Knowledge is factually grounded belief. This account uses the same ingredients as the traditional analysis—belief, truth, and justification—but posits a different relation between them. While the traditional analysis begins with true belief and improves it by simply adding justification, this account begins with belief, improves it by grounding it, and then improves it further by grounding it in the facts. In other words, for a belief to be knowledge, it's not enough that it be true and justified; for a belief (...) to be knowledge, it must be justified by the facts. This account solves the Gettier problem. Gettierized beliefs fall short of knowledge because, albeit true and justified, they are not grounded in the facts. This account also elucidates why knowledge attributions are sensitive to epistemic standards. It's because whether we take a belief to be grounded in the facts is sensitive to epistemic standards. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I offer an account of propositional learning: namely, learning that p. I argue for what I call the “Three Transitions Thesis” or “TTT” according to which four states and three transitions between them characterize such learning. I later supplement the TTT to account for learning why p. In making my case, I discuss mathematical propositions such as Fermat's Last Theorem and the ABC Conjecture, and then generalize to other mathematical propositions and to non-mathematical propositions. I also discuss (...) some interesting applications of the TTT, and reply to some noteworthy objections. (shrink)

Antognazza (“The Benefit to Philosophy”, “The Distinction in Kind”), Dutant (“The Legend”), and I (“Knowledge Before Gettier”) have argued for the historical falsity of the claim that, prior to Gettier’s famous counterexamples of sixty years ago, the so-called ‘traditional’ conception of knowledge was the justified true belief (JTB) conception. This note addresses a related historical question that, rather surprisingly, has not yet been addressed in the philosophical literature; to wit: when did this claim first appear in this literature?

In ‘Swimming Happily in Chinese Logic’ (2021) I suggested that the root conception of knowing for the ancient Chinese Mohists was knowing-as, a conception that fits well with perspectivism in the Zhuangzi, a key Daoist text. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s discussion of both seeing-as and samples, and developing the analogy between seeing-as and knowing-as, I explore various forms of knowing with particular reference to the Mozi, in attempting to make sense of ancient Chinese epistemology and thereby shed light on the whole (...) phenomenon of knowing. (shrink)

Drawing inspiration from a well-attested historical tradition, I propose an account of cognition according to which knowledge is not only prior to belief; it is also, and crucially, not a kind of belief. Believing, in turn, is not some sort of botched knowing, but a mental state fundamentally different from knowing, with its own distinctive and complementary role in our cognitive life. I conclude that the main battle-line in the history of epistemology is drawn between the affirmation of a natural (...) mental state in which there is a contact between ‘mind’ and ‘reality’ and the rejection of such a natural mental state. For the former position, there is a mental state which is different in kind from belief, and which is constituted by the presence of the object of cognition to the cognitive subject, with no gap between them. For the latter position, all our cognition is belief, and the question becomes how and when belief is permissible. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs the origins of Gettier-style epistemology, highlighting the philosophical and methodological debates that led to its development in the 1960s. Though present-day epistemologists assume that the search for necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge began with Gettier’s 1963 argument against the JTB-definition, I show that this research program can be traced back to British discussions about knowledge and analysis in the 1940s and 1950s. I discuss work of, among others, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, A. J. Ayer, Norman (...) Malcom, and A. D. Woozley, showing how exchanges between different schools of analytic philosophy gave rise to new ideas about the nature of knowledge and analysis. Finally, I turn to Gettier's intellectual development and argue that his paper was influenced by some of these debates, suggesting that even his interpretation of Plato’s definition of knowledge can be traced back to discussions in this period. (shrink)

John Cook Wilson (1849–1915) was Wykeham Professor of Logic at New College, Oxford and the founder of ‘Oxford Realism’, a philosophical movement that flourished at Oxford during the first decades of the 20th century. Although trained as a classicist and a mathematician, his most important contribution was to the theory of knowledge, where he argued that knowledge is factive and not definable in terms of belief, and he criticized ‘hybrid’ and ‘externalist’ accounts. He also argued for direct realism in perception, (...) criticizing both empiricism and idealism, and argued for a moderate nominalist view of universals as being in rebus and only ‘apprehended’ by their particulars. His influence helped swaying Oxford away from idealism and, through figures such as H. A. Prichard, Gilbert Ryle, or J. L. Austin, his ideas were also to some extent at the origin of ‘moral intuitionism’ and ‘ordinary language philosophy’ which defined much of Oxford philosophy until the second half of the twentieth-century. Nevertheless, his name and legacy were all but forgotten for generations after World War II. Still, his views on knowledge are with us today, being in part at work in the writings of philosophers as diverse as John McDowell, Charles Travis, and Timothy Williamson. (shrink)

Modern philosophy is often seen as characterized by a shift of focus from the things themselves to our knowledge of them, i.e., by a turn to the subject and subjectivity. The philosophy of Immanuel Kant is seen as the site of the emergence of the idea of a subject that constitutes the object of knowledge, and thus plays a central role in this narrative. This study examines Kant’s theory of knowledge at the intersection between the history of science and the (...) history of the modern subject, on the one hand, and in the tension between modern experimental and mathematical science and more traditional Aristotelian conceptions of epistemic perfection, on the other. The dissertation consists of four chapters. In the first chapter, I examine Kant’s concept of experience, and its relation both to Early Modern experimentalism and to the Wolffian tradition. In the second chapter, I argue that Kant adheres to a broadly Aristotelian conception of epistemic perfection – the ideal of understanding – but transforms this ideal into the self-understanding of reason, where reason can only have insight into the products of its own activity. In the third chapter, I use Kant’s conception of space and time to exemplify such products of reason, and argue that, for Kant, space and time are constructively generated representations that function as principles for ordering empirical knowledge. In the fourth and final chapter, I examine Kant’s conception of the subject, and situate it in relation to both the long history of the modern subject and German Enlightenment philosophy. Whereas the modern philosophical conception of the subject is usually taken to combine an ‘I’ functioning as the subject to which mental acts are attributed and an ‘I’ that has the ability to immediately perceive itself as the subject of these acts, I argue that Kant reconceives this relation between the ‘I’ and its acts as a purely intellectual self-relation. The unity of the ‘I’ is not a perceived unity, but a unity brought about by the intellect. (shrink)

The paper entitled "Knowledge, Science, and Science of Knowledge" uses two relevant texts from German idealism to ask whether philosophy is a science. It is first argued that science presupposes knowledge, but that the concept of knowledge has long been subject to strong scepticism due to Fitch's paradox of knowability and especially the Gettier problem. Only in recent years have historians of philosophy made it clear that the so-called standard analysis of knowledge was not even advocated by many classical authors. (...) This is also the case with the texts under investigation: Fichte's early Wissenschaftslehre and Schopenhauer's Berlin Lectures. Both texts argue for a very different concept of knowledge, which then also determines the concept of science and philosophy. Fichte argues that philosophy must be founded from axioms and is therefore a subordinating science. Schopenhauer argues against this and points out that philosophy can only be a coordinating science. The last part of the paper argues that Fichte's and Schopenhauer's definitions of philosophy as a coordinating or subordinating science can still be applied today. (shrink)

In this article, I propose a formal criterion that distinguishes between deductively valid arguments that do and do not beg the question. I define the concept of a Never-failing Minimally Competent Knower (NMCK) and suggest that an argument begs the question just in case it cannot possibly assist an NMCK in extending his or her knowledge.

It is often claimed that Plato’s definition of knowledge as “true opinion with an account” is in agreement with the contemporary analysis of knowledge as “justified true belief”. Some scholars disagree with the attribution of JTB to Plato. I analyze three influential arguments against the assumption of Plato’s agreement with JTB, and refute them. Then I provide my own argument against the assumption. I argue that the contemporary interpretation of the JTB formula understands “belief” not in the sense of an (...) “opinion,” but rather of a “degree of confidence.” Accordingly, “justification” is understood not as applying to the opinion itself, but rather to the person having a certain degree of confidence. I support this claim by showing the difference between the traditional and the contemporary understanding of “evidence,” the former referring to a property of the proposition, while the latter meaning the body of reasons, which supports the person’s confidence to a certain degree. Thus, I conclude that Plato understands knowledge as “correct opinion validated by a rational explanation,” and it has very little in common with the contemporary understanding of knowledge as “sufficiently supported subjective degree of confidence in the truth of a proposition.”. (shrink)