Abstract

Musgrave opens the book defending the general claim that knowledge consists of justified true beliefs. He concedes that there may well be other kinds of knowledge--knowledge of things, knowing how --but still, he contends, there is much of interest in "knowledge that", and this kind of knowledge is best analyzed in terms of a justified true belief account. If, then, knowing that is a matter of belief, truth, and justification, the most obvious difficulty concerns what counts as an appropriate justification. Generally, knowledge may be justified by appeal to experience or by appeal to certain propositions known a priori. The bulk of Musgrave's book details the three-cornered fight between the empiricists, the rationalists, and the sceptics.