Reliabilism and virtue epistemology (October 2003):
Reliabilism and virtue epistemology both are attempts to answer the question "What is knowledge?" Or rather, what conditions must a belief satisfy to be knowledge? One common approach (which I'll write about at some point) is to consider the justification; knowledge is equated with justified true beliefs (JTB).
Another approach is reliabilism, which is associated with Goldman, Plantinga, and many others. Reliabilism does not consider beliefs nor their justification, but the acts of forming beliefs and/or facts about the believers. That is, a belief is said to be justified -- or count as knowledge -- when (among other conditions) it is "well formed" or results from a reliable belief-forming process. Thinking about scientific experiments, reliabilism makes sense to me. The results of an experiment are justified by the process. If the process is unreliable or suspect, the results are generally not trusted; if the experiment is well-devised and carefully executed, it's results are (more likely to be) trusted. Similarly, outside of the scientific realm, it seems relevant when assessing a the justifiedness of a belief to ask how the belief was formed. And again, the more "well formed" the belief is, the more seriously it is taken.
Virtue epistemology (associated with Zabzebski among others) can be seen as a particular type of reliabilism. As the name suggests, it parallels virtue ethics. Just as ethics is concerned with morally right acts, epistemology is concerned with right (justified) beliefs. And as virtue ethics is concerned with the moral virtues of an actor, virtue epistemology is concerned with the intellectual virtues of a believer. Virtue epistemology attempts to define knowledge/justficiation in normative, non-epistemic terms. According to virtue epistemology, S is justified in believing p if and only if S's believing that p is the result of S's intellectual virtues. In other words, knowledge arises from acts of intellectual virute (whatever those are).