Volume 5, 2000
Epistemology
Fernando Broncano
Pages 49-59
Reliable Rationality
We propose to extend a reliabilist perspective from epistemology to the very concept of rational justification. Rationality is defined as a cognitive virtue contextually relative to an information domain, to the mean performance of a cognitive community, and to normal conditions of information gathering. This proposal answers to the skeptical position derived from the evidence of the cognitive fallacies and, on the other hand, is consistent with the ecological approach to the cognitive biases. Rationality is conceived naturalistically as a control system of the flow of information: reliabilism is the approach that qualifies this system as virtuous. There can be specific-domain devices selected by evolution, although the constraints of the very flow of information can be also represented, even with imperfect means of formalization, and then rationality becomes reflective. Reliable rationality is postulated in conclusion as a more philosophically abstract concept than maximal, minimal or bounded rationality.