Esoteric Reliabilism

Survey data suggest that many philosophers are reliabilists, in believing that beliefs are justified iff produced by a reliable process. This is bad news if reliabilism is true. Empirical results suggest that a commitment to reliable belief-formation leads to overconfident second-guessing of reliable heuristics. Hence, a widespread belief in reliabilism is likely to be epistemically detrimental by the reliabilist’s own standard. The solution is a form of two-level epistemic consequentialism, where an esoteric commitment to reliabilism will be appropriate for an enlightened few, while a form of epistemic fetishism—on which some heuristics are treated as fundamental epistemic norms—is appropriate for the rest of us