CPHL201: Introduction to Philosophy

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CPHL201Introduction to Philosophy

• The Analysis of Knowledge

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• General Introduction to Epistemology
• Epistemology comes from the Greek episteme for
  knowledge, and logos for account, reasoning,
  or explanation
• Thus epistemology is the attempt to give an
  explanation or account of knowledge itself.

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• We use the noun knowledge and the verb know
  in a variety of ways. An important distinction
  in usage is between what we might call knowing
  how and knowing that
• Know-how essentially involves an ability to
  complete a certain task or series of tasks
• Knowing that indicates a certain relation that
  one might have to a proposition or series of
  propositions. For this reason we also call this
  sort of knowledge propositional knowledge.

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• In philosophy and other academic disciplines we
  are generally concerned with propositional
  knowledge
• More specifically, academic inquiry is the
  attempt to learn true propositions about a
  variety of subjects

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• In epistemology too we are primarily concerned
  with acquiring true propositions about a certain
  subject.
• But in this case we seek a knowing that of an
  especially abstract sort we seek propositional
  knowledge about propositional knowledge

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• The Analysis of Knowledge
• What are the necessary and sufficient conditions
  of knowledge?

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• A necessary condition of X is something without
  which X cannot exist.
• A sufficient condition of X is something that in
  itself entails the existence of X.
• Thus the necessary and sufficient conditions of X
  are a set of things without which X does not
  exist, and which together are enough to bring
  about Xs existence.

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• The necessary and sufficient conditions of
  knowledge are generally agreed to be the
  following three things
• (i) belief
• (ii) truth
• (iii)justification
• This justified true belief account of knowledge
  is sometimes called the tripartite analysis of
  knowledge

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• (i) Belief
• Knowledge is a species of belief, a special kind
  of belief
• Hence all examples of knowledge are examples of
  belief of some sort, though not all beliefs are
  examples of knowledge
• Thus belief is a necessary, but not sufficient
  condition of knowledge.

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• What is a belief?
• A belief is a proposition that one takes to be
  true.
• Of course not all beliefs that we hold are true
  beliefs. Thus not all beliefs count as knowledge

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• (ii) Truth
• To count as knowledge, a belief must be true.
• What is truth?

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• (a)The deflationary account of truth
• According to this definition of truth, if
  proposition P is true, then, quite simply, P.

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• (b)The correspondence theory of truth
• To say that proposition P is true is to say that
  P corresponds to the facts.
• In this account our beliefs are attempts to
  mirror or represent the way things actually are,
  and the true beliefs are the ones that represent
  the way things actually are accurately

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• (c) The coherence theory of truth
• A belief is true if it coheres with our entire
  system of beliefs, if it fits in with the other
  beliefs that we hold.

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• We will mostly be working under the assumption of
  the correspondence theory of truth to say that P
  is true is to say that P matches the facts.
• Despite important problems with specifying what
  is meant by the terms matches and the way
  things are, the correspondence theory of truth
  has been the philosophically dominant one, and is
  probably closest to our common intuitions about
  the matter.

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• (iii) Justification
• Doubtless the most troublesome of the three
  traditional necessary and sufficient conditions
  of knowledge.
• True belief alone is widely acknowledged by
  epistemologists to be insufficient for knowledge.

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• What precisely is justification?
• One short answer seems to be that the
  justification of a belief is some sort of a good
  reason for holding that belief to be true.
• By this term good reason we seem to intend a
  number of very different sorts of things. For
  example
• reliance on experts
• sense data
• mathematical intuition

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• A pressing question is whether any of these and
  other sources of apparent support for our beliefs
  is indeed a genuine source of support, a source
  that we ought to rely on in forming beliefs
• This question is at the heart of skepticism,
  perhaps the most important problem facing
  epistemology