Assignment task: Please answer these 3 questions of Epistemology the theory of knowledge.
1. According to mentalist evidentialism, one category of mental states that constitute evidence are experiences. But do all types of experiences constitute evidence? Are they all equally weighty specimens of evidence? What about premonitions, for example? Does the premonition of an upcoming disaster constitute evidence of the truth of its content? And does this imply that, in the absence of defeaters, a person experiencing such a premonition is justified in believing there will be a disaster (soon)? Intuitively this seems wrong. How can evidentialism avoid this upshot? The natural answer seems to be this: They are not evidence because premonitions are not reliable indicators of the truth of their contents. But this account would be rejected by staunch internalists like Feldman and Conee (who don't want to appeal to externalist elements like truth). So what can they say?
2. Concerning the generality problem for reliabilism, some people (e.g., Comesaña 2006) have suggested that it is a genuine problem but it isn't peculiar to reliabi- lism; rather, it is "everybody's" problem. This might be taken to mean that it's a problem for any otherwise promising approach to justification. Do you think this is correct? Show what other theories can be expected to run into the general- ity problem as well.
3. If process reliabilism is an "historical" theory, does this imply that if S forms a belief in P by an unreliable process at time t, S can never thereafter be justified in believing P? Would this be a correct result? Why or why not? If it would not be a correct result, can process reliabilism be formulated so as to (clearly) avoid this result? How would such a formulation go?
Textbook: Goldman & McGrath (2015). Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.