Goldman Quote on Reliabilism: The Reliability of the Process

Quote

"What justifies a belief is not another belief but the reliability of the process that produced it."

— Alvin Goldman, "A Causal Theory of Knowing" (1967)

Context

This statement captures the core insight of process reliabilism, the epistemological theory that Alvin Goldman developed from his 1967 paper "A Causal Theory of Knowing" through a series of influential works in the 1970s and 1980s, most notably "What Is Justified Belief?" (1979). Goldman was writing in the wake of the Gettier problem, which had shown that justified true belief is not sufficient for knowledge, and the subsequent proliferation of attempts to add a fourth condition.

The dominant tradition in epistemology — internalism — held that justification is a matter accessible to the subject's reflection: a belief is justified if the subject can cite reasons, evidence, or other beliefs that support it. Goldman challenged this by arguing that justification depends not on what the subject can access internally but on the reliability of the causal or cognitive process that produced the belief. A belief is justified if it is produced by a reliable cognitive process — one that tends to generate true beliefs — regardless of whether the subject can articulate that process.

"A Causal Theory of Knowing" (1967) was Goldman's first major contribution, proposing that knowledge requires a causal connection between the fact known and the belief that knows it. The reliabilist theory generalizes this insight: what matters epistemically is not the internal reasons the subject has but the external, world-involving reliability of the process linking belief to truth. This marked a decisive turn toward externalism in epistemology.

Meaning

Goldman's dictum makes a precise claim about the ground of justification. Justification is not a relation between beliefs — one belief supported by another — but a property of the process by which a belief is formed. If the process is reliable (it produces a high ratio of true to false beliefs in the relevant conditions), the beliefs it produces are justified; if not, they are not, regardless of how things seem to the subject.

Consider two agents who form the same belief — that there is a barn in the field — by the same internal experience of seeing a barn-shaped object. In normal conditions, both form the belief through reliable perception, and both are justified. But suppose one agent is in fake-barn country, where most barn-shaped objects are facades. The perceptual process that is normally reliable is, in this environment, unreliable. On Goldman's view, the agent in fake-barn country is not justified, even though their internal experience is identical to the agent in normal conditions. Justification depends on the actual reliability of the process, not on how things seem from the inside.

This is an externalist thesis: the justifying factor — the reliability of the process — is not necessarily accessible to the subject's reflection. The subject may have no way of knowing whether their perceptual faculty is functioning reliably in the current environment. Goldman embraces this consequence, arguing that internalist theories of justification are too demanding and that the epistemic status of a belief should depend on its actual track record of truth, not on the subject's access to that track record.

The theory also implies that justification can come in degrees and can be defeated by environmental factors the subject cannot detect. A process that is reliable in general — perception, memory, testimony — may be unreliable in specific circumstances, and the beliefs it produces in those circumstances lack justification. This makes reliabilism a fallibilist and context-sensitive theory: justification is not a once-for-all stamp but a function of the fit between process and environment.

Philosophical Significance

Goldman's reliabilism transformed the structure of epistemological debate:

The internalism-externalism divide: Reliabilism was the catalyst for the internalism-externalism debate that has structured epistemology since the 1980s. Internalists (BonJour, Chisholm) argued that justification must be accessible to the subject's reflection, since otherwise the subject could not be epistemically responsible. Externalists (Goldman, Sosa) argued that what makes a belief justified is its actual connection to truth, whether or not the subject can access that connection. The debate remains one of the central fault lines in contemporary epistemology.

The Gettier problem and beyond: Reliabilism offered a new approach to the Gettier problem. Gettier cases fail because the true belief is produced by a process that, in the specific circumstances, is not reliable — the belief is true by luck, not by a truth-conducive process. While Goldman's original causal theory faced counterexamples, process reliabilism provided a more general framework that has proven resilient and that continues to inform attempts to analyze knowledge.

Naturalized epistemology: Goldman's reliabilism aligns with Quine's call for a naturalized epistemology that treats knowledge as a natural phenomenon. If justification depends on the reliability of cognitive processes, then epistemology must draw on psychology and cognitive science to determine which processes are reliable. Goldman pursued this program in Epistemology and Cognition (1986), arguing that epistemology should be informed by empirical work on perception, memory, and reasoning — a vision that has influenced the rise of experimental and empirical epistemology.

Virtue epistemology: Reliabilism is the direct ancestor of virtue epistemology. Where Goldman focused on the reliability of processes, Sosa and others shifted to the competence of faculties and agents — but the core externalist insight, that justification depends on the truth-conduciveness of the causal origin of belief rather than on internal accessibility, is shared. The lineage from Goldman's process reliabilism to Sosa's virtue epistemology is one of the main lines of development in late-twentieth-century epistemology.

Sources

1. Goldman, Alvin. "A Causal Theory of Knowing," The Journal of Philosophy 64 (1967), 357–372. Context in: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reliabilism/
2. Goldman, Alvin. "What Is Justified Belief?" in G. Pappas, ed., Justification and Knowledge (1979). Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reliabilism/
3. "Reliabilism," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reliabilism/
4. "Alvin Goldman," Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://iep.utm.edu/goldman/
5. Goldman, Alvin. Epistemology and Cognition (Harvard University Press, 1986).