From Reliabilism to Virtue Epistemology

This chapter is Zagzebski’s first paper that discusses “the value problem,” or the problem that an account of knowledge must identify what makes knowledge better than mere true belief. One of the problems with reliabilism is that it does not explain what makes the good of knowledge greater than the good of true belief. In Virtues of the Mind she gave this objection only to process reliabilism. In this chapter she develops the objection in more detail, and argues that the problem pushes first in the direction of three offspring of process reliabilism—faculty reliabilism, proper functionalism, and agent reliabilism, and she then argues that an account of knowledge based on virtuous motives grounded in the motive for truth can solve the value problem.