The reliabilist sometimes, contrary to our intuitions, has to confer justification on beliefs acquired via brain lesions or clairvoyance. This is the problem of strange and fleeting processes. Here, I attempt to find a solution to the problem. After rejecting a few attempts that seemingly lead us astray, I posit that strangeness has to do with mysterious ascriptions of propensities to produce true beliefs. Then, once we adopt a more appropriate understanding of strangeness, I argue that fleetingness becomes a non-issue. If correct, the approach taken in this article allows the reliabilist to forgo adding a necessary condition on justification that specifies a reliable belief-forming process’s circumstances, the type of world it belongs to, or its evolutionary origins.
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Balder Edmund Ask Zaar (2026) studied this question.
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