Dogmatist reliabilism: how seemings justify beliefs

Abstract Dogmatists or phenomenal conservatists about epistemic justification hold that if an agent S is in possession of a seeming with the content p, then S has at least prima facie justification to believe p. Dogmatism or phenomenal conservatism is often adopted due to its explanatory power. However, there are cases that dogmatism fails to accommodate, the most famous ones resulting from “bad” cognitive penetration. In this paper, I propose a novel augmented form of dogmatism. The view I recommend maintains that only seemings that result from actually reliable belief-forming processes are apt to confer prima facie justification on a belief. The view proposed here not only escapes the main counterexamples to dogmatism but also possesses additional advantages in comparison to dogmatism or alternative qualified versions of this view.