Toward a Synthesis of Reliabilism and Evidentialism? Or: Evidentialism’s Troubles, Reliabilism’s Rescue Package

Abstract

Alvin Goldman argues that evidentialism needs a helping hand by offering three supposed counterexamples to evidentialism—specifically to Conee and Feldman’s version. First, it cannot account for justification by introspective evidence because there needs to be a distinct mental state of introspecting x to be explained by the mental experience of x, and it appears that there is none. Second, no evidencing mental state accompanies preservative memory. Third, arithmetic inference does not explain the states from which the inference was made. Goldman argues that the value of superior explanatoriness is that it reliably indicates the truth of the explanation, suggesting that best-explanationism derives from reliabilist principles.But Goldman’s offer is not wholly altruistic, as he argues that reliabilism would benefit from incorporating fittingness into its account of inferential justification. He argues that fittingness is attractive because in instances where one proposition supports another, evidentialism shows that the appropriate degree of confidence in the target proposition is the degree to which the other proposition supports it. The first component of experiential justifiedness is fit with experiential evidence, and the second is a reliable process of belief-formation.

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