Epistemology
106 flashcards by MentisLibrary
The theory of knowledge: the justified true belief analysis and the Gettier problem, foundationalism and coherentism, internalism and externalism, skeptical arguments, perception, memory, testimony and the probability of evidence.
- What is epistemology?
- The philosophical study of knowledge: what it is, what makes a belief justified, what our sources of evidence are, and how far skeptical challenges to them succeed.
- Name the three kinds of knowledge philosophers usually distinguish.
- Propositional knowledge, knowing that something is the case; ability knowledge, knowing how to do something; and knowledge by acquaintance, direct familiarity with a person, place or experience.
- What is propositional knowledge?
- Knowledge that some proposition is true, the standard form being S knows that p, where S is a subject and p a proposition.
- What is the classical analysis of knowledge?
- Knowledge is justified true belief: S knows that p if and only if p is true, S believes that p, and S is justified in believing that p.
- Why is truth a condition on knowledge?
- Because knowledge is factive: if p is false, nobody knows that p, however confident or well supported they are.
- Why is belief a condition on knowledge?
- Because knowledge is a state of the knower: you cannot know something you do not in any sense accept, so knowledge entails belief.
- Why is justification thought to be necessary for knowledge?
- Because a true belief formed by guesswork or wishful thinking is not knowledge; something must connect the belief to the truth in the right way.
- Knowing how versus knowing that
- Gilbert Ryle argued that knowing how to do something is a practical capacity, not the possession of propositions, so it cannot be reduced to knowing that.
- Knowledge by acquaintance versus knowledge by description
- Russell distinguished direct awareness of something you are immediately presented with from knowledge of something reached only through a describing phrase.
- A priori versus a posteriori knowledge
- A priori knowledge is justified independently of particular experience; a posteriori knowledge is justified by experience.
- Analytic versus synthetic
- An analytic truth is true in virtue of the meanings of its terms; a synthetic truth says something further about the world.
- What did Quine argue in Two Dogmas of Empiricism?
- That the analytic and synthetic distinction cannot be drawn without circularity, and that individual statements do not face experience one at a time; our beliefs meet evidence as a whole.
- What is a necessary a posteriori truth?
- A truth that could not have been otherwise but that can be known only through experience, a category Kripke argued is genuine.
- Rationalism versus empiricism
- Rationalists hold that reason alone can deliver substantive knowledge of the world; empiricists hold that all substantive knowledge derives from sense experience.
- What is Locke's tabula rasa?
- The claim that the mind begins as a blank sheet, so all its contents derive from sensation and reflection rather than from innate ideas.
- What is knowledge-first epistemology?
- Timothy Williamson's proposal that knowledge is a basic mental state that cannot be analysed into belief plus further conditions, and that our evidence consists of what we know.
- What is the value problem for knowledge?
- The question, raised in Plato's Meno, of why knowledge is more valuable than merely true belief, given that both guide action equally well.
- What is fallibilism?
- The view that a belief can be justified, and can count as knowledge, without the justification guaranteeing its truth.
- What is infallibilism?
- The view that knowledge requires justification that rules out the possibility of error, so anything less falls short of knowing.
- What is the correspondence theory of truth?
- A proposition is true when it corresponds to how things actually are, and false when it does not.
- What is the coherence theory of truth?
- A proposition is true in virtue of fitting into a comprehensive, mutually supporting system of beliefs, rather than by matching an independent reality.
- What is the pragmatist theory of truth?
- Roughly, that a belief is true if it works: it is the belief inquiry would converge on, or that survives sustained testing in practice.
- What is a deflationary theory of truth?
- The view that saying a proposition is true adds nothing beyond asserting the proposition itself, so truth is not a substantive property needing analysis.
- What is a Gettier case?
- A case in which a subject has a justified true belief that intuitively falls short of knowledge, because the belief is true by luck rather than because of what justifies it.
- What is the general recipe behind Gettier cases?
- Start with a justified belief that happens to be false, infer something from it that is true for an unrelated reason, and the conclusion is justified and true yet clearly not known.
- Describe the sheep in the field case.
- Looking across a field you see what appears to be a sheep and believe there is a sheep in the field. The object is a dog that looks like one, but a real sheep is hidden behind it.
- Describe the stopped clock case.
- You read the time from a clock that is accurate but happens to have stopped exactly twenty-four hours earlier, so it displays the correct time.
- Describe the fake barn county case.
- Driving through a region full of convincing barn facades, you look at the one real barn and believe you are seeing a barn.
- What is the no false lemmas response to Gettier?
- Add a fourth condition: the justification must not depend essentially on any false belief.
- What is the defeasibility response to Gettier?
- Knowledge requires justification that no true proposition would defeat, so if some truth you do not possess would undercut your reason, you do not know.