Abstract

I think it is important to try to make sense of these thoughts concerning the justificatory role of experiences, for I suspect that we are losing the ability to see why philosophers have traditionally been attracted to such thoughts. Coherentism and reliabilism, perhaps the two most currently popular theories of epistemic justification, appear simply to reject the idea that experiences can justify beliefs. Thus according to coherentism, the view that ‘a belief is justified by its coherence with other beliefs one holds,’ it is only other beliefs, not experiences, that can justify beliefs. Although there is little consensus as to how the notion of coherence should be explicated, it is generally agreed that experiences are not the sort of thing that can cohere with beliefs. Reliabilism, by contrast, holds that ‘a belief is justified if and only if it is “well-formed,” i.e., it has an ancestry of reliable and/or conditionally reliable cognitive operations.’ In other words, according to reliabilism beliefs are justified, not by experiences, but by being caused by reliable belief-forming processes. Experiences may be formed in the course of such processes, but they need not be, and even when they are, they make no contribution to the justification of the beliefs that are formed as the result of those processes. What makes a belief-forming process justification-conferring, according to reliabilism, is simply that it is reliable, not that it gives rise to experiences. So neither coherentism nor reliabilism seems to allow any room for the traditional thought that experiences justify beliefs.