However, the reliance on this rule leads to systematic errors in the estimation of distance. These judgments are all based on data of limited validity, which are processed according to heuristic rules. The subjective assessment of probability resembles the subjective assessment of physical quantities such as distance or size. In general, the heuristics are quite useful, but sometimes they lead to severe and systematic errors. Occasionally, beliefs concerning uncertain events are expressed in numerical form as odds or subjective probabilities. Many decisions are based on beliefs concerning the likelihood of uncertain events such as the outcome of an election, the guilt of a defendant, or the future value of the dollar. If not, then so much the worse for our reflective epistemic judgments and intuitions. If SR makes recommendations that accord with our reflective epistemic judgments and intuitions, great. And second, Strategic Reliabilism does not attempt to account for an epistemological property that is assumed to be faithfully reflected in the epistemic judgments and intuitions of philosophers. Strategic Reliabilism is a theory of epistemically worthy ways of forming beliefs.

First, it is not a theory of justification or knowledge – a theory of epistemically worthy belief. It differs from most contemporary epistemological theories in two ways.

First introduced in our book, Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment (henceforth EPHJ), the basic idea behind SR is that epistemically excellent reasoning is efficient reasoning that leads in a robustly reliable fashion to significant, true beliefs. It is a theory of cognitive excellence, or more colloquially, a theory of reasoning excellence (where ‘reasoning’ is understood very broadly as any sort of cognitive process for coming to judgments or beliefs). Strategic Reliabilism is a framework that yields relative epistemic evaluations of belief-producing cognitive processes.

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