Abstract

Among recent naturalistic epistemologies, one class of theories, 'rough psychologistic' theories, is the most promising. These claim that for our belief-formation processes to yield knowledge is for them to be sufficiently reliable. The study of cognition, then, is best conducted by dividing labor between two groups: psychologists, who should describe what, and how reliable, the processes we use to form beliefs are; and philosophers, who should formulate normative standards of reliability. ;One promising version of rough psychologism is Alvin Goldman's nativistic reliabilism . According to NR, reliability ultimately must be attributed to innate processes responsible for belief fixation; justified beliefs are beliefs produced by reliable innate processes. ;But NR is unsatisfactory. Agent-environment relations, not innate processes, determine whether beliefs are justified. ;This is because naturalized epistemologies, including NR, are externalistic in character. They hold that justification consists in reliability, and the latter is an objective fact about the agent's situation . Reliability is a matter of direct causal relations between him and conditions that make true the proposition he believes. ;NR is not truly externalistic, however. It holds that to have justified belief is simply to have the right innate processes, rather than to be directly related to environmental conditions. Its notion of innateness is spurious; there are no innate processes in its sense. NR fails to account for externalistic justification. ;Since justification depends on immediate environmental relations, a new, more satisfactory theory is required. This theory, here called 'contextualism', holds that beliefs are justified just in case they are related properly to the world around the subject. Beliefs must: normally be caused by appropriate environmental conditions; be of a type that, historically, has usually been true under such conditions; and be true according to available objective information. The dissertation goes on to develop and defend this new theory