Reliability, Justification, and the Problem of Induction

According to the main tradition in epistemology, knowledge is a variety of justified true belief, justification is an undefinable normative concept, and epistemic principles (principles about what justifies what) are necessary truths. According to the leading contemporary rival of the tradition, justification may be defined or explained in terms of reliability, thus permitting one to say that knowledge is reliable true belief and that epistemic principles are contingent. My aim here is to show that either of these approaches will yield a solution to the problem of induction. In particular, either of them makes it possible to ascertain the reliability of induction through induction itself. Such a procedure is usually dismissed as circular, but I shall argue that it cannot be so dismissed if either approach is correct.
As one would expect, the solution based on the traditional approach differs from the one based on the reliabilist alternative, but they have important features in common. The common elements are presented in sections I, II, and III, the elements specific to the reliabilist approach in sections IV, V, and VI, and those specific to the traditional approach in section VII.     

Near-Death Experience,Consciousness, and the Brain: A New Concept about the Continuity of Our Consciousness Based on Recent Scientific Research on Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest

In this article first some general aspects of near-death experience will be discussed, followed by questions about consciousness and its relation to brain function. Details will be described from our prospective study on near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest in the Netherlands, which was published in the Lancet in 2001. In this study it could not be shown that physiological, psychological, or pharmacological factors caused these experiences after cardiac arrest. Neurophysiology in cardiac arrest and in a normal functioning brain will be explained. Finally, implications for consciousness studies will be discussed, and how it could be possible to explain the continuity of our consciousness. Scientific study of NDE pushes us to the limits of our medical and neurophysiologic ideas about the range of human consciousness and mind–brain relation.