ABSTRACT
The Reliability Theory of Knowledge claims that there is an important analogy between knowledge and a reliable measuring device. The mercury thermometers the authors use to check whether the people have fevers are examples. One virtue of the reliability theory is that it explains what is wrong with a standard skeptical argument. The reliability theory shows why the act of imagination is irrelevant to the question of whether S has knowledge in the real world situation that she occupies. This is the fact that claims of circumstantial necessity are often ambiguous. The thesis that knowledge is relative has an interesting implication about skepticism. Skepticism, recall, is the position that people don’t have knowledge. Common sense suggests that either the events are simultaneous with each other or they are not. The space-time interval between two events isn’t relative to the choice of a rest frame.
