nonreliabilist

Nonreliabilism is a term in epistemology used to describe positions that deny the necessity of reliability in the cognitive processes that produce beliefs for justification or knowledge. It sits in opposition to reliabilism, which claims that a belief is justified or counts as knowledge if it results from a reliable process. Nonreliabilist accounts typically stress internal factors accessible to the subject—reasons, evidence, and mental states—over external causal or statistical properties of belief-forming processes.

Within this broad family, several main strands are common. Internalism holds that justification depends on factors under the agent’s conscious awareness or mental accessibility. Foundationalist theories posit basic, self-justifying beliefs that ground further inferences. Coherentist theories justify beliefs by their coherence with a larger system of beliefs rather than by their relation to external processes. Some forms of virtue epistemology tie justification to the intellectual character and dispositions of the knower rather than to the reliability of any mechanism producing beliefs.

In practice, nonreliabilism is part of the larger internalist-externalist debate in epistemology. Proponents argue that justification must be detectable by the subject and not contingent on whether the belief was produced by a generally reliable mechanism. Critics contend that nonreliabilist theories face challenges explaining how justification relates to truth and how general reliability can be set aside. The term is often discussed in contrast to externalist and reliabilist approaches to knowledge and justification. Notable figures associated with nonreliabilist or internalist traditions include Laurence BonJour, Robert Audi, Ernest Sosa, and Linda Zagzebski, who have defended internalist or virtue-theoretic developments.