EXAM Flashcards
Basic knowledge
doesn’t depend
on any other statement for its
justification
Non-basic knowledge
does depend
on some other statement for its
justification
What does non-basic knowledge also require?
absence of defeaters
A defeater
a truth
that would wipe out your
justification if you knew about it
What do Lehrer & Paxson think Non-basic knowledge is?
undefeated justified
true belief
Goldman’s new theory: reliabilism
Knowledge is true belief caused by a
reliable process or mechanism
What is it for a process to be reliable?
A reliable mechanism discriminates
the truth of p from relevant alternatives, forming a belief when p is true, but not when those relevant alternatives obtain
A possible world
a (complete) way things
are or could have been; it is a “maximally
inclusive situation”
☐-> “box-arrow”
to indicate the
subjunctive (or “counterfactual” conditional)
Robert Nozick’s basic* analysis of
knowledge
S knows that p if and
only if:
(1) p is true
(2) S believes that p
(3) If p were not true, S
would not believe that p
**(4) If p were true, S
would believe that p and
it would not be the case
that (S believes not-p).
Nozick and the sceptic agree that:
If SK really does obtain, we don’t know any of
the things we think we know about the world
around us.
Nozick also says:
We don’t track whether or
not we are in SK; so, we cannot know whether we are in SK.
Nozick’s sensitivity
condition
If p were false, S
would not believe that p
Plantinga analyses knowledge as
warranted true belief.
Zagzebski gives her general recipe for Gettier cases
- Describe a case of false belief
which has that some-other-factor
(and enough of it so that it would
count as knowledge if the belief
were true). - Now, add a stroke of luck that
ends up making the belief true
The core of Zagzebski’s argument against
internalist analyses:
‘On internalist theories
the grounds for justification are accessible to the consciousness of the believer, and
Gettier problems arise when there is
nothing wrong with the internally accessible aspects of the cognitive situation, but there is a mishap in something inaccessible to the
believer. Since justification does not
guarantee truth, it is possible for there to be a break in the connection between justification and truth, but for that connection to be regained by chance.’
Internalism
justification is strictly a
function of what is available from the first-
person perspective
Externalism
justification can also include factors
available from the third-person perspective (like
causal relations between you and the clock)
Belief Independent
processes (like
vision) take external stimuli as inputs
and produce beliefs as outputs.
Belief dependent
processes like
inference and memory take prior beliefs
as inputs and produce new beliefs as
outputs.
Goldman’s externalist theory of
justification
Base, Recursive and Closure clause
What BonJour wonders is whether
basic beliefs can be characterized in
a way that will simultaneously make
them
both properly basic (not
dependent on anything else) and
really epistemically justified
Srinivasan sees internalism as making justification a
matter of your own private individual effort: “All
that is required to be internalistically justified is
individual conscientiousness
To be externalistically justified
requires, in part, the cooperation of the external
world: one must have
an undistorted relationship
to the relevant bit of reality
Pettigrew argues that there is no
single quality that deserves the
name of “justification”: he is a
__________ about justification.
pluralist
- Credence
(an epistemic term, measuring
your degree of rational confidence)
- Chance
(an ontic term, measuring
something about the world itself)
an epistemic weapon is a means by which an agent
whether
an individual, dominant group, or whole society—can cause
epistemic harm to a target—whether an individual, an
oppressed group, or a whole society.
he wants to argue that there is a
whole family of vocabulary items that
pattern with “terms of knowledge” –
we use them all the time, in useful,
familiar and systematic ways, to say
things that are literally false. This is
the family of __________
absolute terms
Dretske’s core idea:
To know that x is
A is to know that x is A within a
framework of relevant alternatives, B,
C, and D
An operator is fully
penetrating when it
‘reaches through’ to all of
the necessary
consequences of a
proposition.
Remember that a fully
penetrating operator is one
where O(P) entails O(Q)
whenever P necessarily
entails Q.
Not all sentential operators are fully
penetrating some are
___________
nonpenetrating
Dretske thinks that operators like
the ones on the right are
really
far from penetrating – they don’t
have to go through even to the
most obvious necessary
consequences of a proposition.
Dretske:
epistemic operators are __________
semi-
penetrating
The mainstream view is to
accept the principle of
Closure under known
logical implication
Closure:
If you know P, and
competently deduce Q from P
(while retaining knowledge
that P), then you come to
know Q.
Does Dretske deny closure?
yes
ON EXAM LEWIS DEFINITION
Subject S knows proposition P if and only if P holds in every possibility left uneliminated by S’s evidence
