ABSTRACT
If you know, you could not easily have been wrong. Call this the Reliability Conditional. Its modality relates to the knowing, rather than to what is known. A true proposition which might easily have been false can be known, and a true proposition which could not easily have been false can be believed without being known. If a machine functioned reliably (on a given occasion), it couldn’t easily have gone wrong (on that occasion). Reliability and easy possibility are closely related, so an account of knowledge in which reliability plays an important part is an account that connects closely with the notion of what could easily happen.
