Frank Hofmann

I distinguish between three kinds of reliabilism for epistemic justification, namely, pure reliabilism, evidential reliabilism, and reasons reliabilism, and I argue for reasons reliabilism. Pure reliabilism and evidential reliabilism are plagued, most importantly, by the generality problem, and they cannot deal adequately with defeater phenomena. One can avoid these problems only by jettisoning the idea of process reliability. The truth connection ? which is essential for any kind of reliabilism ? has to be provided in an altogether different way, namely, by means of facts in the world which serve as objective reasons (or evidence). So, as reasons reliabilism says, a justified belief has to be anchored in an objective reason which speaks in favor of its truth. Only in this way can intuitions about defeaters be preserved and explained. And reasons reliabilism can avoid the generality problem

Recently, a new movement of philosophers, called 'experimental philosophy', has suggested that the philosophers' favored armchair is in flames. In order to assess some of their claims, it is helpful to provide a theoretical background against which we can discuss whether certain facts are, or could be, evidence for or against a certain view about how philosophical intuitions work and how good they are. In this paper, I will be mostly concerned with providing such a theoretical background, and I will start discussing in which way experimental philosophy challenges the reliability of philosophical intuitions and how its challenge fits into some more theoretical considerations that also point towards a reliability problem for intuitions. The paper attempts to argue that a certain account of intuitions—the imaginationist account—is available which is well-suited for explicating the expertise reply to the challenge of experimental philosophy