Epistemology

Question 1

Epistemology.

Answer 1

Epistemology is the study of knowledge.
- Types of epistemologies
There are several epistemologies, according to which branch of philosophy someone is studying:
- virtue epistemology
- social epistemology
- moral epistemology

Question 2

Sense knowledge

Answer 2

When we learn about and interact with the world we use our senses.
- Example:
we touch a flower, we smell it, we see its colour, we can feel it if it is warm or cold outside, and so on. This is known as ‘sense knowledge’.
- Senses can be decieved:
However there are other aspects to the world that are outside of our senses. And sometimes, such as when we see an optical illusion, our senses are not telling us the truth, so it’s clear that there are ways in which our senses can be deceived. And so, although we know what we know about the world through what we experience about it, sometimes what we have experienced and continue to experience, or have thought and continue to think, just might not be what we thought it was.
- Is what we perceive reality?
So, is this because what we see and know of the world constitutes what the world really is, or is it just the way the world appears to be? And, if that is the case, are what we see truths, for example the colour ‘orange’, appearing differently to each person or not?

Question 3

Tabula rasa

Answer 3

The baby’s brain. - in effect, a blank sheet upon which, as its goes through life, knowledge and ideas, opinions and prejudices and so on will be inscribed.

Question 4

Ability Knowledge.

Answer 4

A baby will learn lots of things before they reach old age and die. It will learn how to do things; this is called ability knowledge, and includes things such as riding a bicycle, being good at maths, playing an instrument, learning a trade etc. Once we have the ability to do something, we tend to do it without thinking too much about how to do it.

Question 5

Acquaintance knowledge

Answer 5

A form of knowledge that you learn for yourself, without help from an intermediary, such as another person, a news item, a book, a film etc, telling you that knowledge. Acquaintance knowledge is knowledge of an object; you know that the physical object but you do not know the truth of it (e.g. you knew what the sea felt like when you swam in it, but the truths might be how much of each chemical dissolved in the sea is present.

Question 6

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

Answer 6

Russell was an English philosopher, writer, historian, mathematician, social critic and logician. He was especially interested in the philosophy of epistemology, ethics and language. The concept of acquaintance knowledge arises from his work.
- Quotes:
- ‘… direct cognitive relation to the object, i.e. when directly aware of the object itself…’ (Russell 1910).
-‘ … we have acquaintance with anything of which we are directly aware, without the intermediary of any process of inference or any knowledge of truths…’ (Russell 1912)
- Acquaintance:
Acquaintance with something does not consist of forming any judgement, or even thinking about it, nor does it mean having any concept or representation of it. You cannot be acquainted with something that does not exist.

Question 7

How do we know if something is knowledge?

Answer 7

It has to be ‘justified true belief’.
- Need to know:
We need to know these four things:
1. What are the conditions of that knowledge?
2. What are the sources of that knowledge?
3. What is the structure of the knowledge?
4. What are the limits of the knowledge?

Question 8

Justified belief

Answer 8

Knowledge can also be defined as ‘justified belief’.
- 3 Things we must know:
This means that we need to know:
1. How we understand ‘justification’.
2. What makes the justified knowledge justified.
3. Is the justification internal or external to our own mind.

Question 9

The tripartite view of knowledge

Answer 9

Propositional knowledge follows the ‘S’ knows that ‘P’ process, where:
S = the subject who has the knowledge.
P = the known proposition.

Traditionally, P is a justified true belief in which:
1. We cannot know a false proposition, therefore knowledge needs truth.
2. If S does not believe P, then it cannot be something that S knows. Therefore, knowledge needs belief.
3. It might be that S believing P being true is down to luck, rather than them having a good reason to believed it. Therefore, knowledge needs justification.

This is known as the tripartite view because there are three things that are essential if P is to be justified true belief.

Question 11

What do we need to consider when thinking about weaknesses of the tripartite definition of knowledge? What 3 propositions?

Answer 11

1. Justification is not a necessary condition of knowledge.
2. Truth is not a necessary condition of knowledge.
3. Belief is not a necessary condition of knowledge.

Question 12

Justification - Justification is not a necessary condition of knowledge.

Answer 12

• The premise that someone holds an unjustified true belief:
  Think of the premise that someone holds an unjustified true belief. It would be possible to believe P, where P was true, even if on unjustified grounds.
• True beliefs on unjustified grounds:
  True beliefs can be held on unjustified grounds, so perhaps this means that justification should not be one of the conditions of knowledge?
• Problematic:
  But this in itself is problematic - surely knowledge does need some evidence or justification for itself, or else how can we determine what does not count as knowledge?

Question 13

Truth - Truth is not a necessary condition of knowledge.

Answer 13

Can we think of knowledge as justified belief rather than justified true belief? It is possible for S to believe in p, p being untrue, though S may feel certain that p is true. Should we only say that we believe (rather than we know) any p until we can determine that it is definitely true?

Question 14

Belief - belief is not a necessary condition of knowledge.

Answer 14

What if S knows p, where p is true and justified, but S does not believe that p is true? S knows p, but does not believe that p is true? S knows p, but does not believe p. S cannot justify their answer, but the answer just happens to be justified and true, in which case S does not really know p - it might look like they do but it is a coincidence.
- Nature of belief:
Or do we look more closely into the nature of belief and say that S does in fact believe p, just not on a conscious or immediate level; it was a subconscious belief, but they still believed it even if they didn’t think they knew it. Therefore, S believes p, and we can therefore say p does still equate to knowledge.

Question 15

Edmund L. Gettier in Analysis 23 (1963): 121-123

Answer 15

“First, in that sense of ‘justified’ in which S’s being justified in believing P is a necessary condition of S’s knowing that P, it is possible for a person to be justified in believing a proposition that is in fact false. Secondly, for any proposition P, if S is justified in believing P, and P entails Q, and S deduces Q from P and accepts Q as a result of this deduction, then S is justified in believing Q’.

Question 17

Gettier’s core challenge against justified true belief equating to knowledge.

Answer 17

Gettier’s core challenge against justified true belief equating to knowledge is about his separation of ‘justification’ from ‘truth’. This means that justified true belief can no longer be sufficient for knowledge, and if this is the case, it is no longer the same as knowledge. These cases are known as ‘Gettier cases’, in which knowledge cannot be justified true belief. It means that the justification condition needs to be modified, removed, or replaced in order to maintain the tripartite definition of knowledge.

Question 18

Three main responses to Gettier’s challenge

Answer 18

1. Strengthen the justification condition.
2. Add a ‘no false lemmas’ condition (J+T+B+N).
3. Replace ‘justified’ with an account of epistemic virtue (V+T+B).

Question 19

A lemma

Answer 19

something you introduce into an argument in order to help you make your argument.

Question 20

Gettier’s ‘is true belief knowledge’ case 1

Answer 20

‘Suppose that Smith and Jones have applied for a certain job. And suppose Smith has strong evidence for the following conjunctive proposition:
d. Jones is the man who will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his pocket.
Smith’s evidence for (d) might be that the president of the company assured him that Jones would in the end be selected, and that he, Smith, had counted the coins in Jones’s pocket ten minutes ago. Proposition (d) entails:
e. The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.
Let us suppose that Smith sees the entailment from (d) to (e), and accepts (e) on the grounds of (d), for which he has strong evidence. In this case, Smith is clearly justified in believing that (e) is true.
But imagine, further, that unknown to Smith, he himself, not Jones, will get the job. And also, unknown to Smith, he himself has ten coins in his pocket. Proposition (e) is then true, though proposition (d), from which Smith inferred (e), is false. In our example, then, all of the following are true: (i) (e) is true, (ii) Smith believes that (e) is true, and (iii) Smith is justified in believing that (e) is true. But it is equally clear that Smith does not know that (e) is true; for (e) is true in the virtue of the number of coins in Smith’s pocket, while Smith does not know how many coins are in Smith’s pocket, and bases his belief in (e) on a count of the coins in Jones’ pocket, whom he falsely believes to be the man who will get the job’.
- Summarised in own words: Smith believes (e), that the man who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket. He is justified in thinking this, and the statement is in fact true, however, statement (e) was inferred from statement (d) which is in fact not true. Therefore, can we say that Smith knows (e)?

Question 21

Gettier’s ‘is justified true belief knowledge?’ case 2:

Answer 21

Let us suppose that Smith has strong evidence for the following proposition:
Jones owns a Ford.
Smith’s evidence might be that Jones has at all times in the past within Smith’s memory owned a car, and always a Ford, and that Jones has just offered Smith a ride while driving a Ford. Let us imagine, now, that Smith has another friend, Brown, of whose whereabouts he is totally ignorant. Smith selects three place names quite at random and constructs the following three propositions:

Either Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Boston.
Either Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Barcelona.
Either Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Brest-Litovsk.
Each of these propositions is entailed by (f). Imagine that Smith realizes the entailment of each of these propositions he has constructed by (f), and proceeds to accept (g), (h), and (i) on the basis of (f). Smith has correctly inferred (g), (h), and (i) from a proposition for which be has strong evidence. Smith is therefore completely justified in believing each of these three propositions, Smith, of course, has no idea where Brown is.

But imagine now that two further conditions hold. First Jones does not own a Ford, but is at present driving a rented car. And secondly, by the sheerest coincidence, and entirely unknown to Smith, the place mentioned in proposition (h) happens really to be the place where Brown is. If these two conditions hold, then Smith does not know that (h) is true, even though (i) (h) is true, (ii) Smith does believe that (h) is true, and (iii) Smith is justified in believing that (h) is true.
These two examples show that definition (a) does not state a sufficient condition for someone’s knowing a given proposition. The same cases, with appropriate changes, will suffice to show that neither definition (b) nor definition (c) do so either.
- Summary:
Gettier presents another case in which a true belief is inferred from a justified false belief: Smith has correctly said the location of Brown, but on a random inference, it isn’t justified, however true.

Question 22

No false lemmas

Answer 22

• Smith has a false belief that Jones will get the job, and he doesn’t know that the man who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket. In which case, we need to add an additional condition to exclude the possibility of false beliefs so that we can ensure the following conditions:
  1. The proposition p is true.
  2. S believes that p.
  3. S’s belief that p is justified.
  4. S did not infer that p from anything false.
• In addition to the original three conditions, we have added a fourth. This fourth condition is the ‘no false lemmas’ condition.
• In this case, Smith based the proposition that Jones will get the job on the information given to him by the president of the company: and he also used this to decide that the man with 10 coins in his pocket will get the job.
• Now we can see that ‘Jones will get the job’ is a lemma, since it helps Smith to reach the conclusion that the man with 10 coins in his pocket will get the job - however, we also know that it is a false lemma, so it does not fit with the condition 4 that we added to the tripartite definition of knowledge.

Question 23

Problems with the ‘no false lemmas’ response.

Answer 23

• Suits the Smith and Jones example mentioned by Gettier, however we can see that it still doesn’t address the fundamental issue that truth and justification can be separated. We can only use this additional case where the Gettier case is one in which an inference was made, as Smith did.
• But there are Gettier cases where there is no inference made, and so condition 4 is not broken, but justification and belief have still been separated.

Question 24

Strengthen the justification condition: Infallibilism

Answer 24

• What is justification? In the tripartite definition of knowledge we have no criteria for determining whether a belief is justified or not.
• Infallibilism states that knowledge must be certain. It’s only infallibility that can provide the basis for justification, and can make true belief become knowledge. It is hard to be certain about something, so one conclusion to remember from Gettier cases is that we do not often have the sufficient justification for our beliefs to quote them knowledge.
• Now we need to think about what counts as infallibility and how we can be certain that we are certain.
• Descartes believes that reason is the means by which we reach certainty. If we do not always use logic and reason, we will begin to make mistakes. We need to remove ourselves from what our senses tell us because the senses can lie to us.
  1. One cannot know what is false (though one can believe what is false).
  2. If S knows P, then S must be sure and certain about p.
  3. In which case, for justification to make knowledge certain, justification must also be an indicator of truth.
  4. If S is justified in believing p, it is impossible for S to be mistaken.
  5. If there is any possibility of S being mistaken, then S is not justified in believing P.
  6. In which case, infallibilism (complete certainty) is truth.
• Infallibilism helps us to exclude Gettier cases: as we know, in these cases there is no justified true belief if use the infallibilism argument that knowledge equates to certainty.

Question 25

Who was Descartes (1596 - 1650)?

Answer 25

• Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650) was a French philosopher who is given the status of the ‘Father of Western Philosophy’. Much of what philosophers believe today are responses to what Descartes argued.
• The term Cartesian philosophy applies to his philosophy.
• In 1619, he shut himself in a room with an oven to escape the cold, and had three visions which revealed a new philosophy to him which was unlike the philosophy of the past. He saw that all truths were linked to each other.
• This gave rise to his famous saying: ‘I think therefore I am’.

Question 26

Problem with infallibilism.

Answer 26

• In reality, we cannot often be totally certain based on the evidence we have in front of us.
• One of the consequences of infallibilism is that we can have a lot of beliefs which we could be fairly confident of being true - but we could know very little, since there is very little we can be entirely and completely certain of.
• In which case, infallibilism does not help us to build up a quantity of certain knowledge, but instead leads us towards scepticism: we must doubt everything , since certainty is very hard to come by.
• Descartes found that he could work out what was real by removing anything that he could doubt. This gave rise to a strand of philosophy called ‘Cartesian doubt’.

Question 27

Cartesian doubt.

Answer 27

This method includes:
1. Accepting only information you know to be true.
2. Breaking down these truths into smaller units.
3. Solving the simple problems first.
4. Making complete lists of further problems.

Question 28

Reliabilism: replace ‘justified’ with ‘reliably formed’.

Answer 28

• Does knowledge actually need to have any justification at all; can it exist without it? Maybe it doesn’t - this is the concept of reliabilism, which states that you can claim to know something (p) if:
  1. p is true.
  2. You believe p.
  3. The belief is brought about by a reliable act of cognition.
• ‘A reliable act of cognition’ is when you remember or perceive something.
• Reliabilism is useful in that it allows for non-human forms of knowing: when an animal interacts with its environment it knows what it is doing, for example. This means that we can assume that animals have a reliable cognitive process, so they must have true beliefs that count as knowledge.

Question 29

Problem with reliabilism.

Answer 29

• This form of reliabilism doesn’t help us with some of the Gettier cases.
• Here’s a famous one about Henry, who drives through a place known as Barn County. Henry doesn’t know that nearly all of the barns in this county are actually fake - although they look real to Henry from his perspective, they have only a false facade at the front so they look real. Each time Henry sees a barn he believes it is a real one, because that’s what barns look like to him. The twist is that there is actually one barn in the whole of Barn County that is real. When Henry sees this one, he thinks that he has seen another real barn; and he is right, but it’s only an accidental truth .
• Reliabilism doesn’t help us here because every time Henry sees a barn, he is using a very reliable cognitive process (his perception).
• When Henry sees the one true barn in Barn Country, reliabilism would have to hold that Henry does in fact know that he is seeing the one true barn, but he has no idea that most of the barns he has seen are fake.
• In other words, reliabilism does not help us when somebody holds a true belief under circumstances where that belief under circumstances where that belief is only true by accident.

Question 30

Strengthening reliabilism.

Answer 30

• Returning to reliabilism to make it more nuanced:
  such you know p:
  1. If p is true.
  2. You believe p.
  3. This belief is brought about by a reliable act of cognition.
  4. You are able to determine what are ‘relevant possibilities’ in the actual situation.
• Henry (Barn County case) is unable to determine that the barns are actually fake where they seem real, so he falls foul of condition 4 under this version of reliabilism.