Hill on epistemology

Abstract

Hill’s ‘‘Process Reliabilism and Cartesian Skepticism,’’ takes on two tasks. The first is to defend reliabilism against the objection that it makes incomprehensible how skeptical arguments could have any appeal. The second is to show that reliabilism can help us see why the skeptical arguments fail. His overall conclusion is that reliabilism, far from being refuted by the appeal of skepticism, helps us understand why skeptical arguments are unsatisfactory. A number of philosophers have worried that the appeal of skeptical arguments is a problem for reliabilism. If reliabilism were true, wouldn’t skeptical arguments be manifestly wrongheaded, given that they fail to consider the issue of reliability altogether? And yet they are not manifestly wrongheaded. Call this the skeptical objection to reliabilism. Hill gives two responses to this objection. Both maintain that skeptical arguments do implicitly address the issue of reliability. The first response claims that the best skeptical arguments include premises that imply that considerations of reliability have no bearing on the relevant points and can be set aside. The skeptical argument that Hill considers begins with the