The PR-st’s Objection to Feldman’s Brian/Brain scenario:

It is safe to assume that the Process Reliabilist would criticize the first premise of Feldman’s Brian/Brain Objection, “The BIV has justified but false beliefs about the external world”, and would argue that the BIV does not have justification about the external world. The process reliabilist would argue that, although it may seem that the BIV would have justification, the BIV does not have justification because since the BIV perfectly mirrors the thought process of Brian, then the BIV does not truly hold knowledge of its experiences. In other words, the Process Reliabilist would argue that Brain does not hold knowledge because Brain mirrors the experiences of Brian, and that therefore Brain does not have knowledge in the first place (meaning that Brain cannot have justified but true beliefs either). Since Brain mirrors every mental thought that Brian has, the PR-ist would argue that Brain does not have justification for his beliefs because Brain’s line of reasoning is actually just Brian’s line of reasoning. I guess that the PR-ist would ultimately argue that Brain is a puppet of Brian, mimicking every thought and experience that Brian has, and therefore is not justified in creating any sort of beliefs in the first place. Another objection that would be raised by the PR-ist would be this scenario:

Brian has the notion that he is a brain in vat whose experiences are auto-generated by a computer: this means that Brain would also have the notion that he is a brain in a vat, meaning that Brain would have a justified but true belief (going by Feldman’s notion that Brain has justification). This would also put the first premise of Feldman’s Brian/Brain into question, as the aforementioned objection would render Feldman’s argument as an enumerative inductive argument. Feldman would assume that since Brain has routinely had his ‘justification’ lead to false beliefs, then the next justified belief would also be false: however, with the example of Brian thinking that he is a BIV, this is obviously not the case.