All notes from A-Level Philosophy Paper 1 (Epistemology) including:
- What is knowledge?
- Perception as a source of knowledge
- Reason as a source of knowledge
- Limits of knowledge
What is knowledge?
The tripartite view
Propositional knowledge is defined as justified, true belief
Indirect realism leads to scepticism about our perceptual knowledge
whereas idealism secures an objective reality that we can directly know
about
Quotation: ‘true beliefs, once tied down, become knowledge, and are
stable’ – Plato; ‘Meno’
S knows p iff:
1. S is justified in believing that p
2. P is true and
3. S believes that p (individually necessary and jointly sufficient
conditions)
Quotation: ‘true belief accompanied by a rational account is knowledge’ –
Plato; ‘Theaetetus’
Necessary and sufficient conditions
Necessary: need this to have the thing in question
- Example: you cannot have rain without water
Sufficient: when met, you will always have the thing in question
- Example: being an aunt is sufficient of having relatives (‘aunthood’
guarantees relatives, but it is not necessary as a person can have
relatives without being an aunt)
Some conditions are both necessary and jointly sufficient
- Example: being single and being a man are the necessary and jointly
sufficient conditions for being a bachelor
Issues with the tripartite view
Are the JTB conditions individually necessary?
Truth condition
- Correspondence theory of truth: truth consists in correspondence
between a claim and the relevant fact
- Coherence theory of truth: a belief is true if it is one of the webs of
beliefs held by a society to be true
,Justification condition
- If no justification, luck?
- Example: roll some dice, guess it will be a 6, it is, is this knowledge or
luck
Are the JTB conditions jointly sufficient?
Smith and Jones are going for a job, Smith claims Jones will get the job
(the president of the company told him this)
Smith knows Jones has 10 coins in his pocket (he counted them)
Belief: the man with 10 coins in his pocket will get the job
Smith gets the job
Truth: Smith has 10 coins in his pocket too
Gettier; ‘Is Justified, True Belief Knowledge?’
Double-luck Gettier cases are inevitable on JTB account
Zagzebski claims JTB leaves a gap between justification and truth
Double-luck situations (justification is unluckily wrong, belief is luckily
true)
Example: doctor believes patient has virus x – tests show this is the only
virus consistent with the evidence
Symptoms are caused by virus y (unknown and new) – unlucky prior
justification
Patient has virus x but at that stage it was too early to show up in tests –
luckily true belief
Because of luck involved, did the doctor know patient had virus x?
Fake barns
Someone unknowingly driving through Fake Barn County
They look to the side and see a barn
He believes (because he has seen it) that there is a barn at the side of the
road
Happens to be the only real barn in Fake Barn County
Did they know there was a barn there?
Unusual context involved although justification is not false in any way
Responses to the issues with the tripartite view
Infallibilism
We should only count as knowledge those things we cannot rationally
doubt
- Example: 2 + 2 + = 4
There is no room for Gettier cases
- None of these cases would count as knowledge
, - All counterexamples are open to some doubt so cannot be claimed as
knowledge
Belief only occurs when doubt is possible
Knowledge occurs when doubt is impossible
- Example: Price cites the example of pain – someone can belief you are in
pain, but only you can know you are in pain
Criticism: counter-intuitive
- Implies we have very limited knowledge
- Too radical
No false lemmas
Gettier cases do not count as knowledge as the justification includes a
false belief or lemma
Knowledge is a justified, true belief, where the justification is not based on
a false belief
Knowledge = J + T + B + N (no false lemmas)
Criticism: false beliefs not always involved in false knowledge
- Example: Zagzebski doctor scenario
- Example: Fake Barn County
Reliabilism
Knowledge is only of a true belief that has been formed by a reliable
cognitive process
Replacement of justification
- Justifications are internal to the believer (involve conscious thoughts)
- Reliable cognitive process does not necessarily involve conscious
thoughts
Strength: animals: reliabilism can account for animals having knowledge
Strength: cognitive science
- Reliabilism turns the issue from philosophical to cognitive scientific
- Means scientists can give external accounts of neurological processes
that lead to true belief rather than philosophers providing internal
accounts of good and bad justifications
Criticism: Gettier cases
- Reliabilism is just as patchy when it comes to Gettier’s examples
Virtue epistemology
Knowledge is a true belief brought about by a virtuous intellectual
disposition
- Virtuous true belief
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