Abstract
The generality problem is widely considered to be a devastating objection to reliabilist theories of justification. My goal in this paper is to argue that a version of the generality problem applies to all plausible theories of justification. Assume that any plausible theory must allow for the possibility of reflective justification—S’s belief, B, is justified on the basis of S’s knowledge that she arrived at B as a result of a highly (but not perfectly) reliable way of reasoning, R. The generality problem applies to all cases of reflective justification: Given that B is the product of a process-token that is an instance of indefinitely many belief-forming process-types (or BFPTs), why is the reliability of R, rather than the reliability of one of the indefinitely many other BFPTs, relevant to B’s justificatory status? This form of the generality problem is restricted because it applies only to cases of reflective justification. But unless it is solved, the generality problem haunts all plausible theories of justification, not just reliabilist ones.
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Notes
Others have made similar points. For example, Heller (1995) and Adler and Levin (2002) argue that the generality problem arises for more than just reliabilism. Comesaña (2006) argues that “the problem with the characterization of well-foundedness is intuitively the same as the generality problem, and so any theory that incorporates the notion of well-foundedness into the characterization of justification will have to deal with the generality problem” (p. 31). The argument I propose here, while similar in spirit to the arguments proposed by these authors, is different in detail and broader in scope.
What if someone takes a belief’s justificatory status to be a function of the reliability of its production but is mistaken—it is a function of something else? It doesn’t matter. The generality problem arises for that attempt to show that the belief is justified—even if that attempt is ultimately doomed.
Actually, I will take this back in the next section. Insofar as Sandra’s beliefs about the reliability of the heart attack model are the result of testimony from experts she knows (or justifiably believes) are highly reliable, the generality problem arises for these beliefs as well.
Testimonial knowledge has received considerable attention recently. (For an excellent overview of the literature, see Lackey 2006.) Perhaps the central issue concerning testimonial knowledge is whether testimonial beliefs are (in some sense) epistemically basic. I take no stand on that issue. My thesis requires only the uncontroversial claim that some testimonial beliefs can be justified by explicit, second-order knowledge that the testimony comes from a highly reliable source.
This argument takes advantage of Feldman and Conee’s permissive view of BFPTs: A BFPT is any set of belief-forming process-tokens that share some property or properties.
John Pollock suggested this reply in conversation.
The referee suggested this reply.
Nothing of substance turns on this broader characterization of the generality problem. Those who want to insist that the generality problem applies by definition only when J is the reliability of the relevant BFPTs can call the broader problem the generality problem*. Given that way of describing things, my thesis is that all plausible theories of justification suffer from the generality problem* and this problem is at least as knotty as the generality problem.
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Acknowledgements
For many excellent questions on earlier versions of this paper, I would like to thank audiences at the University of Pennsylvania, Stockholm University, the University of Gothenburg, and at the conference on The Epistemology of Natural and Artificial Systems at California State University, Long Beach. I would also like to thank Stewart Cohen, Hilary Kornblith, John Pollock, J.D. Trout, Charles Wallis, an anonymous referee, and especially Mark Wunderlich for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful to the National Science Foundation for grant SES#0354536 that supported this research in its early stages.
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Bishop, M.A. Why the generality problem is everybody’s problem. Philos Stud 151, 285–298 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9445-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9445-z