Goldman has offered a novel conception of epistemology, or, to use his terminology, epistemics. Although the project is complex and terminologically intricate, the central point that sets it apart from traditional epistemology is his conception of the objects of epistemic evaluation. Goldman claims that the objects of epistemic evaluation include not merely the beliefs a person holds and the relation of these beliefs to the evidence, but the processes and methods that are used in arriving at the beliefs. Processes and methods are epistemically commendable, on Goldman's view, to the extent that they reliably produce true beliefs, where “truth” is defined independently of epistemic norms. It is the role of the cognitive and social sciences to identify the processes and methods that are to be evaluated; the cognitive and social sciences thus have an essential role to play in epistemology, though they can by no means replace it.