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My grandmother knew when rain was coming but couldn’t say how. Did she know? What is reliabilism?

Akosua Mensah Fellow
· 5 replies
Knowledge & beliefAfrican & AfricanaAnalyticAlvin GoldmanLaurence BonJour#justification#know-how#reliabilism#yoruba-epistemology
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Its coordinates: 2.1 Theories of Knowledge · 2.1.1 The Gettier Problem · 2.2.3 Memory +3 more

I farm cocoa near Kumasi. My son is at university and sends me articles from his philosophy course. The latest one said that to know something you need a true belief plus a good reason, a "justification". Then it said some philosophers disagree, and called them "reliabilists".

My grandmother knew when rain was coming. She was right almost every time, more often than the radio. If you asked her how, she would say she could feel it. She could not give reasons. By the first theory, did she not know? That seems wrong to me.

Can someone explain reliabilism simply? And is it a respectable view, or just a way of excusing people who cannot explain themselves?

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5 answers

Accepted answer

  1. Wanjiru Njenga

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    Akosua, your grandmother is exactly the kind of case that made reliabilism attractive.

    The traditional view says knowledge is true belief with justification, and justification was usually understood as reasons the person could, in principle, give. Alvin Goldman argued in 1979 that this gets things backwards. What makes a belief justified is not that you can produce reasons, but that it was produced by a reliable process, one that tends to produce true beliefs. Your eyes, in good light, are reliable. A sound memory is reliable. And your grandmother's sense of the weather, refined over decades, was evidently reliable.

    So on reliabilism, yes, she knew. She didn't need to be able to explain her method, any more than you need to explain how your eyes work to know your cocoa is ripe.

    It's a very respectable view, one of the major positions today. The classic objection: imagine someone with a perfectly reliable clairvoyant power who has no reason to think they have it, and good reasons to think no such powers exist. Laurence BonJour argued such a person, believing on the strength of the power, would be irrational even if right. So there's a debate about whether reliability is enough or whether the believer must also have some grip on why to trust it.

    Helpful · 1

Other answers

  1. Titilayo Adeyemi

    Fellow

    Yoruba has a lovely resource for this. Barry Hallen and J. O. Sodipo, working with Yoruba elders, found that the verb mọ̀, to know, is reserved for what you have witnessed or experienced first-hand, while gbàgbọ́ covers what you accept from others, from testimony. Your grandmother's weather sense would fall under first-hand experience, I think: knowledge grounded in long acquaintance, not in argument. It's a reminder that "knowing" doesn't have to mean "able to argue for".

    Helpful · 2
  2. Hicham Ouazzani

    Fellow

    In my trade most of what I know is in my hands. I can tell if cedar will split by its sound when I tap it. I couldn't write the rule down. My apprentices learn it by doing, the way your grandmother learned the weather. I'd call it knowledge, and I'm glad philosophers have a name for why.

    Helpful · 3
  3. Kwame Asante

    Fellow

    One small caution, Akosua, because I've seen this in our own debates in Ghana. Reliabilism says she knew because her method was reliable. But the method has to really be reliable, and that is something we can check: count her hits and misses. Some traditional knowledge passes that test brilliantly, and some does not. Reliabilism respects her knowledge and also gives us a fair way to test it. That is better than either romanticising or dismissing it.

  4. Akosua Mensah

    Fellow

    So she knew, because her way of knowing was reliable, and I don't need her to have given reasons. And Kwame is right: I remember the years she was wrong too, and she remembered them, which is maybe why she was so good. I'll send this to my son.

    Helpful · 1