Epistemology
Topics
1. (1hr) What epistemology is.
2. (1hr) JTB account. What the project is. Questioning the T and B conditions.
3. (1hr) Gettier cases. What the methodology is. Logical space of responses.
4. (1hr) Causal account of knowledge.
5. (1hr) Relevant alternatives.
6. (1hr) Conclusive reasons.
7. (1hr) Tracking.
8. (1hr) Against giving an account of knowledge.
9. (2hr) The justification regress problem: foundationalism and coherentism.
10. (2hr) Internalism and externalism
11. (1hr) Skepticism about how much we know.
12. (2hr) Contextualism, response to skepticism.
13. (1hr) The limts of our knowledge
14. (1hr) Semantic externalism response to skepticism.
15. (1hr) Moorean response to skepticism.
16. (2hr) Perception and knowledge
17. (2hr) Reasoning, epistemic closure
18. (1hr) Testimony
19. (2hr) Epistemic paradoxes
20. (1hr) Kinds of knowledge: acquaintance, propositional, know-how.
Things to include
1. A priori vs a posteriori knowledge.
2. Empiricism, the given.
3. Bayesianism, Dutch book argument.
4. Defeasibility, fallibilism. incorrigibility
5. Evidence
6. Evolutionary epistemology
7. KK thesis
8. Knowledge by acquaintance vs by description
9. Naturalized epistemology
10. Connection with psychology
What epistemology is
1. Literally, epistemology is the study of knowledge: ‘Episteme’ is Greek for ‘knowledge’. ‘Logos’ is Greek for ‘????’.
2. It is that, but it also comes to be the study of justification (for beliefs), because of the connection between the two (e.g. many think that justification is necessary for knowledge).
3. Here are four main questions:
a. What is knowledge?
b. Why do we want it?
c. Can we get it?
d. If so, how?
4. Why investigate knowledge? If we are at university in the pursuit of knowledge, then it might be a good idea to think more about knowledge – what it is, why we want it, whether we can get it, and how we can get it.
5. Weird: you can’t order someone to know something (you can order them to get/come to know it). Why not? Not something that we decide?
6. To explain:
a. Force of skeptical argument.
b. Intuition of context sensitivity.
c. Internalism and externalism about knowledge.
d. ‘I know the answer to this question…’
e. ‘No, I didn’t know that.’
f. ‘Yes, I did know that.’
7. Three kinds of knowledge. A distinction is often drawn between three kinds of knowledge; we shall be concerned with the first:
8. Propositional knowledge: John knows that Mary likes to dance.
9. Knowledge by acquaintance: John knows Mary.
10. Knowledge-how: John knows how to dance.
11. Reasons to think that we mean the same thing by ‘know’ in each case, so that there is a single thing, knowledge, even if it comes in different kinds.
12. Dangers of not considering all three kinds of knowledge when trying to figure out what propositional knowledge is. Analogy for illustration.
The JTB account of knowledge
1. Question: What is (propositional) knowledge? Or: What is it for s to know p? Or: What is it to know something?
2. Looking for individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. ‘s knows p’ is the analysandum, the bit after ‘iff’ is the analysans: analysandum iff analysans.
3. We are after an analysis, not a definition. The difference between these two things. What does a dictionary give? Descriptive (non-revisionary) versus prescriptive (revisionary) analyses.
4. Why do we want to do such a thing? Comparison with the question, ‘What is a chair’? We seem to have an ability to sort cases of knowledge from cases of non-knowledge – how do we do this?
5. Might want to give a different analysis for different kinds of knowledge.
6. An answer that was thought correct for a long time is the ‘tripartite’ or ‘JTB’ account (See Plato’s Theatetus (201c – 202d), where he seems to be considering it, and Meno (97e – 98a, where he seems to be endorsing its jointly sufficient conditions) (c. 400 B.C.), Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), and Ayer’s The Problem of Knowledge (1956)):
a. Necessarily, for all x and p: x knows p iff:
b. p is true (the truth condition)
c. x believes p (the belief condition)(shouldn’t be just a matter of luck).
d. x is justified in believing p (the justification condition)
e. (In short: x justifiably and truly believes p.)
7. It is also sometimes called the standard account.
8. The idea is that these three conditions are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for s to know p.
9. Individually necessary:
a. Necessarily, for all x and p: if x knows p then p is true. (Knowledge is factive.)
b. Necessarily, for all x and p: if x knows p then x believes p.
c. Necessarily, for all x and p: if x knows p then x is justified in believing p.
10. Jointly sufficient:
a. Necessarily, for all x and p: if x truly and justifiably believes p then x knows p.
11. Discussion of what a necessary condition is, what a sufficient condition is.
12. Another important distinction: ‘Grass is green’ is true iff grass is green and 2 + 2 = 4. But ‘Grass is green’ does not mean that grass is green and 2 + 2 = 4. There is a difference between having the same truth conditions and having the same meaning (this is contentious). A related distinction: what something is, versus what it is coextensive with.
13. Is it plausible to think that each of these three conditions is individually necessary?
a. Truth
i. People used to know that the Earth is flat.
ii. Newtonian physics is part of our scientific knowledge (but false). But maybe this is to misunderstand the claim that we know Newtonian physics: we know what it says; we know how it helps us understand the world.
iii. Sometimes we take ourselves to know things that are in fact false. No problem there – we can be wrong about what we take ourselves to know. But it seems that sometimes we take ourselves to know things that we know to be false.
iv. The simple scenario. A: ‘What is the time’; B: ‘2pm’ (looking at watch and seeing that it’s 1:58pm). B has said something that he knows is false. He has not said that it’s roughly 2pm, or that it’s near enough 2pm. Why not? Because can be challenged by an onlooker, and will retract, which ought not to do if has made this weaker claim. Why has B said something that he knows is false? Some story about it being near enough (relevance). But has not asserted that it is near enough.
v. Is this a violation of the maxim, assert only what you know? B knows that what he has asserted is false. But does he take himself to thereby not know it?
(1) P0: It is 2pm
(2) P1: It is exactly 2pm
(3) P2: It is approximately 2pm
(4) P3: We can take it to be 2pm.
(5) What B has assrted is that P1, and not that P2 or that P3. Although, he may have asserted that P1 because he knows that P2 or that P3.
(6) Q0: I know that it is 2pm
(7) Q1: I know that it is exactly 2pm
(8) Q2: We can take it that I know that it is exactly 2pm.
vi. Check out the paper by what’s-his-name.
b. Belief
i. I know my house is on fire, but I don’t believe it.
(1) Response: what he means is that he finds it hard to come to terms with it. But why do we use this particular expression? And is this a general use, as we would expect?
ii. Albert gives correct answers to all the capitals of the US, but he claims to not know any of them (is just guessing). He knows that Casper is the capital of Wyoming, but he does not believe that Casper is the capital of Wyoming.
(1) Response: does he really know (might say that he is not justified and that justification is necessary)? If he does, maybe he also believes.
c. Justification
i. True belief is not enough to be knowledge. Need more, and that extra thing is justification. Epistemic luck is not enough (this is a bad name – should be doxastic luck).
14. Note that all we need for a counterexample is a merely possible case, not an actual case (although that would do too). That’s because of the modality in the claim.
15. Different ways of understanding ‘x iff y’: extensional equivalent, necessarily extensionally equivalent, identity. Compare: ‘cordates are renates.’
16. Extensional adequacy and conceptual adequacy of an analysis.
Gettier cases
1. Gettier, E. L. (1963), ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’, Analysis 23, pp. 121-3.
2. Gettier argues that the JTB conditions are not sufficient – it is possible for all three conditions to obtain and yet S not know that P (so the analysis overgenerates). One of his two counterexamples:
a. Smith and Jones have applied for the same job. Smith has good evidence (is justified in believing) that (a) Jones will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his pocket. From (a), Smith deduces and hence is justified in believing that (b) the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket. As it turns out, and unknown to Smith, it is Smith who will get the job, and Smith also has ten coins in his pocket. So, (b) is true, Smith believes that (b) is true, and Smith is justified in believing that (b) is true, but Smith does not know that (b) is true – a counterexample to the JTB account.
b. Smith is justified in believing the false proposition that (a) Jones owns a Ford. On the basis of this, Smith infers and is thus justified in believing that (b) either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona. As it turns out, Brown is in Barcelona, and so (b) is true. So although Jones is justified in believing the true proposition (b), Jones does not know (b).
3. Another case: Barn facades.
4. Another case: The stopped clock.
5. What is sometimes called the Gettier problem: what extra condition needs to be added to ensure sufficiency? This assumes certain things.
6. What is the technique here?
a. What role are intuitions playing here? What if you and I have conflicting intuitions?
b. Are we working out what knowledge is, or what we think knowledge is (i.e. making more explicit our implicit theory of knowledge)?
c. Or are we refining our theory of knowledge? I.e. not making it more explicit, but modifying it.
7. How might we respond? Look closely at Gettier cases and think about what has gone wrong – why the person lacks knowledge.
8. Deny that this is actually a counterexample. Either: deny that it is true, deny that it is believed, deny that the belief is justified, deny that it is not known.
a. The most promising approach here is to deny that the belief is justified. This raises some questions:
i. Why is the belief not justified? Seems that the ball is in your court to explain why. This seems like a clear case.
ii. If we are not justified in this case, are we ever justified?
9. Accepting the counterexample, so that knowledge is not JTB.
a. We might try going in the same direction, by adding a fourth condition, to get an account which does not overgenerating. This is called de-Gettierizing the JTB account.
b. Example, add:
i. S’s justification for believing that P does not rely on any falsehoods (the ‘no false lemmas’ condition) Might try modifying the JTB account by adding an additional ‘no false lemmas’ condition.
ii. Perhaps because it is deduced from a false belief. But then we can just modify the example so that he is justified (Feldman: ‘An alleged defect in Gettier counter-examples’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 52 (1974), pp. 68-9):
(1) Smith is justified in believing (m): that Mr Nogot in his office has always been reliable and honest and has just announced that he owns a Ford (true). Smith deduces and hence is justified in believing (n): that someone in his office has always been reliable and honest and has just announced that he owns a Ford (true). Smith deduces and hence is justified in believing (h): that someone in his office owns a Ford (true). But on this occasion Mr Nogot is lying, and (h) is true because someone else in the office owns a Ford, so that Smith does not know that (h) is true.
iii. But the modified example above will be a counterexample to this new analysis – it shows that the new account still overgenerates.
iv. There is a problem for this: there are Gettier-style cases that do not involve false lemmas. I gave one last time. Here is another:
(1) Mr Farmer sees a fake sheep and, mistaking it for a real sheep, forms the belief that there is a sheep in the paddock. As it turns out, there is a sheep in the paddock (elsewhere), the presence of which Mr Farmer is unaware. Mr Farmer truly and justifiably believes that there is a sheep in the paddock, and has not arrived at this belief by inference from any false lemmas (in fact, by no inference at all), but he does not know that there is a sheep in the paddock.
v. Also, there are Gettier-style cases that do not involve inference.
c. For a comprehensive survey, see Shope, Robert K. (1983), The Analysis of Knowing: A Decade of Research (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).