears ultimately to be at stake is a criticism of the belief-forming processes themselves
rather than simply the principles of belief formation, or, more specifically, the sufficient
necessary relation between the principles of belief formation and the goal of achieving true
belief. More specifically, what Goldman is suggesting is that the success of the Guidance
Deontological (GD) framework for justification is premised on the assumption that what confers
justification is meeting some minimal set of conditions sufficient for the transformation of true
belief into knowledge. His claim is that, in light of the many failed attempts to establish this
sufficient condition, what is of more fundamental concern is the historical reliability of a given
token—belief-forming process—rather than the successes or failures of the GD condition itself.
Belief-forming processes come in many varieties. Belief-forming processes might be
memorial, where an epistemic agent believes some proposition based on a past memory that he
had. Belief-forming processes might be purely perceptual and occurent, where an epistemic
agent believes some proposition based on occurent perceptual states. Belief-forming processes
might also be justified based on reasoning where an epistemic agent comes to believe something
on the basis of a logical or a probabilistic deduction or inference. In each of these cases of
belief, we say both that an epistemic agent has a belief and that a process that interacted with
environmental stimuli produced the belief. Goldman defines these processes in the following
way: “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.’ ”44 It is because
he formulates his theory in terms of this input/output processing system, where environmental
stimuli provide the input and propositional states occur as the output, that Goldman’s theory is

44
Goldman, “What Is Justified Belief?” 339.
said to be causal. It is evaluative in the sense that it evaluates the processing system that
produces belief from these stimuli in terms of its historical reliability. In essence, then,
justifiedness is a function of how individual epistemic agents deal with environmental input; it
evaluates the operations of the intellect in a manner that is not necessarily purposeful or
conscious but rather functional.
Analyzing the underlying sources of justification is a matter of qualifying these
functional processes, or “tokens,” that are used in the production of belief. Yet the question still
looms over the present theory: by what means do we assess these tokens? If Goldman has
disproved the efficacy of establishing deontological principles of belief formation, and
subsequently denied that internal access to a complete justificatory lineage is possible or required
for every belief in favor of the intuition that assesses belief formation in terms of the belief-
forming processes that produce belief, then he must provide the reader with an account of how
this assessment occurs. To understand this qualification process, consider memory as the belief-
forming process that produces a belief. Specifically, consider the underlying intuition of how
memory is assessed. Epistemic agents frequently use memory to recount events that have
transpired in the past. When an individual agent recounts such an event, we typically think of
the epistemic agent as positing the belief that the recounted event occurred: call this belief p.
Memorial impressions of p are evaluated in terms of their accuracy, or, more specifically, in
terms of their ability to recount events as they actually occurred in the external world. Thus,
qualifying a memorial impression is a matter of identifying the properties that go into the
production of the belief that are, to a greater or lesser degree, approximations to conditions in the
external world. For example, a memory that is formed under less than ideal conditions, or a
memory that was formed a very long time ago, will likely not be as capable of producing true
beliefs about the world as, say, a memorial impression that was created relatively recently under
ideal conditions. Yet the operant intuition in the assessment of these processes of belief
formation is not the properties themselves but whether and to what extent these properties are
capable of producing reliable results. A memory that is formed under ideal conditions might be
justified, not because it met a deontological principle, but rather because memories that are
produced under such conditions are more reliable at producing true beliefs about the world.
Thus, Goldman claims that the following base clause obtains:
“If S’s believing p at t results from a reliable cognitive belief-forming process (or set
of processes), then S’s belief in p at t is justified.”45
In order to understand how this principle is to be understood, we must first interpret the term
“reliable.” For Goldman, the term “reliable” is meant to refer to a historical, rather than an
occurrent, reliability. Cognitive belief-forming processes are reliable in the historical sense
when the reliability function is a function of the sum total of the outputs produced by a given
token.46 This is meant to imply an aggregate number of beliefs rather than the ability of an
individual belief-forming mechanism at a given time to produce true beliefs.

2.2 INTERNALISM AND EXTERNALISM DEBATE


The preceding analysis brings up a number of relevant points that need to be addressed in
the contemporary epistemological literature. Of interest for the present thought is the debate
between internalism and externalism. In what follows, I will attempt to articulate the main tenets
of this debate with the intention of arguing for the externalist position against modern thinkers
who seek to collapse this distinction. Before doing this, however, it is important to come to
some idea about where exactly the conflict lies between them. Goldman’s analysis of justified
belief brought with it a number of concerns about the nature of justification itself that ultimately
sparked this debate. What is ultimately at stake in the debate between his account of justification
and those that came before his is that he denies that there exists a “correct” deontological
principle of belief formation that can adequately address each situation and opts instead for an
assessment of the reliability of the mechanisms that formed beliefs. Even if the epistemic agent
were to presuppose such a principle, there would still be an excessive demand placed upon the
epistemic agent to provide a complete justification for each belief that is held in a belief set. In
other words, the debate concerns whether and to what extent epistemic agents should be required
to have the ability to state—or have internal access to—the reasons why they believe what they

45
Ibid., 340.
46
Ibid.
believe. Goldman’s analysis leaves this question open; Goldman prefers rather to discuss the
external reliability of cognitive processes as this measure seems better able to explain our
intuitions concerning justification. This subsequently leaves the question of whether the
epistemic agent can state—or have internal access to—the grounds for a belief. Internalists, on
the other hand, make this internal access a requirement for knowledge. In what follows, I will
attempt to formulate the main tenets of this debate more formally by recapitulating some of the
more recent arguments for each respective position.
In order to assess the internalist position, it is necessary to first determine what it is. In
his paper “Internalism Exposed,” Goldman outlines three main requirements that he claims all
internalists accept:
1. There is a Guidance Deontological (GD) concept of Justification.
2. There are certain constraints on the determiners of justification derived from GD, namely
that all justification determiners must be accessible to or knowable by, the epistemic
agent.
3. Justification must be an internal affair. 47
The GD concept of justification can best be summed up by R. Chisholm’s principle:
S is so situated at t that his intellectual requirement, his responsibility as an
intellectual being, is better fulfilled by p than by q.48
In a similar vein, John Locke claims that it is often the case that individuals believe some
proposition because one has a “duty as a rational creature”49 based on one’s particular
relationship with the external world. Feldman also claims that epistemic agents have an
epistemic duty to “believe what is supported by one’s evidence.”50
“Justifiers” are facts or states of affairs about the world that determine the justification
status of some belief. There exists a sufficient/necessary connection between the states of the
world and the beliefs derived from the states of the world such that if a justifier is available as a
sufficient condition, then an epistemic agent is said to have knowledge. The GD principle claims

47
Goldman, “Internalism Exposed,” 379.
48
Ibid., 380.
49
Locke and Nidditch, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 413.
50
Feldman, “Epistemic Obligations,” 254.
that for a belief to be justified, the existence of a particular kind of justifier must be present in the
formation of that belief.51 Foundationalism, for example, claims that for a higher-order belief to
be justified, it must be reducible to a basic belief from which it was derived.52 The existence of
the basic belief is thus a necessary condition for the achievement of knowledge of some
proposition. The “internal access” or “knowability” constraint suggests that these justifiers must
be available for—or at least potentially available for—the epistemic subject if the proposition is
to be considered a form of knowledge. Goldman formally posits the “knowability constraint”
(KJ) as the following:
The only facts that qualify as justifiers of an agent’s believing p at time t are facts
that the agent can readily know, at t, to obtain or not to obtain.53
This internalist requirement is an immediate consequent of the preceding GD condition that is
placed upon all justifiers by traditional thinkers in the field. This internalist requirement may
equally be called the “introspection requirement.” According to Chisholm, if an epistemic agent
is subject to an epistemic requirement, this requirement is imposed by the conscious state; the
justifiers themselves must come from the conscious state. It is in this sense that knowledge may
be said to be the result of introspection. This, Goldman claims, elicits what he calls “Strong
Internalism” (SI).54 SI is the view that only facts concerning what conscious states an agent is in
at a time t are justifiers of the agent’s beliefs at t. If an agent is justified in this strong sense, then
both the belief itself must be able to be stated and the reasons why the belief is justified must be
able to be stated as well; both of these must be occurently available at time t for the epistemic
agent.
The problem with the SI requirement is that it has “skepticism breeding consequences.”55
Consider the problem of stored beliefs: the vast majority of the beliefs that an individual has are

51
Goldman, “Internalism Exposed,” 379
52
For a modern formulation of the foundationalist response to the reliabilist paradigm see Audi, “Justification,
Truth, and Reliability,” Section III.
53
Goldman, “Internalism Exposed,” 380.
54
Ibid., 382.
55
Ibid.
stored in memory. Many of these stored beliefs provide the justification for many other beliefs
in the system. For many stored beliefs, there is almost nothing in one’s occurrent conscious state
that can justify them. If there is nothing in one’s occurrent conscious state that can justify them,
then, according to the SI position, the beliefs cannot be justified. If the beliefs are not justified,
then there is no way to know that we know the belief, and, thus, skepticism ensues. It is clear
from an analysis of Goldman’s research that the problem of stored beliefs is distinct from the
problem of GD being excessively burdensome on the epistemic agent in the sense that the latter
is a matter of analyzing the intuitions that qualify epistemic agents, whereas the prior is a matter
of analyzing the possibility of justifying higher-order beliefs based on occurrent conscious states.
While both are of relevance, the latter is the stronger position because it denies the possibility of
having access to such foundational beliefs rather than merely questioning the intuitive
qualification that these beliefs need not necessarily be a consideration for justification.
An internalist solution to this dilemma is merely to relax the KJ constraint as follows:56
facts that qualify as justifiers of an agent’s believing p at t are facts that the agent can readily
know at t (directly or indirectly). A further constraint that the internalist might put on the initial
KJ principle to avoid the pitfalls of the problem of stored beliefs is a retrieval constraint. The
final formulation, which will be called “Weak Internalism” (WI), can be stated as follows:
justifiers of an agent believing p at t are facts an agent can readily know by introspection or
memorial retrieval. Thus, in cases in which an epistemic agent is called upon to produce the
justification for an occurrent belief, the belief that justifies it may be either concurrently
available in the conscious state or may be retrievable from memory. This formulation still faces
two separate problems: the forgotten evidence problem and the occurrent retrieval problem.57
Many justified beliefs are beliefs that have come from sources that the internalist would accept
as being acquired in the right kind of way. It is not always the case, however, with beliefs that
justify other beliefs—even ones acquired in the right kind of way—that they can be recollected
when called upon. Often, beliefs that justify other true beliefs are forgotten in memory as a rush

56
Ibid., 383.
57
Ibid.
of new stimuli enters conscious processing. Are these beliefs, then, no longer justified because
they are not available to conscious processing and cannot be retrieved from memory? If these
are sufficient and necessary conditions for knowledge, and subsequently unavailable in many
cases that we would still intuitively consider an epistemic agent to have knowledge in, then
clearly a further condition is needed, or else we will be forced to succumb to one of three
consequences: (a) we will be forced to add this further condition, (b) we will be forced to deny
the internal access condition and the retrieval condition, or (c) we will be forced to deny the
efficacy of the counterargument.
Shortly, we will examine research by Feldman and E. Conee that seeks to add a further
condition to the internalist position to address the concerns that Goldman has presented in his
research. But before we do this, let us examine another problem that he identified with WI: the
problem of concurrent retrieval. WI claims that only conscious states and only those beliefs that
can be retrieved from memory will count as justifiers. This requirement holds for cases in which
a singular belief is required to justify another belief and for cases in which a set of beliefs is
required to justify a belief. If a singular belief or a set of beliefs can be retrieved by introspection
at time t, and retrieved at time t, then these beliefs would pass the revised KJ requirement. If
these beliefs cannot be introspected and retrieved, then they would fail the test. To assess this
claim, consider W. V. O. Quine’s argument for holism:58 he argues that holism is inescapable
because theoretical sentences make sense only as part of a larger theory, making a certain
indeterminacy of translation impossible to avoid. He further argues that if theoretical sentences
make sense only as part of a larger theory of meaning, then meaning itself must refer to the entire
background set of beliefs that justify a given proposition. I claim that if internalists accept
Quine’s holism, then they cannot avoid the problem of concurrent retrieval. The problem
internalists face is that holism entails that it is psychologically impossible to give an account of
all of the propositions in the belief set that justify any given proposition. This means that even if
some of the justificatory structure is internally available to the epistemic agent, the entire set will
not be internally available to the epistemic agent. But if internal access to the reasons that justify

58
Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized,” 535.
every belief is required for the belief to be considered knowledge, and a holistic conception of
meaning in a theoretical sentence inevitably fails this internal requirement due to the nearly
inexhaustible well of background beliefs that serve to justify a given proposition, then, given the
presuppositions of holism, a GD principle with such an internal access requirement would fail as
well.
Goldman goes on to argue against internalism in a number of intuitively compelling and
insightful ways. For present purposes, however, allow us to focus on these issues. In their
chapter “Internalism Defended,” Feldman and Conee go on to address the many concerns that
Goldman presents in the works listed above. In what follows, I will provide a recapitulation of
their criticisms with the intent of setting the groundwork for the criticisms I have of their
responses to the externalist arguments identified above. In order to accomplish this goal, we
must first come to some understanding of how Feldman and Conee conceive of the internalist
position.
There are a number of unique variations on the internalist position that Feldman and
Conee cite in order to argue against the externalist conception of justification. For example, L.
Bonjour claims that a justification is internalist if “all of the factors needed for a belief to be
epistemically justified for a given person be cognitively accessible to that person, internal to his
cognitive perspective.”59 R. Audi argues that justification is “grounded entirely in what is
internal to the mind.”60 A. Plantinga argues that properties that confer warrant for a belief are
properties that provide epistemic access to the beliefs that justify the resultant belief.61 J. Pollock
argues that only internal states can be relevant in determining which beliefs are justified.62
Finally, E. Sosa argues that justification requires appropriate thought and does not depend on
what lies beyond it.63 The result of the preceding internalist views of justification, according to

59
BonJour, “Externalism/Internalism,” 132.
60
Audi, Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge, 233-4.
61
Plantinga, Warrant: The Current Debate, 6.
62
Pollock, “Procedural Epistemology—At the Interface of Philosophy and AI,” 394.
63
Sosa, “Skepticism and the Internal/External Divide,” 147.
Feldman and Conee, is that justification is the product of the mental processes of an individual
epistemic agent. They use the term “mentalism” to refer to this position. Internalism, via the
mentalist claim, is thus committed to the following:
1. Justificatory status of a person’s doxastic attitudes strongly supervenes on the person’s
occurrent and dispositional mental states, events, and conditions. (S)
2. If any two possible individuals are exactly alike mentally, then they are exactly alike
justificationally, e.g. the same beliefs are justified for the same individuals to the same
extent. (M)64
In general, epistemic internalists are opposed to the idea that what confers justification is the
general accuracy of the mechanisms that produce belief. What is relevant, instead, is something
internal—something cognitive—to the epistemic agent (mentalism) and that this something is
relevantly accessible (accessibilism). In defense of internalism, Feldman and Conee begin by
offering a number of different narratives that help to identify the internalist intuition that gives
rise to their position. I will recount such stories with the intent of analyzing the position I intend
to refute in a responsible manner.
Example 1: Bob and Ray are sitting in the lobby of a hotel reading the newspaper. The
newspaper claims that the weather outside is frightfully hot. Each has read this and has
formulated the belief that the weather outside is hot because the newspaper has claimed that it is
hot. Then Bob goes outside and feels the heat, which reaffirms his belief that it is in fact hot
outside. At this point Bob’s belief is better justified than Ray’s belief. It is because Bob’s belief
was enhanced by his first-person experience of the heat that his belief is better justified than
Ray’s. It is because he was able to “internalize” the actual temperature that he became more
justified, whereas Ray had only the forecast on which to rely.65
Example 2: A novice bird watcher and an expert are out looking for birds one day when
they encounter a particular bird in the trees above them. They both get a good look at the bird in
the tree. While the expert recognizes the bird as a woodpecker, the novice has no good reason to
believe that the bird is a woodpecker and thus is not justified in believing that it is in fact a

64
Feldman and Conee, “Internalism Defended,” 408.
65
Ibid., 409.
woodpecker. The relevant epistemic difference between the novice and the expert, according to
Feldman and Conee, is that they differ internally. The expert has internal access to a number of
relevant beliefs about woodpeckers, whereas the novice has no such beliefs that would justify the
belief that it is in fact a woodpecker that they are looking at.66 The point that Feldman and
Conee are trying to make is that every variety of change that brings about or enhances
justification internalizes an external fact or makes a purely internal difference to the epistemic
agent.
Before moving forward with an analysis of Feldman and Conee’s critique of externalism,
I would like to assess the relevant intuitions that go into the construction of the claims on our
intuitions in the preceding cases. In the first case, we find two men, Bob and Ray, sitting reading
a newspaper that claims it is hot outside. Bob, who decides to get up and walk outside, notices
that the newspaper is correct—that it is in fact hot outside. Because he internalizes the evidence,
he is now “more” justified in his act of belief formation. It is entirely unclear whether a GD
theorist is committed to the belief that one is either more or less justified. As the GD condition is
represented in the literature, justification is a matter of meeting a set of sufficient conditions that
necessitate the translation of such conditions into the final product: knowledge. In other words,
GD theorists claim that a sufficient/necessary relation exists between the GD condition and
justification and that the outcome of obtaining the aforementioned conditions is knowledge.
Once such conditions have been met, the thinker attains the justification required for knowledge.
Consider the following standard case as an example: “If it rains, then I will get wet,” translated
as if X, then Y. “If it rains,” X, is the sufficient condition, whereas “I will get wet,” Y, is the
necessary condition. If the sufficient X attains, then the necessary consequent will follow. One
does not “enhance” the necessary condition in virtue of finding an additional sufficient condition
that implies the consequent. To go back to our analogy: one is not necessarily “more wet” when
standing in the rain if a sprinkler is turned on. For a GD theorist, if the sufficient condition is
met, then the thinker is justified in holding a belief. Any considerations that are added to such a
paradigm actually indicate that there is more to the story than the sufficient/necessary condition

66
Ibid.
required by the GD theorist—namely, that certain belief-forming processes are more or less
reliable when processing information about the world, not that adding to the sufficient condition
enhances justification as a consequent.
This brings us to my second criticism of Feldman and Conee’s first example. Why is it
the case, intuitively, that one is “more” justified in believing that the weather is hot outside if one
walks outside and experiences it first-hand than if one reads it in a newspaper? Allow us to
assume that the newspaper is reporting accurately the contents of some first-person experience
that the writer was actually in. We will assume this writer experienced the weather, took note of
the temperature, and determined that it qualified as weather that one would typically denote
using the signifier “hot.” Yet one intuitively considers a first-person experience of the weather
being hot as providing more justification than simply reading it in the newspaper. I contest
Feldman and Conee’s assessment of our intuitions on this point because it is not clear that what
“enhances justification” is internalizing an external fact: both manners of processing
environmental stimuli internalize external facts, albeit in wholly different ways.
Instead, returning to the work that Goldman has already produced regarding such a
question, the operant intuition in this case is that of a difference in the reliability of respective
belief-forming mechanisms that produce the beliefs in question. Generally, and historically, a
first-person assessment of occurrent weather patterns, especially patterns as agent relative as the
weather being “hot” outside, is far more reliable at producing true beliefs concerning the actual
weather—the external and objective condition—than is a second-hand report of the matter given
by a newspaper. The value of second-hand reports of the kind found in newspapers and other
such second-hand material is that more beliefs can be formulated, and more environmental
stimuli can be processed, making generalizations and other such heuristics about the world more
reliable at producing true beliefs in the future, given, of course, the accuracy and dedication to
truth such newspapers may or may not maintain.
Finally, I contest the operant intuitions in Feldman and Conee’s first narrative by
claiming that institutions are belief-forming processes as well, each with an identifiable objective
reliability measure. If it is the case—and this seems as least conceivable—that a newspaper were
to produce a perfectly reliable historical set of true beliefs about the world, and one could, in
general, align one’s belief-forming processes with the contents found in such institutions, then
there would be little need of the requirement that internal access is required for justification.
Further, individual epistemic agents already do assess the justification of their (and others’)
belief-forming mechanisms based on the historical reliability of such institutions. A belief
formed from, say, The New York Times is far more justified, according to externalism, than a
belief formed by reading the National Enquirer. Why is this the case? This is the case because
belief-forming mechanisms that utilize The New York Times, or other such reputable periodicals,
are generally considered to be more reliable at producing externally true beliefs about the world
than are beliefs based on periodicals with a reputation for distorting the truth, thus leading to a
lower proportion of true beliefs versus false beliefs. Again, we find here an explanatory account
of the means whereby individuals actually form beliefs based on the reliability of the belief-
forming mechanism rather than on a reliance on the internalist GD requirement for belief
formation.
In the second narrative, Feldman and Conee identify a case in which two bird watchers—
one novice and one expert—are out looking at birds. Both spot a bird in the trees above them.
Whereas the expert identifies the bird as a woodpecker, the novice has no good reason to apply a
designation to the bird one way or another because he is completely without any internal reason
to do so. The second narrative is far stronger than the first. This seems to provide intuitive
evidence for Feldman and Conee’s claim that the expert maintains his belief based on internal
conditions that are available to the birdwatcher. The problem with the intuitions highlighted by
Feldman and Conee in this case is that they used this case to deliver judgments concerning the
“internal conditions” of an epistemic agent rather than denoting a particular GD principle of
belief formation. The problem with this is twofold. First, any attempt to develop a GD principle
will inevitably encounter the same pitfalls that Goldman mentioned above—namely, numerous
examples of cases in which the sufficient condition is met and yet the necessary condition does
not follow. Thus, the failure of Feldman and Conee to provide such a condition appears to be
merely an ad hoc attempt to indicate that some internal processes are necessary and that some
form of internal access to such conditions ought to be a requirement for knowledge. But, as we
will see later, they are not even entirely committed to the idea that the internal access
requirement is necessary for knowledge. Second, this example still runs the risk of the forgotten
evidence problem and the occurent retrievability problem. Intuitively—and there seems no good
reason to do a complete phenomenology of bird watching—it is not entirely clear that even
experts have a complete set of internally available reasons that indicate that some proposition is
true or false for a case as simple as identifying a bird. But even if it was the case that they did,
this is not what Feldman and Conee are suggesting is a requirement for knowledge. Again, they
are merely positing that some internal process generated the belief and that epistemic differences
are mental—and thus “internal”—in origin. Shortly, we will see why they make this move.
Feldman and Conee address some of Goldman’s criticisms of internalism. I will attempt
to recapitulate their position with the intent of rebutting the objections they offer to Goldman’s
process reliabilism.
Goldman’s criticism of internalism is committed to the idea that internal states cannot
fully account for the justification of stored beliefs.67 He further assumes both (a) that virtually
all justified beliefs are stored beliefs and (b) that internalists must find something conscious to
serve as their justification. Feldman and Conee counter these claims on the grounds that
Goldman fails to make the distinction between occurrent and dispositional senses of “justified”
and occurrent and dispositional senses of “belief.”68 They claim instead that one can have
“stored justification” for these beliefs or, to be more specific, one can have in memory—even if
not readily accessible—reasons that justify these beliefs.69 In other words, their claim is that one
may have developed a belief in the right kind of way—namely, according to some internal access
requirement—and, because of the passage of time, this belief has become dormant. But although
it is dormant (i.e., not available for conscious processing), it can still serve to justify many of the
higher-order beliefs that result from it because it is, in some sense, internal to the mind

67
Rather, his claim is that internal access to beliefs cannot account for the justification of stored beliefs
because it is both excessively demanding of epistemic agents and because it may well be psychologically
impossible.
68
Feldman and Conee, “Internalism Defended,” 412-13.
69
Ibid., 413.
(mentalism). This argument is easy to refute because Feldman and Conee are equivocating on
the word “internal.”
What the word “internal” is intended to convey has been the object of some dispute in the
contemporary literature. W. Alston clarifies the intended meanings when he argues that the
concept of “internal” can be understood in any of the following three ways:
1. Q can confer justification on S’s belief that P only if Q is within S’s “perspective” or
“viewpoint” on the world, in the sense of being something that S knows, believes, or
justifiably believes. (Perspectival Internalism-PI)70
2. Q can confer justification on S’s belief that P only if Q is accessible to S in some special
way, for example, directly accessible or infallibly inaccessible. (Accessibility
Internalism-AI)71
3. Only those states of affairs of which the subject is actually conscious/aware can serve to
justify a given proposition. (Consciousness Internalism-CI)72
The problem with Feldman and Conee’s analysis of Goldman’s account of internalism is
that they have managed to misconstrue the meaning of the word “internal” by arguing for a
model that is most similar to Alston’s PI model, while Goldman, who is citing the other
mainstream internalists, has something like AI in mind when he is refuting “internalism.”
Alston himself provides a very interesting analysis of the internalism and externalism
debate insofar as he claims that the distinction itself is problematic on the grounds that
justification does entail the internal CI condition,73 but that what must be accessible is the
adequacy of the grounds of the belief, which is an external connection to truth. In other words,
to be justified (for Alston), one must believe on the basis of reflection (internal) that the ground
on which S formulates belief p is a justified ground. This differs from Goldman’s reliabilism
insofar as one’s beliefs must be based on a ground that satisfies the AI constraint rather than
being merely the product of some reliable belief-forming mechanism. An assessment of the
adequacy of the ground—truth conditions being external to the agent—is an externalist

70
Alston, “Internalism and Externalism in Epistemology,” 186.
71
Ibid.
72
Ibid., 233.
73
Ibid.
condition, whereas the requirement that this ground be available for assessment is an internalist
condition.74 Goldman ignores such a condition in Epistemology and Cognition in favor of a
reliabilist approach that assesses the historical reliability of a given token. While Alston’s
criticism may be valuable, it is still worth noting that Alston provides yet another GD condition
that might be valuable for the individual cognizer insofar as it may lead to reliable tokens, but
what it still operant in Goldman’s analysis, and thus what is of ultimate concern for a reliabilist,
is that such a GD constraint is valuable only insofar as it contributes to the objective reliability of
a given cognitive token.
Goldman is very specific about what Feldman and Conee mean when they use the word
“internal.” To recapitulate, Goldman claims that internalism—understood as aligning with
Alston’s AI model—is committed to the following three propositions:
1. There is a Guidance Deontological (GD) concept of Justification.
2. There are certain constraints on the determiners of justification derived from GD, namely
that all justification determiners must be accessible to or knowable by, the epistemic
agent.
3. Justification must be an internal affair. 75
To be sure, each of these conditions is a sufficient and necessary condition for the translation of a
true belief into knowledge. Justification is not simply an internal affair insofar as it involves
internal cognitive processes, but it is “internal” in a specific kind of way—namely that the
reasons that justify beliefs must be accessible to, knowable by, and stateable for the epistemic
agent that is called on to provide justification. Feldman and Conee equivocate on the term
“internal” because they allow occurrent and dispositional senses of “justified” plus occurrent and
dispositional senses of “belief” to count as justifiers when the mainstream internalists that
Goldman is responding to do not.
Regarding the forgotten evidence problem, the reader will remember that one of
Goldman’s criticisms of internalism is that relevant evidence, especially evidence that was
obtained according to internalist conditions, can be lost in situations in which one might

74
Ibid., 243.
75
Goldman, “Internalism Exposed,” 379.
intuitively consider an epistemic agent to still have knowledge. The question of whether an
epistemic agent is justified in holding a belief in which the initial evidence that justifies the belief
has been forgotten is a question of whether we are to extend justification to these retained beliefs
on the grounds that they have been developed by processes that are reliable. Feldman and Conee
respond to this by claiming that justification consists in both internally accessible reasons for
belief, derived from occurrent senses of justification and occurrent senses of belief, and
conscious qualities of recollection, derived from dispositional senses of justification and
dispositional senses of belief.
Justification that is derived from occurrent senses of belief and occurrent senses of
justification is developed based on the traditional conception of the internal access and
retrievability condition. To be justified in this sense, then, the internalist is committed to the
epistemic agent having a conscious representation of the reason for a belief. To be justified in
the dispositional sense, the internalist is not committed to the epistemic agent having a conscious
representation of the reason for a belief. It is problematic for Feldman and Conee to claim that
internalists are arguing against the idea that all “justifiers” must be consciously accessible when
this is precisely what is being offered as a GD condition for internalist justification. This is
problematic because if Feldman and Conee do not cite the internalist position correctly,
subsequently failing to develop their own version of it, then they are merely defending a
paradigm that nobody else accepts. They claim instead that justification can consist in conscious
qualities of recollection such as its “vivacity” and “associated feelings of confidence” 76 without
requiring that propositional states be internally available for conscious processing.
To refute this claim, I will argue two points. First, Feldman and Conee’s argument is still
premised on an equivocation on the word “internal” as it is used by both mainstream internalists
and in Goldman’s diagnosis of internalism. Second, I will argue that this thesis is prima facie
untenable as a solution to the internalism/externalism debate concerning justification and that it
is an untenable solution to the question of justification itself. Feldman and Conee claim that it

76
Ibid., 413.
does not follow that internalism is committed to the view that there must be some internal
representation of the fact for a process to be considered “internal.” It may be the case that:
1. Being in a given state is sufficient for a belief q to be justified.
2. Some fact q can be represented without the epistemic agent making any mental use of the
fact.
These solutions represent the “mentalist” claim that justification is the result of a process that is
internal to the mind, while not necessarily consciously available for the epistemic agent. Once
again, this formulation of the “internalist” claim is an equivocation on the usage of the word
“internal” as both Goldman and various other thinkers in the field use it.
The term “internalism” is intended to denote the claim that justification is the result of
internal access (i.e., conscious representation) of the reasons one has for a belief and that these
reasons can be occurrently available at the time the epistemic agent is called to produce the
justification. Furthermore, it is unclear what exactly Feldman and Conee mean when they claim
that the “vivacity” and “associated feelings of confidence” can serve as the justification for
dispositional beliefs that are not available to conscious representation. On the one hand, it could
mean that beliefs are justified because they are accompanied by a “vivacity” and “associated
feelings of confidence.” Under this assumption, these experiences would indicate that the belief
is justified and, in fact, would serve as a sufficient condition for their justification. The problem
with this case is that it is all too frequent that beliefs are accompanied by these phenomena and
yet lack anything more substantial than mere guesswork or wishful thinking.
Consider Samantha as an example. Since birth Samantha has been told that Santa Clause
arrives the night before Christmas and delivers presents for the entire family, some of which will
be exclusively for Samantha. Each year these presents arrive and each year Samantha is told that
Santa Clause brought them. Because she is told this, Samantha comes to the belief both that
Santa brings gifts each year and that Santa brings gifts exclusively for Samantha each year. If
asked the question as to whether or not Samantha believes in Santa, she would assuredly answer
in the affirmative, and, likely, this belief would be accompanied by feelings of “vivacity” and
“associated feelings of confidence.” Does the presence of these phenomena actually indicate that
Samantha is justified in holding the belief? Of course, these phenomena do not indicate this;
there is nothing epistemologically significant about feelings of vivacity and confidence
associated with a belief.
On the other hand, Feldman and Conee might mean that these feelings arise because the
dispositional beliefs that justify occurrent beliefs give rise to them. In this case, it is wholly
unclear what the connection is between dispositional beliefs, the feelings mentioned, and the
occurrent beliefs the agent is meant to justify. There does not appear to be a logical, a causal, a
probabilistic, or an inferential relation between the feelings and the dispositional beliefs
themselves. Further, if it is true that one has an associated feeling of confidence with a belief, it
is more likely that the belief-forming mechanism itself is historically reliable and thus something
that should warrant the adoption of a belief.
Before moving forward, allow me to interrogate these feelings of “vivacity” and
“associated feelings of confidence” more. In order to demonstrate, consider again Samantha.
Now Samantha is all grown up, attending the local university, and becoming more and more
interested in intellectual affairs. Samantha arrives home from school one day with a
superabundance of energy over a paper she has just written for her political theory course. As
she sits down for dinner, she begins conversing with her neighbor Frank about a given political
topic. Luckily, the topic happens to be one similar to the topic for the paper she has just written
for her political theory course, which itself was wrought with well-researched facts and opinions
regarding current events. As dinner begins, Samantha’s mother sits down to join the debate.
After sitting down, Samantha’s mother realizes that she knows little to nothing about the
discourse being had between her daughter and the neighbor, Frank. As the two are having their
discussion, Samantha’s mother realizes that the dispute between the two is revolving around
facts and opinions that are being cited by each respective side. Samantha is citing facts and
opinions that she has researched, discussed with her peers, and ran by her professors at school,
whereas Frank is citing facts and opinions that he cannot substantiate with anything more than
mere beliefs about the matter. Returning to the question of these proposed feelings of “belief”
and “associated feelings of confidence,” it is more likely that they would be associated with
Samantha’s method of forming belief, and ultimately Samantha’s beliefs themselves—barring, of
course, a history of ill-formed beliefs on similar intellectual matters. This is the case,
presumably, because these feelings are associated with the method by which Samantha formed
her belief. Intuitively, it appears that this is because the method appears to be more reliable than
Frank’s method of forming belief. The point here is that it is intuitively more likely that the
feelings to which Feldman and Conee are referring may be epistemologically relevant, but only
to the extent that they qualify the process of forming beliefs based on the external reliability of
the token rather than themselves being intrinsically valuable.
In conclusion, the goal of the preceding line of thought has been to demonstrate that the
debate between the internalists and the externalists is still alive and worth discussing. I outlined
each respective position with the intention of providing an analysis of both sides. I focused on
Goldman’s externalism with the intent of arguing for his process reliabilism against some of his
internalist critics. I outlined some of the major criticisms of process reliabilism proposed by
Feldman and Conee. There are many other criticisms of the preceding positions that have not
been discussed here. This is not to say that they are not good criticisms of the position, but
rather that many of them are outside the limited scope of this work. The goal of the present
analysis is to maintain the relevant distinction between internalism and externalism, argue for the
claim that Feldman and Conee’s conception of the debate is based on an equivocation of the
word “internal,” and finally suggest that the debate is still very relevant to contemporary
discourse.
CHAPTER 3

MAKING THE TRANSITION TO EXPERIMENTAL


COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Now that we have been introduced to Goldman’s process reliabilism and the debate
between the internalists and the externalists, it is time to begin the transition from traditional
analytic epistemology to an explanation of how it can benefit from the research done in ECP and
neurobiology. Reliabilism requires that a belief-forming mechanism is justified only if it is
suitably reliable at producing a proportion of true beliefs above a given threshold. Determining
whether a belief-forming mechanism produces more true beliefs than false beliefs requires an
account of the external world that a particular belief describes in the belief-ascription process.
As argued earlier, this requires analyzing the cognitive processes that produce beliefs and the
conditions under which beliefs are formed to determine if they are suitable to obtain access to
these external conditions. The goal of analyzing cognitive processes that produce beliefs is to
determine if they are reliable and why they are reliable at producing more true beliefs than false
ones. Thus, analyzing cognitive processes, and the external world represented by them, is a
matter of demonstrating how a particular process produces veridical claims about the world and
that these are actually veridical claims.
Before refurbishing the empirical evidence for Goldman’s externalist claims with more
up-to-date research from more recent work in cognitive psychology, it is imperative to
understand the framework in which he is using this research. This section will attempt to update
his appeal to and discussion of some of the leading empirical research on perception, making
available an account of both his methodology and how research on perception can contribute to
the claims he makes for his externalist project. In what follows, I will give a brief outline of how
Goldman structures the import of certain evidence from ECP relating to perception as it is found
in Epistemology and Cognition. This is significant because it is important to make the
connection between the cognitive psychology research that he is importing and the function that
this research plays in his overall theory. It is only after giving a robust account of his
methodology, supplemented by an identification of which features of the cognitive psychology
literature he imports, that we can come to an understanding of how this information functions,
but, more importantly, what role this information plays in the externalist paradigm with the
explicit intent of importing more recent experimental evidence in an analogous manner.
Goldman opens his chapter on perception by claiming that cognitive science can
contribute to epistemology by identifying basic belief-forming or problem-solving processes,
especially for individual cognitive psychology.77 The goal here is not utilizing this research to
formulate a correlation between environmental stimuli and cognitive events, but rather to
develop a more comprehensive theory of how belief-forming and problem-solving processes are
structured, with the explicit intent of furthering the reliabilist project of assessing belief-forming
mechanisms in terms of their ability to produce true beliefs. The research, he admits, contributes
merely “prospective contributions” of cognitive psychology, but remains committed to the
fundamental principle that what is most valuable to consider for epistemology is “verific”
consequences78 and, subsequently, the degree to which belief-forming mechanisms actually
produce these consequences.
A second principle contribution of cognitive psychology accompanying the identification
of basic belief-forming processes is refining the descriptive categories with which epistemology
operates.79 For example, epistemology deals primarily with the concept “belief,” but, as
Goldman claims, it could benefit from a “more subtle and flexible”80 set of doxastic categories.
Examples of such refined doxastic categories are: finely articulated distinctions between
perceptual stimuli and central beliefs and how beliefs interact. Other examples of such refined
doxastic categories are distinctions between activated (conscious) beliefs and un-activated
(unconscious) beliefs and how these modalities interact, which themselves can be supplemented
by finely tuned descriptions of category formation and how perceptual beliefs filter into activated

77
Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition, 182.
78
Ibid., 98.
79
Ibid., 182.
80
Ibid.
and un-activated channels.81 Refining these categories, and the subsequent use and depiction of
them, is the primary goal driving much of this research.
It is my contention, however, that if the goal of epistemology is developing an evaluation
of belief-forming mechanisms—understood quantitatively as producing some relevant proportion
of true beliefs over false beliefs—and refining the categories with which we speak of these
beliefs and belief-forming mechanisms, then it already contains the latent assumption that what
is ultimately valuable is producing more true beliefs than false beliefs. This is given by
Goldman’s verific consequentialism, which claims that the goal of epistemology, and
subsequently the subject of the evaluative criteria, is the ability of a belief-forming mechanism to
produce true beliefs above a certain threshold. In other words, the formulation itself already
presupposes the normative notion that one ought to produce belief-forming mechanisms that
generate more true beliefs than false beliefs. Goldman’s further contribution in this area is
supplementing these reliabilist intuitions with research drawn from the empirical sciences, which
allow for contributions from fields like cognitive psychology and, as I suggest, neurobiology. I
intend to expand upon the latent normative notion of Goldman’s research in the pages that
follow.
One feature of Goldman’s analysis that should remain apparent both in Epistemology and
Cognition and the work that is found here is that his is not an essay in the philosophy of mind.82
His essay is not concerned with the source and nature of semantic properties of mental states. It
is not concerned with the ontological relationship between brain states and mental states. It is
not concerned with grounding and arguing for the empiricist approach to the study of mind. He
is not arguing for—the much needed—distinctions between phenomenology, introspectionism,
and behaviorism. Likewise, and this is much more of a concern when trying to incorporate
neurobiology into Goldman’s research, it is also not an essay in the philosophy of science: the
research does not concern itself with the methodology of cognitive psychology. It does not
concern itself with divergent assumptions that exist between cognitive psychology and

81
Ibid.
82
Ibid., 184.
neuroscience. It does not concern itself with criticizing traditional notions of belief and belief
formation. The goal of this research is to analyze the ability of cognitive science and, even if
only briefly, neurobiology to assess belief-forming mechanisms. The work remains committed
to justifying propositional beliefs of the form that-p, and it will analyze these mechanisms in
terms of the retrospective, summative formation of these belief-forming mechanisms in
producing some degree of true beliefs versus false beliefs of the form that-p. All other
considerations should be relegated to arguments and assumptions that fall outside the scope of
the research presented here. The guiding assumption is that cognitive science is a well-
established, peer-reviewed tradition that can provide a paradigm in which verific consequences
of belief-forming mechanisms can be assessed. Perception, and particularly vision, which serves
as the basis of most of our perceptual beliefs, is but one modality of belief formation. This
chapter will focus on this modality as causally relevant in the formation of our most cherished
beliefs. Finally, it should be understood that this essay is primarily concerned with what is
termed “primary epistemology.” “Primary epistemology” concerns itself with processes rather
than methodology and with the stimulus-response relationship that exists between the
environment and the individual perceiver.83
Towards this end, Goldman opens his section on perception by formulating the prevalent
distinction between “bottom-up” processing and “top-down” processing. In what follows, I will
outline his articulation of this distinction with the intention of describing his understanding of the
ECP literature as it stood at the time of his writing. A brief foray into the neurobiology literature
will demonstrate a commitment to understanding the formation of beliefs at both the cognitive
level and the neurobiological level. Due to the centrality of perception in the formation of belief,
it will serve, both for the present research and for Goldman himself, as the focal point of the
exploration of the interface between both cognitive psychology and neurobiology, and
epistemology proper.84

83
Ibid., 4.
84
Ibid., 184.
He begins, as do many other cognitive psychologists studying perception, with pattern
recognition. Pattern recognition falls into the category of “bottom-up” processing because it
begins with the features of the perceptual act rather than with the beliefs latent in the central
processing higher-order system. The goal of “bottom-up” processing is classifying, or
categorizing, the output of the perceptual act derived from the initial stimulus.85 The assumption
is that the perceptual act has a content that is distinct from the perceptual features of the act
itself; this is to say that there is a representation in the mind of the perceiving subject that
organizes the features of the perceptual act and, thereby, identifies the object, set of objects, or
scene as one of a particular kind.86 It is also apparent that we frequently perceive altogether
novel objects as well. Goldman cites Irving Rock’s book The Logic of Perception to
demonstrate that the act of perception involves different stages of perception and different
perceptual outputs.
The first stage of the perceptual act that Goldman cites from Rock is the act of “form
perception.”87 The output of this form perception is categorizing the stimulus—without yet
identifying it—as an object that has particular qualities: “round,” “elongated,” “sharp,” and so
forth. This stage is distinct from other stages like the accessing of memories that leads to further
perceptual descriptions and analyzing the feedback that either supports or rejects belief
formation. “Form perception” is a good place to begin the analysis of perception—as a feature
of “bottom-up” processing—because it is the beginning of perception itself, and, again,
perception is the beginning of most beliefs. It should be noted—and Rock makes this point—
that both perceptual stages and higher-order functions contain descriptions, albeit of far different
kinds. For present purposes, we will focus on descriptions of the initial act of perceiving as
Goldman presents it. He claims that a popular approach to perception through the 1960s and the
1970s, and subsequently taken up by Rock in the material presented, is feature analysis.
Goldman claims explicitly: “It will be convenient to conduct my discussion in terms of this

85
Ibid., 185.
86
Ibid.
87
Ibid.
approach.”88 On the model of feature analysis, as it exists as one stage in the perceptual act,
representations are thought of as combinations of “elemental” features.89 This means that all
representations can be broken down into their constitutive components and analyzed in terms of
the mind’s ability to organize these representations according to the perceptual features that went
into the construction of the object as a representation. The question to be ascertained here, and
subsequently the question that needs to be further clarified by cognitive science, is how these
perceptual features combine to produce this representation.
The physiological evidence that Goldman cites seems to suggest that the “nervous system
‘extracts’ such features as horizontal lines.”90 Yet still, he professes, what we perceive are
patterns composed of these elementary features rather than features themselves; feature
extraction and feature combination are processes underlying pattern recognition that go into the
construction of the representation. This is indicative of “bottom-up” processing because it
begins with basic perceptual pieces and moves to the larger units we know as representations.
Analyzing “top-down” processing, on the other hand, is a matter of giving an account of
how higher-level beliefs and background beliefs influence the interpretation of lower-level
perceptual building blocks.91 “Top-down” theories are considered as such because they begin
with these beliefs and depict the extent to which these beliefs influence perception itself. Of
particular interest to “top-down” theorists is the extent to which a pattern’s context influences
how one perceives a pattern.92 This influence becomes readily apparent in cases of what R. M.
Warren calls the “phoneme-restoration effect.”93 In cases such as the “phoneme-restoration
effect,” subjects hear what is not actually present by filling in words that were not actually heard
because of the context in which the words were formed. Meaning—presumably, meaning that is
the result of a particular string of words—is received in the absence of the perceptual recognition
88
Ibid.
89
Ibid.
90
Ibid.
91
Ibid., 186.
92
Ibid., 186.
93
Warren, “Perceptual Restorations of Missing Speech Sounds,” 392-93.
of these phonemes. The reasonable inference to be drawn here is that some higher-level
cognitive processes were involved in the restoration of the phonemes lost in the transmission of
these units. Context in cases such as the phoneme-restoration effect causes subjects to hear what
is not there.94 Combining what is known from “bottom-up” processing and “top-down”
processing, it is fairly evident—and Goldman claims that this is the general view held among
cognitive psychologists at the time of his writing—that perception uses a mixture of bottom-up
and top-down processing.95 It is because of this interplay between “top-down” and “bottom-up”
processing that perception is typically thought to be “intelligent.”96
Jerry Fodor disagrees with the view that perception is necessarily “intelligent” in the way
many cognitive scientists seem to think. He claims instead that input systems are “modular.”97
One feature of these modular systems is that they are “informationally encapsulated.” A module
is “informationally encapsulated” when it contains pieces of information in the organism that are
not available for use by the other systems.98 The implication of this claim is that input systems
can function, and remain effective at producing true beliefs, even if the entire central processing
system is not available at the time of perception. This position allows for some aspects of
perception to be mediated by central processing without necessitating that access to the contents
of this system be a requirement for perception. This leads Fodor to develop three key points
regarding top-down processing: First, he argues that there is some information that the organism
represents that will not feed back and affect perception.99 Secondly, he claims, when there is

94
Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition, 186.
95
Ibid., 187.
96
Ibid.
97
In his seminal work, The Modularity of Mind, Fodor claims that there are six traditional sensory/perceptual
“modes” (hearing, sight, touch, taste, smell, and language) that epistemic subjects use to process information about
the world. Each mode is specialized, he claims, to generate hypotheses about the “digital sources of proximal
stimulation” (47).
98
Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition, 187.
99
In The Modularity of Mind, Fodor also claims that these modules demonstrate what he calls “domain
specificity,” which means that only a relatively restricted class of environmental stimuli can turn on the switch—and
subsequently cause processing within that module—for a given module. There may be multiple modules operant at
any given time, but this is so only insofar as there are multiple sources of environmental stimuli relevant to each
domain that causes processing within the relevant modules (49).
information flow, the flow occurs within the perceptual module itself rather than any other
faculties. Although Goldman appears to be skeptical of the “top-down” approach, he does
concede that it is valuable.100 The implication of the preceding analysis for my argument is that
accounts, both of feature-based “bottom-up” experimental processing and central-based “top-
down” processing must be supplied for a relevant update to Goldman’s analysis.
Identifying the role of ECP in epistemology (and vice versa) is important for Goldman’s
reliabilism for a number of reasons, primary of which is the drive to assess the reliability of
cognitive processes in terms of the cognitive mechanisms that form beliefs. As he argues,101
cognitive science identifies these belief-forming or problem-solving processes and allows them
to be analyzed in empirical and falsifiable experiments designed to ensure their efficacy.102 He
also goes on to argue that the role of cognitive psychology is to refine the categories of belief
formation found in traditional analytic epistemology. A. Corlett argues that ECP is the
investigative process of what he calls “individual cognitive psychology.”103 Epistemology, he
claims, can also provide assistance to ECP by detailing an adequate set of rules for the
introspection of cognitive processes that provides ECP, and ultimately individual cognitive
psychology, with the ability to analyze and assess the production of beliefs by and among human
cognizers. Towards this end, Corlett states that epistemology can serve at least three functions:
1. It can provide philosophical analyses of arguments and concepts regarding the
hypotheses and results of ECP.
2. It can provide explanations for the generalizations often made in ECP.
3. It can help ECP determine which, if any, specific epistemologies are plausible grounds
for scientific knowledge.104

100
In Epistemology and Cognition, Goldman claims: “It suffices for my purposes to register the widespread
acceptance of at least some top-down processing in perception” (188).
101
Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition, 56.
102
The question of method will not be discussed in this thesis. The assumption is that the methodology of
cognitive psychology is sufficient to produce veridical claims.
103
Corlett, Analyzing Social Knowledge, 57.
104
Ibid., 67-69.
The goal of my project is to provide the epistemic agent with a verific determination that
a belief-forming mechanism is reliable, a causally descriptive account of why it is reliable, and
an ideal prescription—based on the latent assumption that evaluations have normative
implications—of how to make it more reliable based on the experimental paradigm accepted.
Developing ideal prescriptions for how to make processing systems more reliable is, I suggest, a
latent assumption contained within a framework that evaluates epistemic agents in terms of the
reliability of their processes at producing true beliefs. I contest Goldman on the grounds that
evaluations are qualifications because they have praiseworthy and blameworthy implications. If
a cognitive process that produces beliefs is more reliable at producing true beliefs than false
beliefs in a given domain than is another belief-forming mechanism, then we say that the prior is
better, and in some sense more deserving of epistemic praise, than the latter. Even if the
threshold for justification is set at a given threshold, and both beliefs have succeeded in meeting
the demands of this threshold, epistemic evaluation is still operant in the sense that these belief-
forming mechanisms can still be assessed in terms of their approach to perfect reliability. It is in
this sense that reliabilism evaluates belief-forming mechanisms in degrees. By claiming that a
belief-forming mechanism is better the closer it approaches perfect reliability, we are suggesting
that the approach to perfect reliability is a good towards which epistemic agents should strive. If
we are to assume epistemic voluntarism, which entails the cognitive assent individual epistemic
subjects give when adopting beliefs, and the beliefs themselves which act as the products of the
cognitive processes that interact with environmental stimuli, we can develop a normative claim
that suggests the approach to perfect reliability is a good that ought to be produced via this
input/output cycle for all beliefs that an epistemic agent can accept; research into the
cognitive/neurobiological processes that produce beliefs can be used for this aim. Goldman
neglects to argue for this normative prescription in Epistemology and Cognition.
An implicit assumption in this approach is that an understanding of how a belief-forming
mechanism functions and what causal role the environment plays in stimulating it is necessary
for determining both the role it plays in belief formation and for refining the categories of belief
formation itself. Also implicitly assumed here is the idea that mental states supervene on brain
states and are causally reducible to them.105 This assumption is also required if we are to import
the work done in neurobiology. Although these empirical fields of study are distinct, any appeal
to cognitive processes requires an account of the brain states that give rise to them. If a process
is in err at producing true beliefs, there is likely a problem with the brain state’s ability to process
information about the external world at either the cognitive level or the neurobiological level.
Conversely, a prescription for developing belief-forming mechanisms that aims to produce more
true beliefs than false beliefs would require an account of how to develop the brain states that
produce the cognitive processes needed for belief in order to achieve this result. ECP is a
valuable resource here because it gives an account of the underlying neural mechanisms operant
in producing beliefs, the cognitive processes themselves, and the reliability of the processes at
producing true beliefs in experimental conditions. Epistemology is valuable, as Corlett argues,
because it provides the schemata for organizing these disparate claims into a coherent theory of
knowledge.106
Before turning to some recent experimental results of ECP and neurobiology, we must
first develop a format for organizing this information into determinate, practicable domains of
consideration. I concur with Goldman and Corlett that ECP can contribute to epistemology by
providing it with empirical research that supplements, and ultimately reifies, claims about brain
states, cognitive processes, perception, recollection, and reliability, among others. My work
proposes that neurobiology is a further supplement to this paradigm and that by neglecting this
research Goldman and Corlett have neglected a fundamental aspect of belief formation—namely,
the brain state on which the mental state supervenes.
Corlett argues that ECP can contribute to epistemology in a number of ways: First, it can
show the difficulties in human cognitive evaluation. He cites the example that cognizers often
evaluate the basis of their belief on background information. Problematic, however, is that much
of this data is not evaluated. Even when it is evaluated, he claims, the analysis of it is often
biased. The reason that much of human cognition faces the problems that it faces is that much of

105
Davidson, “Mental Events,” 138.
106
Corlett, Analyzing Social Knowledge, 67-69.
it is processed by a kind of non-introspected automaticity.107 This “non-introspected
automaticity” is the result of the automaticity of much of human cognition.108 The problem with
this automaticity is that it processes information based on information latent within the cognitive
processing system without determining the accuracy of this latent information. In response to
this, Corlett claims that epistemology can also be helpful to ECP by developing formulas for
engineering better human cognizers. He argues that this “engineering” amounts to developing a
set of rules for introspection that epistemic agents might be wise to heed given their proclivity to
produce truth.109 I supplement this point on the grounds that it does not go far enough in
assessing the mechanisms required for belief formation and that some account of the underlying
neural mechanisms is warranted—if not required—both in assessing the processes involved in
the formation of beliefs and in developing an account of how to “engineer” better epistemic
agents.
The term “better” is a precarious term; the evaluative conditions for it must be set before
its functional usage within any theoretical paradigm can be understood. Goldman sets such
conditions in Epistemology and Cognition when he writes about problem solving, power, and
speed of processing.110 Problem solving is the ability of a given epistemic agent to get a true
answer to a question that is posed for him.111 The term power is used to speak about the ability
of epistemic agents to develop large numbers of true beliefs.112 Power is distinguished from
reliability because reliability might entail a great proportion of true beliefs to false beliefs, but it
fails to deliver the epistemic agent from ignorance. Ignorance is the acquisition of a relatively
small number of true beliefs about the world regardless of the proportion of false beliefs. It

107
Ibid., 61.
108
In The Modularity of Mind, Fodor makes the claim, and subsequently argues for the idea, that “we
apparently have no choice but to take up this computational burden whenever it is offered” (53). This idea is very
much in line with Corlett’s claim that there is operant a kind of “non-introspected automaticity.”
109
Corlett, Analyzing Social Knowledge, 69.
110
Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition, 122.
111
Ibid.
112
Ibid.
differs from power in that an epistemic agent may be highly reliable and yet not have intellectual
power in the sense that the agent is very reliable at producing true beliefs but not formulating a
high quantity of them. Finally, Goldman analyzes the category of epistemic speed. Speed is
meant to designate the ability epistemic agents have of arriving at solutions to problems
quickly.113 The greater the intellectual speed an individual epistemic agent possesses, the
quicker he is able to arrive at a solution to a given problem.
The value of the preceding evaluative criteria for the present thought is that they have
empirical implications for “engineering” better epistemic agents. Where Corlett claims that the
value of epistemology for cognitive psychology is developing a set of introspection rules for
forming beliefs—which itself has empirical implications—I claim that an assessment of the
operant neural mechanisms in the formation of belief in terms of the criteria established by
Goldman is also warranted. Furthermore, I claim that if “engineering” better cognizers by
establishing rules of cognition is valuable, then this account must be supplemented by some
account of how neuroengineering can effectively produce these aims. Cognitively, if it can be
shown that problem solving, power, and speed of processing are enhanced by the application of
cognitive rules of belief formation, then epistemology is certainly valuable for ECP.
Determining whether applying cognitive rules to the formation of belief has implications for the
criteria listed above is an empirical question that immediately refers to the ability of such
cognitive rules to “engineer.” Yet, while one might accept the import of epistemology to ECP
for developing rules of belief formation that have immediate implications for problem solving,
power, and speed of processing, this does not preclude an analysis of the neural mechanisms
operant in belief formation having similar results for the same criteria. If it can be shown that an
assessment or an engineering of neural mechanisms is causally responsible for “engineering”
better cognizers in terms of the criteria Goldman has laid out, then the distinction I have
identified here is warranted. As I intend to demonstrate later, such empirical results are already

113
Ibid., 124.
available, meaning, of course, the bifurcation of operationally relevant domains is warranted in
the assessment of belief-forming mechanisms.114
The analysis of the acquisition of beliefs from occurrent neurological processes can be
subdivided into the following domains of inquiry:
1. Analysis of the factors that affect the performance of relevant processes (i.e., damage,
enhancement, training, etc.)
2. Analysis of the environmental conditions eliciting beliefs.
Seemingly, the only difference between the present analysis of the neurological processes
involved in belief formation and that of Corlett and Goldman is that the present analysis
supplements what was presented by Corlett and Goldman insofar as each provides an assessment
of belief formation, supplemented by a refinement of the categories of belief formation that go
into the construction of belief, with a call for the same practice to be applied to the neurobiology
of belief formation. Again, if the goals of incorporating ECP into externalist epistemology are to
evaluate epistemic agents in terms of the reliability of their belief-forming mechanisms and to
refine the categories which we use to refer to belief formation, then an analysis of the factors
identified above is necessary. Under the further assumption that the goal of analytic
epistemology should be delivering verific consequences, then any evaluative assessment of these
belief-forming mechanisms—which is the primary externalist goal of establishing justification—
is an evaluation of the ability of these mechanisms to deliver true beliefs reliably. If we say that
a belief-forming mechanism is “more reliable,” what we mean is that it has the ability to produce
a greater proportion of externally true beliefs. Because the goal of externalism is assessing
belief-forming mechanisms in terms of their ability to deliver more externally true beliefs than
false beliefs, we confer greater justification, or greater value, on belief-forming mechanisms that
produce some relevant degree of true beliefs over false beliefs. The goal of externalism here is
an assessment, and subsequently an account of justification, that identifies and qualifies the
belief-forming mechanisms operant in belief formation.

114
I discuss the experimental cognitive psychology domain in chapter 4 and the neurobiology domain in
chapter 5.
Before continuing into an analysis of the components of the research provided here, a few
words concerning the present study are warranted. First, and most importantly, this project is not
meant to be exhaustive even within the ECP or neurobiological traditions. The mind and the
brain are incredibly complex, both in terms of the mind’s computational functionality and in
terms of the brain’s neurological makeup. A detailed analysis of respective functions would be
well outside the scope of this thesis. In fact, I have relegated the present analysis to ECP and
neurobiological research published within the last decade or so. Although this is some of the
most recent literature in these fields, it is by no means a comprehensive analysis of what is
available. Taken together, these points should indicate that this is, and should be regarded as, an
ongoing process of developing our understanding of human cognition based on the ongoing
efforts of both the empirical sciences and epistemology working in critical and dynamic
conjunction with one another. The present study is a preliminary roadmap for the project of
eliminating cognitive error and producing better epistemic agents by analyzing the mechanisms
and the causal processes that constitute the belief-formation process, not a comprehensive
analysis of either the cognitive processes or the neurobiological processes.
The goal of the present analysis is to update the field of epistemology with recent
findings from both ECP and neurobiology in order to develop a format for analyzing belief-
forming mechanisms and, even if only secondarily, continuing the conversation of how to
engineer these mechanisms to enhance reliability. Eliminating cognitive error may—and likely
does—require an analysis of the epistemic conditions in which one forms beliefs, but it is
important to note that these are distinct projects. The elimination of cognitive error itself sounds
very much like a psychological project rather than a philosophical one. Yet epistemology is still
very relevant here insofar as a supervening theory of normative principles directing the empirical
research found in cognitive psychology and neurobiology is necessary for both assessing belief-
forming mechanisms and for the project of engineering better epistemic agents. Epistemology
may be valuable here, for example, by producing a normative principle that suggests that
producing better epistemic agents is a valuable goal. Likewise, there is a need for assessment
strategies that analyze the mind and brain in order to determine which epistemic qualities are
valuable to maintain in epistemic agents. These final considerations require more than the
strictly empirical sciences can give us.
CHAPTER 4

COGNITIVE PROCESSES

In what follows, I will focus the presentation of some of the recent ECP literature on the
cognitive processes of perception—namely, on how cognitive processes rely on perception and
are made more or less reliable based on how perceptual mechanisms function. I will also focus
on recent experimental literature that analyzes the relationship between the central processing
system and perception. I will take it for granted that most beliefs begin with perceptual stimuli,
especially visual stimuli. I also will take for granted that perception results from a reflexive
interchange between world and perceiver, mediated by the perceptual faculties. These things
being true, analyzing faculties in terms of both their functionality and their reliability will prove
useful for determining the status of the R-rules required for the inferential leap to belief. R-rules
require an account of the causal process that brought about the belief that-p in order to transition
from the second-order belief to justified true belief. The following literature provides an analysis
of the basic functions of the perceptual mechanisms operant in perception to both supplement the
discussion started by Goldman in traditional individualistic justified true belief theory and
carried on by Corlett in social epistemology and to provide empirical support for the construction
of J-rules.
Any account of belief and belief-forming processes must take into consideration a salient
feature of all belief formation: bias. As J. Lauwereyn’s book The Anatomy of Bias: How Neural
Circuits Weigh the Options argues, bias is a fundamental constraint in the production and
maintenance of many veridical beliefs. What is important for her, however, is that we
acknowledge this bias and qualify it as good or bad in terms of its role in decision making.
Lauwereyn, as someone who hopes that “we will yet become a species that puts our brains to
good use,”115 claims that the “neural signatures” that constitute the brain processes—especially
those relevant to decision making—establish the basis for the effect of bias on both belief and
behavior. Since this is the case, the goal becomes controlling bias so that it produces what is

115
Lauwereyns, The Anatomy of Bias: How Neural Circuits Weigh the Options, 128.
advantageous. 116 But the problem for Lauwereyn is that bias operates at the level of Gestalt
formation;117 we are our fears, desires, preferences, and so forth, and we functionally perceive
the world in light of these dispositions. Neutral processing can only exist without a composite
vested interest in existence. But as finite organisms, with a specifiable set of needs, we are, for
much of our lives, concerned with the survival and maintenance of our species-being.
Lauwereyn’s thesis is relevant to the present study because it serves as a reminder that even
beliefs formed under ideal epistemic conditions may be developed because of biases rather than
veridical accounts of the external world.
Supplementing this research, Chao-Ming Chang and Chin-Lan Huang claim that
cognitive systems consist of two kinds of processing: processing at the object-level and
processing at the meta-level.118 Processing at the object-level concerns objects and events below
the level of self-awareness and cognition. This is called unconscious memory.119 Unconscious
memory benefits from a coding condition in which cognitive environments match to activate the
same type of information (visual, lexical, semantic, etc.) as items in memory.120 This content is
typically processed as a preexisting association between experience and stimulus or as an
abstract, categorical structure. Processing at the meta-level concerns cognitions about other
cognitions: higher-order thoughts. Higher-order thoughts involve both self-awareness and the
active manipulation of cognitive symbols within an agent’s mental state.121 Conscious memory
is perceptually, lexically, and conceptually driven. It benefits from perceptual processing in
“shallow,” “deep,” and “association conditions.”122 Association conditions are typically
conceived as conceptual processing in “deep association,” as well as processing at the generation
level.

116
Freeman, “Bias Mania: Science, Poetry, and the Possibility of Their Union,” 495.
117
Ibid., 498.
118
Cheng and Huang, “Processes of Conscious and Unconscious Memory,” 437.
119
Ibid.
120
Ibid.
121
Ibid.
122
Ibid., 433.
In the same vein, Irwin Nahinsky and Isaiah Harbison investigate a conscious
phenomenon known as “unitization.” In unitization, general attributes—categorical features—
become associated with each other during learning.123 The primary motivation of their research
is analyzing this learning process to determine how this value association is established. When
formulating their hypothesis, Nahinsky and Harbison made the distinction between “rule-
learning” and “exemplar-based” systems.124 In exemplar-based learning, concrete perceptual
stimuli facilitate the holistic learning process, where prior “identifier-category relationships”
somehow only indirectly influence the effects of attribute values.125 Furthermore, they were able
to identify that poorer cognitive performance and behavioral performance were predictable when
“repeated-identifier” concrete perceptual stimuli were not available and participants had to rely
on category-level abstractly associated information.126 Their research further demonstrated that
identifier repetition influences category-level processing by facilitating the learning of abstract
structural relationship between categories.127 In other words, contextual stimuli are important
both in determining how category-level information interacts in category learning and in
producing beliefs and behaviors conducive to success in various tasks at the experiential level.
Mechanically, processes that involve rule learning are limited to the prefrontal cortex and the
anterior cingulated, while the striatum performs the concomitant executive functions.128
Processing environmental stimuli is the key feature of assessing whether a belief-forming
mechanism is reliable. There are various considerations here, but in order to supplement the
material found in Goldman’s Epistemology and Cognition, we will begin with a salient feature of
conscious processing that Goldman identifies: attention. Goldman identifies numerous features

123
Nahinsky and Harbison, “The Interaction between Specific and General Information,” 1.
124
Ibid.
125
Ibid., 8.
126
Ibid.
127
Ibid.
128
Like most other studies in ECP, this study will frequently cite the neurological correlates of cognitive
processing without giving an account of the relation between neurological processing and cognitive processing.
of attention worthy of note.129 First, although perception is often—quite rightly—described as
an automatic response to environmental stimuli, there are features of it that are somewhat less
than automatic. Goal responsiveness, Goldman notes, does indeed involve more than the
automaticity of perception.130 The implication here is that attention allows for greater goal
orientation in pursuit of some desired end. The function of attention, then, is allowing the
perceptual system to select which environmental stimuli it will process. Towards this end,
organisms have the capacity to orient their sensory organs (moving a hand, turning a head,
extending a limb, etc.) to acquire particular, desired information from the environment. There
are internal mechanisms involved as well, Goldman states. For instance, attentional states have
the ability to filter out sensory input in favor of intentional input. Finally, attention has a visual
modality.131 This implies that attention can direct the cognizer to process information globally—
spatial orientation—or on specific details of particular objects—object orientation—in response
to the attentional resources available to the agent. The preceding research seems to support
many of the views held by cognitive scientists that are shared with many epistemologists. For
example, the views here seem to suggest that the ability to direct attention to a particular
environmental stimulus is one way in which belief formation is said to be voluntary. Although
this view is called into question by Fodor’s account of the automaticity of thought, higher-order
processes that can direct attention seem to be one sense in which a belief is said to be voluntary.
Supplementing these views with more contemporary research, M. Carrasco claims that
there are two forms of attention: voluntary attention and involuntary attention. Voluntary
attention refers to the “sustained, endogenous, directing of attention to a location in a visual
field,”132 whereas involuntary attention refers to the “transient exogenous, capture of attention
brought about by a change in the environment.”133 Attention is important because it has been

129
Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition, 194.
130
Ibid.
131
Ibid.
132
Carrasco, “Cross-Modal Attention Enhances Perceived Contrast,” 22039.
133
Ibid.
shown that improved attention improves performance on many detection, discrimination, and
localization tasks by optimizing representation of sensory input. It also has the effect of altering
our subjective impression along the following domains of spatial and temporal considerations:
color contrast, spatial resolution, color saturation, and speed of processing.134 This research
suggests that successfully directing attention to one object results in higher accuracy rates for
regular sequences of perceptual stimuli. It also directly correlates with the production and
permanence of learning.
The ability of directing attention to perceptual stimuli is also correlated with an increase
in the speed and accuracy of processing.135 Yet it biases decisions without actually altering early
perceptual representations or subjective appearances of the target. For example, orienting
attention to the location of a sudden sound has been shown to enhance the visual perceptual
sensitivity, which in turn alters the apparent contrast of the visual stimuli. Because the goal of
the visual system is to maximize the usefulness of stimuli to the perceiver, it (the visual system)
will rarely actually produce a one-to-one copy of the world as it exists external to the agent. This
causes the system to produce non-veridical percepts by investigating only the immediately
relevant stimuli for processing. This allows attentional processes to assist in the production of
more true beliefs than false beliefs, ensure greater learning and retention of the information
required, and harness the ability to keep goal-oriented information active in conscious thought
longer.

134
Ibid., 22040.
135
Stormer, McDonald, and Hillyard, “Cross-Modal Cueing,” 22456.
CHAPTER 5

TRANSITIONING FROM COGNITIVE PROCESSES


TO NEUROLOGICAL PROCESSES

The use of contemporary neurobiology as a tool to inform epistemology was wholly


neglected by Goldman’s Epistemology and Cognition. There are various possible reasons for
this—and one can only speculate—but it is likely that Epistemology and Cognition was written
before the efficacy of neurobiology had been established. If this is true, then it seems that by
neglecting neurobiology, Goldman may have been postponing this project until more could be
known about the field. He does mention during his analysis of the implications of ECP for
epistemology that certain brain structures are operative in the formation of belief. Written only a
few years after Epistemology and Cognition, he claims in “Epistemic Folkways and Scientific
Epistemology” that the concepts of “knowledge” and “justification” already invoke conceptions
of psychological processes.136 But the fact remains that he fails to incorporate a sophisticated
analysis of the neurobiological features of the brain that are relevant for assessing the reliability
of belief-forming mechanisms and to analyze the extent to which environmental features interact
with the neurobiology of individual cognizers so as to effect the belief-formation process. He
argues that “the strict role of primary epistemology is to borrow the results of cognitive science
and assess the epistemic repercussions of those results.”137 Yet it is unclear why a systematic
analysis of the biological features of the brain and their relation to belief-forming mechanisms is
not included in the account. In what follows, I will provide just such an introduction to this
aspect of the Goldmanian project. I intend to import a variety of contemporary pieces from
within the most recent neurobiology literature to demonstrate how this transition from ECP to
neurobiology might help inform epistemology and evaluate the composition and reliability of
belief-forming mechanisms.

136
Goldman, Liaisons: Philosophy Meets the Cognitive and Social Sciences,” 156.
137
Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition, 182.
A few things need to be mentioned before the details of this project can be provided.
First, although I intend to develop Goldman’s externalist account further, I concede that this
project is, to use his words, still only “some first steps towards a full-fledged primary
epistemics.”138 There are still many problems yet to be solved. For example, we still need to
come to some solution regarding the problem of how brain states produce mental states. We still
need to continue the work of mapping the correlations between particular brain states and
particular mental states. Further, we still need a better understanding of how damages or
artificial manipulations will affect the nature of brains and mental states. The present project,
however, is an attempt to provide a roadmap for how neurobiology can contribute to the
overarching theme of assessing the reliability of belief-forming mechanisms, refining the
categories with which we speak about such mechanisms, and producing better epistemic agents.
As Gualtiero Piccini states, “If psychological theorizing is to make contact with actual neural
mechanisms, it needs to be more responsive to neuroscientific evidence than computational
chauvinists suppose.”139 The goal of the following research is to be more responsive to such
evidence without attempting to abandon the fundamental presuppositions of the cognitivist
project.
Second, I will relegate the focus of the current project to an analysis of how research into
the neurobiology of perception can generate useful information about how belief-forming
processes produce reliable beliefs. Due to the constraints of this thesis—coupled with the
recognition of the enormity of such a project—I will not focus on the updates to Goldman’s
research in the areas of memory, representation, coding, deductive reasoning, judgments, and
acceptance conditions. These are certainly research topics that could be pursued at a later time,
but they are, once again, outside the constraints of the present study. The goal here is to press
forward a research method by demonstrating how the latest neurobiological research can provide
empirical support for the assessment of belief-forming mechanisms, the proper functioning of
belief-forming processes, and the methods that engineer more reliable epistemic agents.

138
Ibid.
139
Piccinini, “Computational Explanation in Neuroscience,” 344.
Epistemology is valuable in return here because it provides a template for organizing the
disparate claims and correlations that ECP and neurobiology make, allowing the findings to be
presented systematically according to the constraints of value paradigms produced within the
tradition.
The ability of a cognizer to perceive the external world, or, more specifically, the ability
for object and spatial representation, is a fundamental requirement for most beliefs about the
world. Object and spatial perception, if veridical, requires the proper functioning of perceptual
faculties. These perceptual faculties are material physiological structures found within the
organism that, when functioning appropriately, produce accurate representations of the world.
Of specific importance to the present study is the network of neurons that comprise the human
brain and how these networks contribute to the formation of the perceptual representations that
are ultimately responsible for belief.
Because of advances in EEG technology and other various neuroimaging strategies,
researchers are now able to tell that object perception and the subsequent computations the
perception produces result from an activation of the brain region known as the ventral visual
pathway. The ventral visual pathway begins in the primary visual cortex, area V1 in the occipital
lobe, and ascends to regions in the lateral occipital cortex and the ventral occipito-temporal
cortex.140 From the ventral pathway, neural activation for visual stimuli travels to the lateral
occipital cortex and then to the ventral occipito-temporal cortex. Grill-Spector141 found that
object-selective regions, as opposed to spatial-selective regions, are isolated to the lateral
occipital complex (LOC). The posterior region of the LOC, they also found, involve neural
activation when processing the visual motion of the objects of experience.142
The LOC plays a significant role in object perception, but not specifically in low-level
property processing. Although it is the case that both strong and weak neural activations will
convey useful information about an object or an object category, the LOC is primarily

140
Grill-Spector, “Object Perception: Physiology,” 1.
141
Ibid., 2.
142
Ibid., 5.
responsible for processing shapes and unities rather than textures, colors, and other determinate
features of an object.143 Another feature of the LOC that Gill and Spector were able to identify
were the activation intensities of objects presented under a variety of conditions. They found
that the LOC responded with heightened activation potential when stimuli were present under
defined luminance, when objects were generated using a dot stereogram—as opposed to a
random bundle of dots—implying the perception of an object as an object, when structures were
present in motion, and when perception was generated from texture.144
Further fMRI studies now demonstrate that the ventral stream responds with differential
sensitivity to object transformations such as size, position, illumination, and viewpoint.145 Of
particular interest here is the claim that “at no point in the ventral stream [are] neural
representations entirely invariant,” as would seem to be the case in abstract, higher-order
processing.146 However, Grill and Spector go on to note that invariance may be the result of the
neural capacity to store information regarding object identity and object position across the
response of neural populations in distinct regions of the brain.147 Thus, there is evidence here of
separate coding for identity and position. This allows for the creation of category responses in
the coding of perceptual information alongside determinate position coding. This ability to
separately code for identity and position may produce one or both of the following.148 First, it
may preserve information about structural relationships either within an object (as in the
presence of particular features) or about an object (as in the case that, say, all tables have four
legs). Second, it may produce position invariance. In position invariance, the relative position
of objects in object perception can be held invariant in relation to other objects in the perceptual
field.

143
Ibid., 4.
144
Ibid., 7.
145
Ibid.
146
Ibid., 8.
147
Ibid.
148
Ibid.
The above information supplements much of the work by Goldman in Epistemology and
Cognition regarding perception, yet it pushes past it in dealing with perception at the level of the
neurobiological processes. The neural correlates of experience operate according to a complex
binding system that encodes neuronal processes to experiential content.
A. Raftopoulos argues that this complex binding parameter is needed to establish the referent of
a perceptual demonstrative.149 Likewise, A. Treisman points out that we code one object at a
time in spatial attention and this item is selected on the basis of its location at an early level,
especially where perceptive fields are small. The focus of Treisman’s work, however, is on the
problem of binding itself as a feature of neurobiological processing. The binding problem asks
the question: how do we achieve a coherent world of integrated objects in time and space, yet
still perceive and code for singular objects?
To answer this question, Treisman begins by distinguishing between the dorsal pathway
that codes for motion and space and the ventral pathway that codes for color and shape.150 The
implicit suggestion is that specialized areas code for different aspects of the visual scene. These
specialized areas mediate binding in order to code for different perceptual properties in the visual
scene. Specifically, Treisman found evidence to support separate coding for spatial perception
and object perception.151 When the object identity and/or location is known before the visual
search, Treisman found that the subjects can use feature-based grouping strategies to recognize
and store perceptual stimuli faster than in unknown searches.152
Evidence for illusory conjunctions in the binding relationship was also found in
Treisman’s research. The findings suggest that illusory conjunctions may be the result of the
neural “flags” that signal the presence of particular features of an object or scene being coded
incorrectly according to whether or not the object or feature is present.153 Treisman’s research

149
Raftopoulos, “Reference, Perception, and Attention,” 357-8.
150
Treisman, “Feature Binding, Attention, and Object Perception,” 1295.
151
Ibid., 1296.
152
Ibid., 1299.
153
Ibid., 1296.
suggests that there are four features of the reflexive relationship between perceiver and
environment and that illusory conjunctions are a prevalent feature of the perceptual task.154 First,
often features of a perceptual scene are separately coded, making misperception—which is the
result of illusory conjunctions—the result of coding for one property in one location and another
in another and, upon recall, identifying only one feature from recall in that location while
neglecting the second. During recall, this failure to identify a feature of a perceptual scene
results from the failure to recall coded features of the perceived environment. Secondly, the
binding problem is a real problem. Findings suggest that in perception there is a real problem
between identifying an object as an object in a perceptual scene and simply surveying a scene to
determine spatial orientation. This can result in either a failure to code for an object within a
visual scene or a failure to code correctly for an object within a visual scene. Or, conversely,
one may code for an object and yet neglect the spatial orientation of the surrounding
environment. Thirdly, evidence from research into illusory conjunctions suggests that focused
attention solves the binding problem. These findings suggest that as long as attention is focused
and directed, proper coding will ensue—at least it will be much more likely to ensue. Finally,
Treisman’s findings suggest that attention is not required for the simple detection of separate
features of an object or scene. Inevitably, many of these features will be coded automatically, as
much of perception is already automatic.
Conclusions from Treisman’s research suggest that attention itself settles through a kind
of perceptual competition between features, objects, and scenes for dominance. Action and
belief, Treisman goes on to state, which are the product of perceptual influence, are the result of
this selective155 process that helps create the objects and scenes rather than the agent being
merely a passive recipient of them. But because the questions of binding relevant to this
discussion require achieving detectors—neural “flags”—that code for conjunctions, this
selectivity becomes important because it determines which conjunctions will be coded and which

154
Ibid., 1297.
155
The term “selective” is loaded here. It may mean either (or both) consciously selected as in the case of
higher-order thoughts determining which objects to attend or it may mean somewhat less consciously selecting
which objects to attend based on the non-conscious automaticity of desires, preferences, or states.
will not. It is possible, Treisman concedes, that binding can happen at a later level in the coding
process than at the level of instantiated detectors. But even if this were the case, considerations
of selectivity would still remain fairly consistent due to the need for directed attention coding for
perceptual scenes prior to binding itself.
CHAPTER 6

DISCUSSION

In sum, Goldman’s process reliabilism claims that a belief-forming mechanism is


justified if it is reliable at producing more true beliefs than false beliefs. Analyzing belief-
forming mechanisms to determine whether or not they are reliable requires analyzing the
external historical reliability of a given token to determine that it actually is capable of reliably
producing true beliefs above a certain threshold, but, also, it is a matter of analyzing the
cognitive processes that form the beliefs. By analyzing the specific cognitive processes that
form the beliefs, Goldman is providing a second-order account explaining that certain belief
forming processes do in fact produce veridical beliefs according to a proper input/output,
stimuli/response cycle. Finally, by supplementing the second-order account with a J-rule,
Goldman is able to give a causal explanation of why a particular belief-forming mechanism is
able to produce the belief it does, thereby justifying the holding of that belief.
Externalism requires this causal explanation because it is an objectivist theory of
knowledge that situates the conditions for truth conduciveness in the external world. ECP,
Goldman argues, is instructive here because it is able to identify the operative cognitive
processes in belief formation and, by so doing, refine them to make them even more reliable.
The assumption here is that by identifying which belief-forming mechanism is operant in belief
and by analyzing the constituent components of the mechanism, the epistemic agent will be
better equipped to qualify it by quantifying its functional reliability. Further, once the reliability
of a mechanism has been established, the epistemic agent is in a better position to refine the
belief-forming processes themselves.
As stated above, one of the central aims of my attempt to incorporate neurobiology into
the discussion of justification is to develop what Goldman claims is the central focus of
externalism, and, more broadly, analytic epistemology: methods of assessing and refining our
understanding of cognitive/neurobiological processes so that they are better equipped to produce
veridical propositions regarding knowledge epistemic subjects have of the external world. This
initial formulation allows for two interpretations. On the one hand, it may mean developing
various strategies for enhancing cognitive/neurobiological mechanisms to increase the reliability
of the processes of forming belief according to the methods of assessment developed by
Goldman cited above. Or it may mean developing new assessment strategies for mechanisms
that produce beliefs in order to determine either individual reliability or higher-order categorical
reliability for individual mechanisms. The implication here is that the project of assessing belief-
forming mechanisms is itself open to revision, given, of course, developments in both ECP and
neurobiology. This is the inevitable result of the claim Goldman makes in Epistemology and
Cognition that assessing the reliability of belief-forming mechanisms requires developing both a
descriptive account of the mechanisms involved and a justificatory account that implies, and
indeed entails, the evaluation of these mechanisms in terms of how many more true beliefs over
false beliefs, relative to some threshold, they produce. These considerations can be subdivided
into the relevant domains of inquiry.
Before considering how to further subdivide the assessments concerning reliability, we
need to develop an account of what considerations are relevant for assessment. This is especially
important for the normative implications of Goldman’s work mentioned above. Goldman claims
there are three standards of evaluation: reliability, power, and speed.156 As discussed earlier, a
belief-forming mechanism is reliable if it tends to produce more true beliefs than false beliefs
and the proportion of true beliefs is higher than some threshold. Reliability is important because
it helps distinguish between error and ignorance. Error is false belief, which means the opposite
of error is true belief, or reliability. Ignorance is the absence of true belief. For Goldman, the
opposite of ignorance is intellectual power. He describes intellectual power as the “capacity of a
process, method, system or what have you to produce a large number of true beliefs.”157
Intellectual power refers to the capability a mechanism or an epistemic agent has to problem
solve or answer questions effectively. Finally, epistemic speed refers to the speed at which a
belief-forming mechanism is able to produce true beliefs.

156
Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition, Section 1.4.
157
Ibid., 27.
These standards of evaluation are essential for a number of reasons. First, if the goal of
ECP and neurobiology—as far as they can be claimed to have value for epistemology—is
identifying which process is involved in which belief, and then using this information to refine
our understanding of belief-forming mechanisms, then some idea of the good produced must be
contained in the method. Goldman is aiming at the production of a clearer understanding of the
belief-forming mechanisms that produce belief in terms of the criteria listed here. Insofar as
epistemology is concerned with endorsing methods and procedures of belief formation—
assuming these endorsements are intended to produce better cognizers—the ends identified here
serve as teleological principles. The goal of research into ECP and neurobiology must then be
conducive to principles that have as their orientation the production of better cognizers.
Developing strategies for the production and maintenance of reliable mechanisms has a
multitude of implications that has potential import from a variety of fields. Consider as an
example that M. Aberg et al. found that cardiovascular fitness at the age of 18 correlated
positively with cognitive performance. More specifically, endurance training correlates with a
decreased activation of the anterior cingulated cortex, hippocampal angiogenesis, neurogenesis,
and synaptic plasticity.158 Further, in longitudinal studies, physical fitness at the age of 18 was
positively correlated with enhanced occupational status and educational achievement later in
life.159 Similarly, H. Chang and J. Gibson160 found that something as simple as playing Soduku
limited the odd/even effect—differential processing loads for odd and even numbers—by
making subjects more familiar with the processing task. Findings also suggest that playing
Soduku speeds activation potential in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the ventrolateral
prefrontal cortex, which has positive implications for both mathematical processing and working
memory. Most significant of all, perhaps, is the beneficial effect Soduku has for age-related
decline in cognitive processing.161

158
Aberg et al., “Cardiovascular Fitness Is Associated with Cognition in Young Adulthood,” 20909.
159
Ibid., 20910.
160
Chang and Gibson, “The Odd-Even Effect in Sudoku Puzzles,” 321.
161
Ibid., 315.
The previous studies are but a few examples of the different ways in which epistemology
can benefit from the work being done in ECP and neurobiology. But epistemology is valuable
for ECP and neurobiology insofar as it is able to organize the disparate claims being made by
each of these respective theories into a coherent set of normative maximizing principles that can
provide direction to an otherwise disparate set of empirical findings. Corlett makes this point in
Analyzing Social Knowledge.162 By using the language of ideal theory and articulating a set of
normative constraints, epistemology is able to not only help direct the research of ECP and
neurobiology, but also to help apply it in real-world settings in which epistemic agents can
actually benefit from the results. The present thought differs from Goldman and Corlett insofar
as it provides an addition to the repertoire of tools used to both analyze belief-forming
mechanisms and to refine them according to the dictates given from the prior description and the
assessment strategies developed therein. Neurobiology, instead of assuming the postulated
functionalist model, derives the insights related to the present project from the neurological
sources of mental activity. Irrespective of the theorists’ view of this motivation, it is evident that
an analysis of the brain states that underlie mental states is relevant inquiry for not only deriving
the reliability of mechanisms but also the strategies for their refinement.
The importance of the discussion started by Goldman and Corlett was to introduce the
idea that epistemology and ECP could be mutually beneficial to each other. Denying this is
equivalent to denying one of the central aspirations of naturalistic epistemology: the
philosophical analysis of the possibility of the acquisition of objectively veridical beliefs. My
contention is that, while ECP may prove useful to this project, it may still be methodologically
limited because its claims are dependent upon postulated processes that supervene on more
fundamental biological mechanisms. Any account of these processes without at least a brief
treatment of the operant neural mechanisms is still limited to an account of the cognitive
correlates to neural processes that produce the experiences and the representations that we have.
While this may be valuable for the epistemological principles developed here, it can be
supplemented by an analysis of these neural processes on, if nothing else, epistemological

162
Corlett, Analyzing Social Knowledge, 67-69.
grounds. ECP, and the cognitive correlates it presupposes, is valuable as a heuristic insofar as it
can be developed to produce particular epistemic goals, but it will—and should—be regarded as
delivering parsimonious claims concerning the causal profile of belief and action.
I have two goals for the remainder of this thesis: First, I intend to highlight how the
updates to Goldman’s philosophical discussion of some ECP research have supported or
undermined the work he presented from years prior in order to demonstrate the relevancy of the
current project. Second, I intend to demonstrate the benefits of utilizing the neurobiological
framework to both supplement the research Goldman presented and move past it by analyzing
the neural structures themselves as they relate to the environment. These will be considered
under the principles guiding the research established here.
Goldman begins his account of perception by analyzing Rock’s book The Logic of
Perception. As discussed above, Rock makes the distinction between what he calls “bottom-up”
processing and “top-down” processing. 163 The distinction is between processing that results
from immediate perceptual stimuli and processing that results from prior stimuli, which consists
of higher-order thoughts and background beliefs directing cognition. The research I introduced
by Chang and Huang immediately following suggests that processing at the “bottom-up” level is
quite a bit more complex than Rock’s account admits. They claim instead that “bottom-up”
processing admits some degree of both conscious and non-conscious perceptual processing.
Chuang and Huang make the distinction between unconscious memory and conscious
memory.164 Rock’s account seems well-equipped to discuss accounts of conscious processing
and conscious memory, but it appears to have little to say about unconscious processing.
Chuang and Huang make what appear to be fundamental contributions to the analysis of
perception here by providing some of the details regarding this distinction.
Likewise, the neurobiological research provided above demonstrates the complexity of
perception at the neural level as well as at the cognitive level. Consider the work by Grill-
Spector that analyzes the neural correlates of object perception versus spatial perception. What

163
Rock, The Logic of Perception, 15.
164
Cheng and Huang, “Processes of Conscious and Unconscious Memory,” 434.
she found using various neuroimaging strategies was that visual perception is stored in the
ventral visual pathway. Specifically, she found that object-selective regions of the visual
experience are stored in what is called the LOC.165 By analyzing the activation potential of
various patterns in the visual field, and by supplementing this analysis with empirical findings
regarding how these activation potentials effect the formation of belief and action, researchers
can analyze the most immediate relation to perceptual stimuli forming belief: the nervous system
itself.
The distinction between this research and the ECP research cited above by Goldman,
Chuang, Huang, and others should be readily apparent here. We find here a methodological
divergence rather than merely a difference in results. We find that Goldman and Rock are
committed to discussions involving two relevant domains: stimuli involving lower-level
perceptual properties and higher-order cognitive properties. Conversely, although Grill-Spector
makes use of the same relevant domains, she furthers this by contributing an understanding of
the operant neural mechanisms that work at both the conscious and non-conscious levels.
Analogies may be drawn between Grill-Spector’s work and the work being done by Rock, but
the distinction to be made is a distinction concerning the site of inquiry. Rock is concerned
primarily with the cognitive level and the effects stimuli have on conscious processing, whereas
Grill-Spector is concerned with the neurobiological underpinnings of the cognitive response.
Again, this is important because both serve to contribute to the two goals that Goldman outlined
as potential contributions of ECP—namely, the assessment of belief-forming processes and the
refinement of the categories about which we speak of them. The neurobiological work of Grill-
Spector, however, provides further latitude for Goldman’s project in the sense that it contributes
to an understanding of how the brain states underlying the cognitive mechanisms involved in the
construction of conscious experience (and required for conscious thought) operate, allowing for a
more refined understanding of the categories of thinking and, further, an opportunity to reflect on
possible normative strategies concerning the development of justified belief-forming
mechanisms.

165
Grill-Spector, “Object Perception: Physiology,” 1.
These two methodologically distinct traditions will maintain certain assumptions in
common and certain assumptions apart. For example, ECP will likely maintain the voluntariness
of belief, the necessity of acceptance for belief, and the ability of independent higher-order
processes to direct behavior. Conversely, neurobiology will likely neglect—yet not necessarily
disallow for—the voluntariness of belief in favor of neural effects of environmental causes.
Likewise, neurobiology will possibly deny that acceptance is necessary for belief or even that
such things as “beliefs” actually exist in any robust metaphysical sense.166 While fascinating,
these arguments fail to sufficiently disrupt the present discussion for a number of reasons,
primary of which is that identifying a methodological distinction is not a relevant disruption to
the overarching themes of articulating the criteria for assessing the reliability of a belief-forming
mechanism or for refining the categories with which we speak about these categories. Although
ECP requires postulates to characterize its computational model, and questionable assumptions
to orient its research program, it is also empirically true that, according to the normative
principles established here, ECP is capable of delivering efficacious results. It is capable of
developing strategies for producing more reliable epistemic agents by identifying the conditions
under which epistemic agents deliver true beliefs. It is capable of refining our thoughts on the
nature of cognition. Conversely, neurobiology operates at the level of biochemical responses to
environmental stimuli. Although one may argue that such reductionism can provide little in the
way of concrete results concerning processing of the input/output cognitive response of
epistemic agents, it is true that cognitive processes supervene on brain processes and are causally
reducible to them, making them a valuable source of study for those interested in the processes

166
Paul Churchland makes an argument for this point in his article titled “Eliminative Materialism and the
Propositional Attitudes.” He claims: “The relations between the resulting propositional attitudes are
characteristically the relations that hold between the propositions ‘contained’ in them, relations such as entailment,
equivalence, and mutual understanding” (258). Goldman rightly criticizes the eliminative physicalist project in his
article titled “The Psychology of Folk Psychology” when he claims that the folk psychology concepts interrogated
by cognitive psychology are still necessary for two reasons. First, he states, most people do not have a robust theory
of mind, but they do have a folk psychology (a collection of superficial concepts about mental states). It is not the
case now, and it likely won’t be the case for a very long time (if ever), that the practical value of folk psychology
can be abandoned as a means of exchanging information about both the world and mental states. Secondly, he
claims, cognitive science needs to discover what the contents of these concepts are, especially as they relate to
thinking, how they are derived, and what the value of them might be for future research.
that form beliefs.167 This being noted, any complete description of—or prescription for—
occurrent cognitive states must include some account of the neural mechanisms at work.
Moreover, epistemology, and, more specifically, externalism, can benefit from the application of
neurobiology to the study of belief-forming mechanisms. Neurobiology may also, perhaps, be
able to ground the entire externalist project given future scientific results.
In sum, I gave an account of Goldman’s reliabilism and supplemented it with a
recapitulation of both his and Corlett’s examination of certain aspects of ECP and ECP’s relation
to externalist theory. I followed this research by updating some of the research presented by
Goldman to demonstrate that the project outlined is subject to continual critique and
reformulation. Finally, I argued that the application of neurobiology to the project started by
Goldman and continued by Corlett is a valuable way to develop the reliabilist project according
to the rigors of the latest experimental science. It should be apparent from the ideas presented
here that this too is a work in progress and ought to be subjected to the latest findings in both
ECP and neurobiology. Until something resembling perfectly reliable epistemic agents is
achieved, an understanding of the mechanisms involved in belief formation can still benefit from
descriptive refinement given by ECP and neurobiology.

167
Davidson, “Mental Events,” 138.
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