Abstract

This dissertation is concerned with the various ways in which assessments of the reliability of our beliefs are relevant to claims about what we know and what it is epistemically rational to believe. After giving the schema of an adequate analysis of knowledge and defending it against Gettier-style objections in Chapter One, I argue in Chapter Two that a true belief counts as knowledge only if it is reliably produced in the believer. In my third chapter, I argue for the claim that unless we already assume that some of our beliefs are reliably produced in us, we cannot properly take ourselves to have any epistemic reason to think that any of our beliefs are reliably produced in us. Taken together, the claims of my second and third chapter imply that unless we make certain assumptions of reliability, we cannot properly take ourselves to have any epistemic reason to believe that we have knowledge. ;Of course, having reasons to think our beliefs are reliable and count as knowledge is important to us when it comes to deciding what it is epistemically rational to believe. One of the conclusions I reach, then, is that if we are to make progress in assessing the epistemic rationality of our beliefs, we must assume that some of our beliefs are reliably produced in us. These beliefs assumed to be reliable, defeasible though they are, make other beliefs epistemically rational for us to hold because we can take the former to provide evidence for the latter. In Chapter Four, I give a characterization of what that relation of evidential support amounts to. By the end of the dissertation, I hope to have shown how we can be epistemically rational in what we believe even though we have no guarantee that our beliefs are reliably produced in us