Reliabilism, Truetemp And New Perceptual Faculties

According to the thought experiment most commonly used to argue against reliabilism, Mr. Truetemp is given an unusual but reliable cognitive faculty. Since he is unaware of the existence of this faculty, its deliverances strike him as rather odd. Many think that Truetemp would not have justified beliefs. Since he satisfies the reliabilist conditions for justified belief, reliabilism appears to be mistaken. I argue that the Truetemp case is underdescribed and that this leads readers to make erroneous assumptions about Truetemp’s epistemic situation. After examining empirical studies of actual subjects who, like Truetemp, have received new perceptual faculties, I show that Truetemp must have been endowed with all of the reorganized neural circuitry and cognitive skills that subjects with new perceptual faculties normally acquire during a long and difficult process of adaptation and development. When readers realize how much more the designers of Truetemp’s new faculty had to do than simply slip an artificial device under Truetemp’s scalp, I find that they no longer think his beliefs would be unjustified. Because the thought experiment fails to support anti-reliabilist intuitions when further details of the case are made explicit, the Truetemp thought experiment does not constitute a clear and decisive counterexample to reliabilism. 1. INTRODUCING THE PROBLEM Reliabilists offer the following analysis of justified belief. R1) S’s belief in p is justified iff it is caused (or causally sustained) by a reliable cognitive process, or a history of reliable processes. (Goldman 1994, 309) A process’ reliability is determined by the ratio of true to false beliefs produced by that process. If a belief is produced by a highly reliable cognitive process, that belief will have a high degree of justification. Beliefs will be unjustified just when they are produced by unreliable processes. Many epistemologists claim that simply being formed by a reliable process is not sufficient to make beliefs epistemically justified. Others maintain that process reliability is not even necessary for justification. Many critics of reliabilism use the same kind of counterexample to argue for the inadequacy of reliabilism. The most widely discussed version of the counterexample is Keith Lehrer’s (1990, 162 ff.) story of Mr. Synthese 140: 307–329, 2004. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.