PHILOSOPHY AND PRAXIS

This paper is a Critique of Alvin Goldman's Reliabilism as a Reaction to the Gettier Tproblem. In a three (3) paged article, Edmund L. Gettier shook the very foundation of traditional epistemology which had it that, Justified True Belief accounts for knowledge. The formulation holds that three conditions are necessary and jointly sufficient for knowledge. Firstly, there are beliefs which imply that one does not know something unless he holds it as true in the mind, what this means is that, if you do not believe it then you do not/cannot know it. Secondly, we have truth, which means that there can be no knowledge of false propositions; belief in a falsehood is delusion or misapprehension, not knowledge and thirdly, there is justification which means that the belief must be appropriately supported; there must be sufficient evidence or argument for the belief. This tradition was inherited from Plato in one of his works, namely, Theaetetus. Gettier argues that there are situations in which one's belief may be justifiable while not qualifying as knowledge. In the bid to provide answers to what has now been termed 'The Gettier Problem', Alvin Goldman proposed that Reliabilism is the key to gaining knowledge and the solution to the Gettier Problem. On the one hand, Goldman believes that a proposition is accounted for as knowledge if the process by which we gain the knowledge is reliable (Process Reliabilism); and on the other hand, a belief, for Goldman, is justified if it proceeds from an intellectual virtue and unjustified if it proceeds from an intellectual vice. It is premised on this, that the paper argues that Reliabilism is circular in its nature, and as a result, fails in its attempt at a plausible solution to the Gettier problem. As a result, the paper further argues that virtue epistemology offers a more promising response by grounding knowledge in the intellectual virtues and competences of the knower. On this view, knowledge is “apt belief,” true belief creditable to the agent's intellectual virtue rather than to coincidence

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