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Full Idea
How can the fact that a belief is reliably produced make my acceptance of that belief rational and responsible when that fact itself is entirely unavailable to me?
Gist of Idea
If the reliable facts producing a belief are unknown to me, my belief is not rational or responsible
Source
Laurence Bonjour (A Version of Internalist Foundationalism [2003], 2.2)
Book Ref
Bonjour,L/Sosa,E: 'Epistemic Justification' [Blackwells 2003], p.27
A Reaction
This question must rival Pollock's proposal (Idea 8815) as the master argument against externalism. Bonjour is assuming that knowledge has to be 'rational and responsible', but clearly externalists take a more lax view of knowledge.
Related Idea
Idea 8815 Belief externalism is false, because external considerations cannot be internalized for actual use [Pollock]
| 22326 | Knowledge needs more than a sensitive response; the response must also be appropriate [Russell] |
| 4259 | External reliability is not enough, if the internal state of the believer is known to be irrational [Bonjour] |
| 2866 | A true belief might be based on a generally reliable process that failed on this occasion [Blackburn] |
| 8890 | If the reliable facts producing a belief are unknown to me, my belief is not rational or responsible [Bonjour] |
| 3565 | Sometimes I ought to distrust sources which are actually reliable [Williams,M] |
| 2737 | 'Reliable' is a very imprecise term, and may even mean 'justified' [Audi,R] |
| 9162 | Believing nothing, or only logical truths, is very reliable, but we want a lot more than that [Field,H] |
| 20187 | Epistemic perfection for reliabilism is a truth-producing machine [Zagzebski] |
| 19522 | More than actual reliability is needed, since I may mistakenly doubt what is reliable [Conee] |
| 19521 | If pure guesses were reliable, reliabilists would have to endorse them [Conee] |
| 19523 | Reliabilism is poor on reflective judgements about hypothetical cases [Conee] |
| 22327 | Knowledge from a drunken schoolteacher is from a reliable and unreliable process [Potter] |
| 19725 | In a sceptical scenario belief formation is unreliable, so no beliefs at all are justified? [Comesaņa] |
| 19726 | How do we decide which exact process is the one that needs to be reliable? [Comesaņa] |
| 19570 | Reliabilism cannot assess the justification for propositions we don't believe [Kvanvig] |