Epistemology Modalized by Kelly Becker - Original PDF
نویسندگان: Kelly Becker
خلاصه: 1 Introduction: Externalism and modalism Recent developments in epistemology, and in philosophy more generally, provide a promising foundation for an answer to a very old question: What is knowledge? The question stymied Plato in the Theaetetus, from which the traditional tripartite analysis of knowledge as justified true belief derives. It received fresh attention when Edmund Gettier showed that the three conditions of the traditional analysis were not jointly sufficient for knowledge. Subsequent attempts to repair the analysis of knowledge aimed (1) to amend the notion of justification to avoid the Gettier problem; (2) to add a fourth condition, for instance that there are no defeaters to one’s justification; or (3) to replace justification with some other condition that captures the requisite link between belief and truth constitutive of knowledge. 1 The uniqueness of the third strategy is not clearly defined because one could easily argue that, whatever the necessary link between belief and truth turns out to be, it just is justification. Nonetheless, I see myself as pursuing this approach because the very term ‘‘justification’’ is all too pregnant with associated notions that I believe are not essential to knowledge, and work- ing toward an account that explicitly involves justification as a necessary condition can lead us away from a proper understanding of knowledge. (A specific instance of this problem arises in Chapter 2.) Unencumbered by the requirement to explicate ‘‘justification,’’ we can inquire into the requisite belief-truth link constitutive of knowledge by testing proposals for that link against our intuitions concerning whether an agent actually knows in parti- cular cases. If we find that a correct or, at least, working account of that link does not capture the traditional conception of justification, then so be it. 2 Our topic, then, is propositional knowledge: knowledge that p for some arbitrary proposition p. I will not claim that all other forms of knowledge, for instance, knowledge by acquaintance, knowledge of one’s own phenom- enological states, and know-how, are reducible to propositional knowledge, and so do not intend to give an account of knowledge in general. This only slightly diminishes the importance of an account of propositional knowl- edge, since it is through sentences and the propositions they express that we think and talk about the world. It would be a significant advance in our understanding if we had a plausible theory of such knowledge