The Reliability of Blogs vs Conventional Media: A Response to David Coady

Response to David Coady's “An Epistemic Defence of the Blogosphere”

Preamble/vocab for non-philosophers:  
I wrote this for a class so, although I've tried to avoid it as much as possible, there are a few technical words which I'll explain here:

Epistemic reliability: A source is epistemically reliable if it produces/conveys more true beliefs than false beliefs.  Epistemic just means having to do with knowledge.

Knowledge that is vertistic: knowledge as true belief.

I think that's it!  

Intro

“. . . [W]henever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that, whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them right." (Padover, 1939, p. 88). The implication here is the widely shared belief that a well-functioning democracy isn't possible without the public knowing what's going on in their government. Of course, this assumes that the information the public receives is likely to be true, which in turn depends on the reliability of the sources from which it is acquired by the public.

In the internet age, the blogosphere has emerged as a popular source for political news and commentary. Given its rise in popularity it's worthwhile considering its epistemic benefits relative to those of the conventional media and whether the blogosphere positively contributes to our democratic practices. Goldman (2008) takes the negative view arguing that the blogosphere is a less reliable source of information than the conventional media and therefore does not benefit our democratic practices. In “An Epistemic Defence of the Blogosphere,” David Coady argues for the positive position and counters Goldman's three main lines of argument against the epistemic reliability of the blogosphere (relative to that of the conventional media). Coady argues contra Goldman that the blogosphere (a) doesn't undermine professional journalism, (b) doesn't lack balance in any detrimental way, and (c) isn't parasitic on the conventional media. Finally, Coady concludes that the blogosphere benefits our epistemic well-being and improves our democratic practices.

I will briefly outline Coady's main argument then I will argue that both Goldman and Coady are mistaken to focus their attention on evaluating the relative epistemic reliability of the blogosphere because (a) no meaningful distinction can be made in terms of reliability and (b) whatever current distinction there is will likely soon evaporate. I conclude that (c) even if we assume that one or the other class of media is more reliable this doesn't matter one fig given the wide range of reliability within each class; what matters is whether the citizenry is able to distinguish between good and bad arguments and good and bad sources. A citizenry with low cognitive abilities will easily be mislead by the sensational and find themselves sucked into epistemic black holes--despite the existence of some reliable sources, conventional or otherwise.

Outline of Coady's Argument:

(P1) Although the blogosphere might undermine professional journalism, it doesn't follow that it harms the “epistemic prospects” of the citizenry because political questions shouldn't be the exclusive domain of experts--we ought also appeal to 'the wisdom of the crowds' (i.e., bloggers).

(P2) The conventional media's ostensible virtue of balance actually excludes genuine balance because it omits points of view that aren't those of the dominant parties. The blogosphere, on the other hand, can accommodate every micro-perspective. This is an epistemic benefit to the citizenry.

(P3) Despite Goldman's argument that the blogosphere isn't independent from the conventional media, the dependance relation also runs the other way. The conventional media often turns to blogs as sources because blogs can do things the conventional media can't or doesn't do (like close examination of public documents, in depth analysis, etc...). These activities, which are most typical to the blogosphere, are an epistemic benefit to the citizenry.

(C) It follows from (P1), (P2), and (P3) that the blogosphere provides an epistemic benefit to the citizenry because it does things that the conventional media can't or doesn't do much of.

It Don't Mean Stink if You Don't Know How to Think
Instead of focusing on the central argument I will attempt to make the case that this debate over the relative epistemic benefits of the blogosphere and conventional media, while interesting, is of minimal importance. If our chief concern is epistemic well-being and good democratic decision-making, what really matters is the general level of critical thinking in the citizenry. An important part of the debate between Goldman and Coady hinges upon there being a meaningful distinction between journalists in the conventional media and bloggers. To begin making my case, I'll try to show that this distinction cannot be sustained.

Coady gives several criteria to mark the distinction:

(a) Journalists are paid while bloggers are not; (b) journalists are part an institution and therefore subject to institutional norms (for better or for worse) while bloggers are not; (c) journalists have access to “the halls of power” to collect information while bloggers' principle form of research consists in close examination of publicly available documents; (d) journalists have their information filtered in a way that bloggers don't.

With the exception of perhaps (d), I suggest that these criteria do not establish a strong demarkation between the two categories because there are many obvious counter-examples to each of the criteria. Regarding (a), many bloggers are well-paid and make a living off of sponsorships and ads. In fact, many bloggers aspire to this. Regarding (b), many academics and professionals have blogs. When they blog in their capacity as academic and professional, just like journalists they are also subject to strong professional and institutional truth-telling norms, in these cases do they suddenly cease to be bloggers? That's unlikely. Coady himself gives a counter-example to (c), and presumably as individual blogs grow their audience and opinion-making power, this distinction will be obliterated. Access to the halls of power is a poor demarkation criteria.

The last criteria is (d) is perhaps the most promising as a demarkation criterion. The concentration of corporate power and friendly ties to those in power suggest that the conventional media is subject to a type of filtering to which blogs are not. That said, as Coady himself indicates, there are examples of bloggers also gaining face-to-face access to politicians. It's not unreasonable to suspect this access is because of their favorable disposition or reluctance to criticize the particular politician; i.e., filtering similar to that in the conventional media. Of course, the bloggers are not subject to institutionally-imposed filtering norms, nevertheless it seems that anyone who's going to get face-to-face access—blogger and journalist--gets that access on the precondition of at least some filtering. One would presume that as individual blogs increase their audience and clout so too will their possibility of access increase, in turn further blurring the line between blogger and journalist. The point here is simply that in the long run this demarkation criteria probably going to grow increasingly porous and so isn't going to succeed in drawing a clear line.

Recall why we even care about marking a distinction between the two categories of media. We want to know if the blogosphere is a net benefit for a democracy in terms of its ability to reliably provide true information to the citizenry which will in turn cash out as a benefit to good democratic decision-making. Now, suppose one were to reject my above arguments against a meaningful demarkation, I believe I can still make my case against it: For each category the range of reliability is so wide as to make any meaningful distinction irrelevant in terms of the property we care about: reliability. In sum, the degree to which the two categories (if we presuppose some essential difference) overlap in terms of reliability renders them indistinguishable from each other in this respect.

Consider the conventional media. Who's in this category? Fox News, MSNBC, CBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, Huffington Post, NYT, NPR, PRI, and PBS to name a few. In terms of reliability, anyone who's bothered to look at recent media studies literature will tell you that there's a huge gap between the reliability of say, Fox News and NPR. For example, in several polls testing knowledge of current events, Fox News viewers scored even lower those who don't follow the news (citation). Not surprisingly, the more ideological the news source (regardless of ideology), the worse the participants' knowledge of current events. The group who scored best were those who listened to NPR.

So what's my point besides the fact that everyone should donate and listen to NPR? The point is that in terms of reliability—the property with which are concerned—the range within the category “conventional media” is so wide such that ascribing a reliability score to the category is rendered meaningless. “Conventional Media” captures pretty much any reliability value you choose, depending on the case you're trying to make.

It should come as no surprise that the same argument can be made of the blogosphere. From Alex Jones' Info Wars and the rest of the wacky wonderworld of conspiracy-of-everything blogs to blogs run by elite Ivy League professors, the range of reliability within the blogosphere is vast. The distribution is so wide that to speak of “the reliability of the blogosphere” is essentially meaningless—even more so than for the conventional media. You can make the reliability score fit whatever position you wish to support depending on the cluster of blogs you select.

Essentially, you can pick and choose a conventional source and a blog to make whatever case you want about the relative reliability of each category. One reply might be to average the reliability over all prototypical members of the class but this would do no more than distort what we really want to know: If a citizen gets their news from blogs or conventional media, which one is more likely to reliably report true beliefs? It all depends on which particular source of conventional media we are talking about and which particular blogs she chooses. It'll return to this later.

There are further reasons to be skeptical of any attempt to meaningfully distinguish and make pronouncements about the conventional media and the blogosphere in terms of reliability. Consider a hypothetical situation where there's no blogosphere and only conventional media. Is the conventional media reliable? That is, does it announce more true information than false? It depends. Do we live in North Korea? Or do we live in a Western democracy with strong laws protecting freedom of the press and a low concentration of media ownership? Or do we live somewhere in between? The point here is that there's nothing intrinsically reliable about conventional media. It's reliability is contingent upon many variables many of which are political, legal, and economic. With this in mind, lets return to the central issue: Does the conventional media improve our democratic practices (via epistemic benefits)? The answer and reasons are same as for the reliability question: it depends.

How about if we consider a population where there is only a blogosphere and no conventional media. Is the blogosphere more reliable? Again, it depends. What blogs is a person reading? How are they choosing what blogs they read? Do they pick blogs that confirm their pre-existing ideological biases or do they actively seek out blogs that challenge their point of view? The empirical evidence suggests the former.

The wide and overlapping distributions of reliability within and between the blogosphere and the conventional media as well as the contingent nature of each categories' reliability score all suggest that the reliability issue is of only minimal significance. To true see why lets return to the issue that motivated the whole project to begin with: how can we best ensure that the public is well-informed such that our democratic practices are improved? Coady would have us believe that there mere fact that people have access to a range of positions where they will encounter mutually incompatible points of view implies that “as a result they are able to develop their critical faculties, which in turn helps them make better choices about what and whom to believe” (p. 291).

Unfortunately for Coady, there are journals replete with literature to the contrary. I wish I could share his optimism, but exposure to a plurality of views isn't sufficient if we don't take into account the various conditions under which these views are encountered. For example, consider level of education. The Dunning-Kruger effect shows that those least able to reason are most confident in their ability to do so and most recalcitrant to correction. Johnathan Haidt's research shows that we are recalcitrant to facts that undercut cherished beliefs. Kahan's research shows that our ideological biases determine who we consider to be an expert. The backfire-effect (Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler) shows that in the face of strong disconfirming evidence people will further entrench their beliefs rather than align them with new and better evidence. Even something as objective as doing basic math is distorted by our political biases (Kahan) and the effect is stronger with numeracy! There's also a growing body of literature on how people make media choices and it doesn't support Coady's hypothesis: the majority of the population chooses its media sources based on whether it confirms their existing views. Most people want confirmation and comfort rather than the discomfort of cognitive dissonance when their cherished beliefs and values are challenged.

There are too many studies to list here but the upshot is that (a) encountering disconfirming views on its own is unlikely to confer any epistemic benefit and, even if this weren't the case, (b) the vast majority seek out sources which confirm rather than challenge their views essentially sending them into an epistemic echo chamber. For example, the literature on conspiracy theorists is clear. Anyone who enters this epistemic black hole has little chance of ever escaping: any evidence against the conspiracy is counted as evidence for it.

“With the click of a mouse, you enter the world of conspiracism, and you never have to leave that world,” the University of Utah's Goldberg explained. “You get a situation where you are confirmed, and you don’t have any information that advises you to look in a different direction ... There’s an inner core of people who are committed.” And not only are these people stuck in a feedback loop of confirmation bias and groupthink, but they are actually being radicalized in the process as well, Goldberg maintained.¹

Given massive cuts to education, emphasis on rote learning for standardized tests and its consequences to the critical thinking skills of the general populous, its hard to see how the rise of the conspiratorial and sensational in the blogosphere should be counted as epistemic gain.

The obvious reply is that I am committing the fallacy of confirming instances for surely there are also blogs that are extremely vertistic. True, but there are several confounding factors. First of all, as I've mentioned already, given the human propensity to seek confirmation we should expect that these “good” blogs will be ignored by those who could most benefit from them. Second, I'd wager the conspiratorial, sensationalist, and ideological blogs as a whole have way more traffic than the reliable blogs and that there's little overlap between the audiences. Finally, for those that enter the blogosphere neutral, the gravitational force of the “bad” type of blog is much stronger than that of the “good” type.

So, what are we to make of this mess? Is there any way to draw a meaningful distinction between the blogosphere and the conventional media? I'm not sure but if there is any thing distinctive about the blogosphere it is that its possible range of epistemic reliability is wider than that of the conventional media. Conversely, at least in most Western democracies, there are institutional norms that prevent chronic outright fabrication in the conventional media. To be fair, Coady acknowledges as much when he marks the distinction between the epistemic virtues of avoiding false beliefs and acquiring true beliefs. The conventional media might win out over the blogosphere in achieving the former.

Lets return once again to the motivating issue. To the extent that we can even talk about the blogosphere and the conventional media as distinct categories and given the overlapping wide-ranges of reliability values between and within each class, can anything be said about the blogosphere in respect to its role in a democracy? To answer this, let me once again quote Padover: "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." (1939, p. 89). In other words, the blogosphere is only a benefit from an epistemic point of view if people have the requisite critical thinking skills such that they can distinguish between good and bad sources and good and bad arguments.

Blogs, like many tools, are proverbial double-edged swords. Some are more epistemically reliable than the best “conventional” news source and some are so epistemically naughty it would make Fox News blush. For the citizen who has the cognitive tools to critically evaluate the quality of sources or luckily stumbles on a network of credible blogs, blogs are a net epistemic benefit. For someone who tumbles down the rabbit whole of conspiracy or strongly ideological blogs, they are not likely to again see the light of reason. The same sword that defends you from harm can also cut you. It depends on the skill of he who wields it.

1 Anatomy of a Conspiracy Theorist. March 15, 2013. http://www.ibtimes.com/anatomy-conspiracy-theorist-inside-new-wave-ancient-tradition-1127679

What is a Justified Belief? Goldman and Reliablism

Introduction and Context
"A topic that ain't given no 'spect"  
---Renowned Philosopher D. Gurney

Introduction and Context
So far we've been looking at Descartes, Locke, and Berkeley's account of what is possible for us to know. Common to all their accounts is that in order for our beliefs to be justified, we have to be able to offer some sort of argument. You just can't go running around saying you believe there are tables and chairs without any supporting argument!

In other words, traditionally, justification for a belief entails that the believer
(1)  has an argument/reason (i.e., justification) for why they hold their belief,
(2)  has conscious access to the justification for their belief,
(3)  can present that justification when asked for it.

Goldman disagrees.
He denies 1, 2, and 3!
"A process reliable,
makes justification undeniable,
That defines it for me!"

If you aren't a master at poetic interpretation, Goldman's reliablism is that justification for a belief is a function of the reliability of the process that created the belief.  That is, if a belief is acquired through a process that reliably produces more true beliefs than false beliefs, then the believer has a justified belief.

Now here's the crazy part.  It doesn't matter if a particular belief produced from a reliable process is false.  Reliable processes can sometimes produce false beliefs.  To qualify as a reliable process, the process needn't produce true beliefs 100% of the time.  This standard is too high.  All that is needed is that, in the long run, the process produces more true beliefs than false ones.

To many who see rationality as central to justification, this is a philosophical outrage!  To make matters worse, Goldman's going to agree with Gettier in that justification and knowledge are not one and the same:  You can have a belief that is justified but that is not knowledge!  Before we go on a rampage, leaving behind us a smoldering trail of broken collections of sense-data, let's hear Goldman out...

Vocabulary:
Ok, I lied.  We're not going to look at Goldman right away because we first need to cover some vocabulary and explain the alphabet soup of some technical philosophical writing.

Lets get the vocabulary out of the way first:  
Explanans vs explanadum (explanada for plural):  This is really just a fancy way of referring to the explanation and the-thing-you-are-trying-to-explain.  So, explanandum is the thing we're trying to explain; in this case, we're trying to explain what it means for a belief to be justified.  The explanans is the explanation that we use to to give an account of the thing we're trying to explain (i.e., the explanandum).  Anyhow, these words pop up sometimes in academic philosophy so they're good to know...and now you can impress your friends!  (E.g., "What do you suppose the explanans is for why so-and-so broke up?") 

Philosophy Alphabet Soup
In contemporary philosophy there can be a lot of "alphabet soup" depending on the philosopher. Variables are used to stand in for classes of things.  It's actually no different from using variables in math, except in philosophy there are some conventions regarding which variables represent which types of things--most of which are intuitively obvious.  Here are a couple standard ones:

S: This stands for "subject" as in "some person" who is (usually) doing or believing something.  For example: Suppose S is walking down the street...or S believes that cats like milk.
p: This stands for "proposition" as in "some assertion" that is either true or false but not both.  For example: S believes p.  We could substitute any person for 'S' and we could insert any assertion for 'p'.
t:  This one's pretty easy.  "t" stands for "at some point in time."  So, me might say, S believes p at t1.
C:  This stands for "some cognitive state".  For example, S's belief in p at t1 is a result of C1.

There are others but this should be enough for now...  OK, let's check out Goldman's reliablism.

Defining a Reliable Process:
For our purposes, I'm not too concerned about the details of how Goldman eventually arrives at his definition of a reliable process, but I'd like to point out a few important points:

The Project: An Explanation of our Intuitive Sense of Justified Belief
Goldman's project is not to tell us which processes are reliable or even how we can verify if a process is reliable (although this is arguably a problem); what he's trying to do is to give an account of what we mean when we say someone is justified in holding a certain belief.  Although it's not made explicit, it's important to notice that his method is to give an account of justification that aligns with our intuitions. In short, his project is descriptive, not prescriptive. 

Two Definitions of Reliable Processes
Fairly early in the article, Goldman proposes a definition of a reliable process for forming true beliefs:

(5)  If S's believing p at t results from a reliable cognitive process (or set of process), then S's belief in p at t is justified.

Basically he's saying that a justified belief is one which you acquired through a reliable cognitive process (where "reliable" is any process that produces more true beliefs than false ones over the long run).

He then goes on to make a further distinction between the two types of belief-forming processes: belief-dependent and belief-independent.  He wants to distinguish these two types because some belief-forming processes (i.e., belief-dependent ones) use beliefs as input, and if the input is false, then the output will also be false.  But this shouldn't count as strike against the process.

Consider an example of a belief-dependent process. Suppose you have to do some basic arithmetic for your taxes.  If you begin with the wrong numbers (i.e., inputs) then you'll likely come up with wrong totals at the end (i.e., outputs), but this doesn't mean that the rules or processes of arithmetic aren't reliable.  It only means that you began with "false beliefs" (i.e., the wrong numbers).  If you'd begun with the correct numbers, the rules of arithmetic would have reliably yielded true answers.

Examples of belief-dependent processes might be reasoning and inferences made from memories (if you have a false memory, the inference will also likely be false).

A belief-independent process would be something like beliefs formed from sensory perception.  I believe there's a wall in front of me because I see it, not because I'm inputing a prior belief into some cognitive process.  I see.  I believe. There's no manipulation of an input belief to yield an output belief.

Anyhow, because of these two classes of processes he divides his original formulation in (5) into 2 sub-formulations

(6A)  If S's belief in p at t results ("immediately") from a belief-independent process that is (unconditionally) reliable, the S's belief in p at t is justified. 

(6B)  If S's belief in p at t results ("immediately") from a belief-dependent process that is (at least) conditionally reliable, and if the beliefs (if any) on which this process operates in producing S's belief in p at t are themselves justified, then S's belief in p at t is justified. 

Reliablism vs Other Accounts of Justification
Now that we have definitions for reliable processes, we can compare Goldman's theory with other theories we've encountered thus far.  Before doing that, let's just quickly recap what Goldman's theory is.

Reliablism is the idea that a belief is justified if and only if it is the product of a reliable cognitive process.  The belief could be true or false; it doesn't matter for justification.  The only thing that matters for justification is how the belief was formed.  For this reason Goldman calls reliablism an historical or genetic theory. Within epistemology, reliablism is considered an externalist theory because what justifies a belief can be external to the agent's consciousness. 

We can compare historical theories with "current time-slice" theories.  Current time-slice theories tie a belief's justification to what is true of the believer at the time of the belief: for example, can he give a good argument for his belief?  Or is it coherent with his other beliefs? Current-time-slice theories are more generally called internalist theories of justification because what justifies a belief is internal to the agent's conscious awareness. 

Let's look at the two current time-slice theories we've encountered so far:  First we encountered foundationalism with Descartes, Locke, and Berkeley.  Their account of justification is that a belief is justified if and only if the believer can, at that moment, give a sound argument for the belief.

We've also encountered a coherence theory with Russell. Under this theory, a belief is justified if and only if it doesn't conflict with any of the believer's other current beliefs.

Justified Belief without Knowing You're Justified
Unlike those other two theories, reliablism says we can be justified in holding a belief even though we don't know we're justified!  How the crap does that work, you ask?  Suppose a long time ago you acquired a belief through a reliable cognitive process and have since forgotten why you hold that belief, yet you still hold the belief.  That is, if asked, you cannot give a justification for it.  However, under reliablism, the mere fact that the belief was acquired via a reliable process means you are justified in holding it despite the fact that you can't give any reasons or arguments for it now.

Objection 1:  The Definition Is Too Narrow, It Doesn't Capture All Possible Types of Justification
Goldman anticipates two possible objections to his theory. The first is that his definition of a reliable process excludes justifications for some types of beliefs that we would agree are justified.  That is, there are some beliefs that are justified but are not justified because of the process by which they were formed.

These types of beliefs include: beliefs about our current psychological state, intuitive beliefs about elementary logic (e.g., that something cannot both be and not be at the same time), and beliefs about conceptual relationships (all cats are mammals).

His reply to the first type is that we obtain our beliefs about our current psychological state through introspection, which, he argues, is also a type of retrospection and therefore doesn't only rely on a current time-slice of my mental states. Basically, even though it occurs in a very short period of time, a belief (about my own psychological state) is derived from a (reliable) cognitive process that had a (short) causally connected chain of events over time, and so it is captured by his definition of justification.

The second and third types of beliefs are also the result of cognitive processes that, although very quick, involve a chain of beliefs and/or mental states that reach back in time, as opposed to depending only on a set of beliefs and/or mental states that exist at the present time-slice. Therefore, contrary to his critics, they are also captured by his definition.

Objection 2:  Is Reliability Sufficient for Justification?
The next objection puts pressure on the notion of reliability as being enough, on its own, for justification.  Essentially, Goldman's position is that so long as a process produces more true beliefs than false beliefs, then we can call the process "reliable" and in turn say that the beliefs it produces are justified.  In short, if the process is reliable, then the belief is justified.

But there's an easy counter-example:  Typically, we think that wishful thinking is not a reliable process for producing true beliefs and therefore justifiable beliefs.  However, suppose there's a world in which a benevolent demon (Descartes' evil demon's good little brother) makes everyone's wishes come true. For example, if you believe that pigs fly, then pigs will fly.  

In such a world we are forced to say that beliefs derived from wishful thinking are justified (because they produce more true ones than false ones).  In this world, wishful thinking is a reliable process.  But even though the process is reliable in this case, it seems odd to say the believer is justified in holding the beliefs.  We don't want a theory that says wishful thinking is a reliable process.

Reply 1:  Accept
One possible reply is to bite the bullet and say, "well, I guess in that world, the process is reliable and so the consequent beliefs are justified".  However, some people might resist this because we "know" that wishful thinking isn't normally a reliable process for producing true beliefs and any theory that says wishful thinking is a reliable process for true beliefs is not very good.  Let's try a different reply...

Reply 2:  Non-manipulated Environments
Another possible reply would be to add a further qualification to the definition that stipulates that a belief is justified if it comes from a process that is reliable in non-manipulated environments.  That is, a process is reliable if it functions in "natural" situations, not implausible demon-haunted worlds where the environment is "messed with" in order to mislead us regarding a processes reliability. 

Reply 3:  Here on Earth
A further possible reply is to add different qualification.  We can say that a belief is justified if and only if it results from a process that is reliable here on earth as we know it.  Forget about the fantastical on other possible planets where a process that doesn't work here works over there.  The only beliefs that we will call justified are the ones that are formed by process that we know to be reliable here on earth, not on crazy philosopher-imagined worlds.

Things to Think About:
Goldman's explanation of what we mean by a justified belief relies heavily on our intuitions on the matter.  What role do you think our intuitions play and should play in discerning truth?  What should we do if we have internally conflicting intuitions?  What if two people or two groups have conflicting intuitions?  What is the relationship between intuitions and truth, especially in non-empirical matters such as epistemology and, perhaps, morality?

A Few Possible Problems for Reliablism

The Cartesian Demon:
Suppose there's a Cartesian demon or you're in the matrix (and you haven't taken the blue pill yet). Typically we think of perception as a reliable process thereby creating justified beliefs.  So, perception =a reliable process.  But in these hypothetical cases, the resulting perceptual beliefs will not be reliably producing true beliefs.  So, which is it?  Is perception a reliable process or not?

Someone who's a current-time slice theorist (especially Berkeley) doesn't have this problem.  He's going to say, "look, all I can know is what I directly perceive, so whether I'm in the matrix or I'm a brian in a vat, I can know what I directly perceive (the clusters of sense data in my conscious experience)".

Mr. Truetemp (Lehere 1990):
Mr. Truetemp, unbeknownst to him, has a thermometer in his head that produces accurate beliefs about the ambient temperature.   He walks into a room and says "it's 71 degrees."  He has no knowledge about the process by which he acquires the beliefs. Intuitively, it doesn't seem that these beliefs are justified.

Bootstrapping/Circularity (Vogel):
Arguably, reliablism requires that we know that a process is reliable.  But how do we independently verify that a process is reliable without appealing to that very same process?  For example, consider visual perception:  without using your perceptual system, how can you verify that your perceptual system reliably picks out the color red whenever it is present?  All you can do is to refer back to past instances, but this involves appealing to your perceptual system and presupposes that it was already reliable previously.