Abstract
Western epistemologists have long told us a simple tale of how we must begin to conceive of knowledge’s nature. But they have long been on conceptually weaker ground than they have assumed is so. This paper will tell an alternative story about that same phenomenon.
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Notes
- 1.
The translation here is from Grube (1981).
- 2.
As I indicated, epistemologists have standardly interpreted Socrates’ talk of an account of “the reason why” in terms of the possession of evidence. However, spurred on especially by Goldman (1979, 1986), many contemporary epistemologists eschew any commitment to knowledge’s needing to include evidence. That commitment is deemed to be epistemically internalist; and those epistemologists are content instead with an externalist substitute, such as your forming the belief in a way that is generally reliable as a way of forming true beliefs. That externalist approach can also be extended, from talking about your forming the belief, to explicating your maintaining the belief. Above, I have parsed Socrates as requiring the evidence to accompany the correct opinion. Below, we will focus on whether that could be enough—or whether instead something more active is needed-in what we say about evidence’s role within knowing.
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I say “caution” because a stronger version of this conception might instead be thought to emerge no less clearly from Socrates’ argument in the Meno. On that stronger version, we do not say merely that knowledge is at least a justified true belief; we say that it is a justified true belief—that knowledge is nothing less than, but also nothing more than, a justified true belief. More strongly still, we would say that this is how knowledge is to be defined. Of course, that stronger account was famously challenged by Edmund Gettier (1963), when—with two hypothesized situations—he questioned the sufficiency of a belief’s being true and justified for its being knowledge. Still, even Gettier did not question the necessity, to a belief’s being knowledge, of its being true and justified. He thus left intact the “at least” in the At Least Justified True Belief conception, and it is that weaker conception upon which we will focus in this paper. For detailed discussion of Gettier’s challenge and its history within the past fifty-plus years of epistemology, see Hetherington (2016).
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And if instead we accord the term “guess” a psychological reading, whereby it indicates the person’s feeling unconfident as to p, we are also not obliged to view the situation as one in which the person believes that p in the first place.
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Hetherington, S. (2021). Knowing as Simply Being Correct. In: Zhang, B., Tong, S., Cao, J., Fan, C. (eds) Facts and Evidence. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9639-1_6
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