Search Results

Where this chapter stands on the issue of what epistemologists call the ‘Gettier problem’ is much as Chapter 2 stood on the issue of sceptical worries. It argues for a correspondingly non-standard interpretation of Gettier cases, the kind of puzzling cases first described by Edmund Gettier (1963). This interpretation will also provide further support for the hypothesis that epistemic absolutism is false.

This chapter argues that by attending to the illocutionary force of knowledge attributions — specifically, that they serve to give credit to the believer for getting things right — fallibilists can assuage two problems plaguing their concept of knowledge: namely, the lottery problem and the Gettier problem. Borrowing work from Joel Fienberg on blaming, an account of credit attribution is developed that stresses the relationship between causal salience and causal responsibility. Because causal salience is context sensitive, resolutions to the lottery problem and the Gettier problem contain a significant contextual element. Just as an agent must be causally responsible in order to receive credit for athletic feats, so too must an agent's cognitive character or intellectual virtue be a necessary element to explain why an agent is deserving of credit for obtaining a true belief. This account is tested against cases relative to the above problems and ends with how this account can explain the value of knowledge.

The chapter eliminates a potential obstacle towards an informational analysis of knowledge. In the last decades, epistemology has been largely confined to the tripartite account of propositional, fallibilist knowledge that p as justified true belief. Such approach can become adequate only if it can solve the Gettier problem. However, the latter can be solved only if the problem of a successful coordination of truth and justification can be achieved. But such coordination problem is unsolvable because it is equivalent to the ‘coordinated attack’ problem, which is demonstrably unsolvable in epistemic logic. It follows that the tripartite account is not merely inadequate as it stands, as proved by Gettier-type counterexamples, but demonstrably irreparable in principle, so that efforts to improve it can never succeed. The positive result is that the tripartite account should be abandoned in favour of a non-doxastic, informational approach to the analysis of knowledge.

Addresses the classical ‘justified true belief’ account of knowledge. Examines Robert Fogelin's reinterpretation of the traditional analysis as conjoining assessments of epistemic propriety and truth‐determinativeness, and the diagnosis of Gettier problems suggested by it. A perspectivalist revision of Fogelin's account is advanced, defended, and distinguished from widespread ‘contextualist’ views. Concludes with a demonstration that the revised analysis avoids various forms of scepticism.

In ”Virtues in Epistemology,” John Greco presents and evaluates two main notions of intellectual virtue. The first concerns Ernest Sosa's development of this concept as a disposition to grasp truth and avoid falsehood. Greco contrasts this with moral models of intellectual virtue that include a motivational component in their definition, namely a desire for truth. Instead, Greco argues that a minimalist reliabilist account of intellectual virtue “in which the virtues are conceived as reliable cognitive abilities or powers,” can be illuminating in an account of knowledge. He sets out to support this on the grounds that his approach to intellectual virtue can adequately address three major problems on the theory of knowledge: Humean skepticism, the Gettier problem, and the problem of showing that knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief.

The contributions to this volume reflect and deepen the Gettier Problem’s impact on epistemology and on philosophical methodology. Fifty-four years ago, in his three-page paper, Edmund Gettier taught us that the generally accepted account of factual knowledge was defective because there are cases of true justified beliefs that are not knowledge. Most of the issues on our epistemological agenda since then are closely related to his lesson. To reflect on the very latest developments in the scholarship on this problem, we gathered the papers of twenty-six experts, including many of the most influential epistemologists of our time. This is the largest, most authoritative collection of essays on the Gettier Problem. The contributions to this volume reflect the state of the art on the subject.

This chapter examines the nature of memory causation. This involves identifying the vehicle of memory causation, specifying the strength of the causal relation constitutive of memory, and ruling out deviant causal chains. It is argued that the causal chains connecting the past and present representation must consist in a persisting memory trace. Memory traces are either dispositional beliefs or subdoxastic states. For a memory trace to give rise to a genuine memory it must at least be an INUS condition for one's present state of seeming to remember. If the memory trace is an independently sufficient condition for the state of seeming to remember, it may not be preempted by another independently sufficient condition. The dependence of memory states on past representations must support counterfactuals of the form: if the subject hadn't represented a particular proposition in the past he wouldn't represent it now. This chapter discusses, among other things, the possibility of trace transplants, connectionism, the Gettier problem, hypnosis, and suggestibility.

Timothy Williamson has urged us to regard the Gettier problem as insoluble and so to forego the search for the elusive ‘fourth condition’ on knowledge. He has also defended the popular thesis that knowledge is defeasible by the addition of further evidence. And finally, he has argued that an agent's evidence set consists of all and only those propositions that the agent knows to be true. The present chapter argues that, if we give up Williamson's identification of evidence with knowledge in favor of an alternative conception of evidence, then we can obtain a satisfactory solution to the Gettier problem, as well as an argument against the defeasibility of knowledge by the addition of further evidence.

The guiding question of this chapter is whether the concept of intellectual virtue merits a central and fundamental role within traditional epistemology. It is argued, first, that the answer to this question depends on whether the concept of intellectual virtue merits a primary role in an analysis of knowledge. The rest of the chapter is an inquiry into the plausibility of a virtue‐based account of knowledge. The central focus is Linda's Zagzebski's (1996) account, according to which knowledge is (roughly) true belief arising from intellectually virtuous motives and actions. It is argued that Zagzebski's conditions for knowledge are neither necessary nor sufficient, and that the problems with her analysis are likely to plague any virtue‐based analysis of knowledge. It is concluded that the concept of intellectual virtue does not merit a central or fundamental role in traditional epistemology and thus that the stronger version of conservative character‐based virtue epistemology fails.

This chapter distinguishes different ways for moral beliefs and believers to be justified: instrumentally or epistemically, permissively or positively, slightly or adequately, and personally or impersonally. It explains the two main arguments against justified moral belief: the skeptical regress argument and the skeptical hypothesis or scenario argument. It concludes that these arguments pose a dilemma because their flaws are hard to detect, and their conclusions are hard to believe.

This chapter points out that standard versions of virtue epistemology accept and are motivated by the same central problems in epistemology — such as analyzing the concepts of knowledge and justification, and addressing skeptical challenges — which motivate contemporary epistemology. The only significant difference is that virtue epistemology claims that the concepts of knowledge and justification must be analyzed in terms of virtues. What motivates virtue ethicists, however, is not what is motivating other ethicists. The contemporary census amongst ethicists has a different set of problems than the ones motivating virtue ethicists. Virtue epistemologists should mount a similar challenge to their contemporaries: instead of focusing on static states such as beliefs and evaluating whether or not they are justified, they should focus their efforts on evaluating and regulating the activities of inquiry and deliberation, and the role which virtues play in such evaluation and regulation.

Epistemology involves reflection on human inquiry, but to what end? This chapter describes a multidisciplinary approach to epistemological questions: regulative epistemology. This type of theorizing aims to generate guidance for inquiry and it calls for the blending of descriptive, normative, and practical perspectives.

This chapter enhances and extends a powerful and promising research program, performance-based epistemology, which stands at the crossroads of many important currents that one can identify in contemporary epistemology, including the value problem, epistemic normativity, virtue epistemology, and the nature of knowledge. Performance-based epistemology offers at least three outstanding benefits: it explains the distinctive value that knowledge has, it places epistemic evaluation into a familiar and ubiquitous pattern of evaluation, and it solves the Gettier problem. But extant versions of performance-based epistemology have been the object of serious criticism. This chapter shows how to meet the objections without sacrificing the aforementioned benefits.

A model theory for a logic of both knowledge and belief (epistemic logic) is spelled out and defended. The chapter explores some consequences of the assumptions that motivate the theory, some alternative ways that the theory might be extended, and some ways in which this kind of model theory might throw light on traditional problems in epistemology. The main focus is the relation between knowledge and belief, and on some parallels between issues that emerged from the project of responding to the Gettier problem and issues in the more formal framework about the relations between the accessibility relations for belief and knowledge operators.