Precis of perception and basic beliefs

This book is concerned with a cluster of issues: the distinction between perception and inference; the role of nondoxastic experiential states in perceptual belief and perceptual justification; the nature of epistemologically basic beliefs; and a famous class of counterexamples to reliabilism involving agents with clairvoyance or other strange cognitive powers. What these issues have in common, I think, is that the central philosophical problems they generate are all solved by singling out a certain class of cognitive systems, or modules. The outputs of these special modules are epistemologically basic beliefs. Perceptual modules constitute a subset of this special class, and what it is to be a perceptual belief is to be the output of one of these perceptual modules. Thus, all perceptual beliefs are basic, though not all basic beliefs are perceptual. The features that distinguish these modules have nothing to do with conscious experience, so the theory defended here makes room for a kind of ‘‘zombie epistemology’’: even zombies (who are lacking in conscious experiences altogether) can have perceptual beliefs—and justified perceptual beliefs—provided that they have (reliable) perceptual modules. My theory of basicality is an externalist one, and although it could be incorporated into a nonreliabilist epistemology, one selling feature is that it solves a long-standing problem for reliabilism. My ‘‘Inferentialist Reliabilism’’ holds that reliability is sufficient for the prima facie justification of basic beliefs, while nonbasic beliefs must be the result of a reliable inferential process that takes justified beliefs as inputs. Clairvoyance-type objections to reliabilism (BonJour 1985; Lehrer 1990) show that process reliability is not sufficient for justification, but because the kinds of modules that appear in clairvoyance-type cases are not the