Our main interest here is section III, which presents Plantinga’s own account. But it may not be obvious what distinguishes Plantinga’s account from others, and his criticisms of reliabilism in §II may help with that. (That section also sketches some further developments of Goldman’s view.)
• The introduction is very brief, but it does explain some terminology that we have not encountered before.
• In section II, Plantinga discusses reliabilism (after a brief comment on coherence, something we will look at next week though in a form different the one Plantinga mentions). He looks at two issues faced by forms of the view developed by Goldman after the papers we’ve discussed. One of these, the generality problem, is discussed on pp. 10f. It is worth thinking about, but the second problem, discussed on pp. 11f, is more directly related to Platinga’s own account.
• Plantinga’s account is presented in a several stages beginning on p. 12 and concluding with the first full paragraph of p. 14 though it receives a succinct statement only last paragraph of the paper. Between p. 14 and the end Plantinga considers the idea of “proper function” on which his account is based. This account seems designed to handle the second sort of problem for Goldman that Plantinga mentioned; ask yourself how well it handles the first (the generality problem). Ask also how well it handles cases you’ve seen in earlier papers.