Knowledge is Believing Something Because It's True

Episteme 19 (2):178-196 (2022)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Modalists think that knowledge requires forming your belief in a “modally stable” way: using a method that wouldn't easily go wrong, or using a method that wouldn't have given you this belief had it been false. Recent Modalist projects from Justin Clarke-Doane and Dan Baras defend a principle they call “Modal Security,” roughly: if evidence undermines your belief, then it must give you a reason to doubt the safety or sensitivity of your belief. Another recent Modalist project from Carlotta Pavese and Bob Beddor defends “Modal Virtue Epistemology”: knowledge is a belief that is maximally modally robust across “normal” worlds. We'll offer new objections to these recent Modalist projects. We will then argue for a rival view, Explanationism: knowing something is believing it because it's true. We will show how Explanationism offers a better account of undermining defeaters than Modalism, and a better account of knowledge.

Similar books and articles

Sensitivity Principle in Epistemology.Guido Melchior - 2020 - Oxford Bibliographies Online.
Safety’s swamp: Against the value of modal stability.Georgi Gardiner - 2017 - American Philosophical Quarterly 54 (2):119-129.
Knowledge Under Threat.Tomas Bogardus - 2014 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 88 (2):289-313.
Modal Security.Justin Clarke-Doane & Dan Baras - 2021 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 102 (1):162-183.
Modal Virtue Epistemology.Bob Beddor & Carlotta Pavese - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 101 (1):61-79.
Do Safety Failures Preclude Knowledge?J. R. Fett - 2018 - Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 22 (2):301-319.
Sensitivity Actually.Michael Blome-Tillmann - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 (3):606-625.
Sensitivity, safety, and impossible worlds.Guido Melchior - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (3):713-729.
Is Safety In Danger?Fernando Broncano-Berrocal - 2014 - Philosophia 42 (1):1-19.
Competence to know.Lisa Miracchi - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (1):29-56.

Analytics

Added to PP
2020-06-15

Downloads
2,113 (#3,798)

6 months
416 (#3,596)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Tomas Bogardus
Pepperdine University

Citations of this work

An Explanationist Account of Genealogical Defeat.Daniel Z. Korman & Dustin Locke - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (1):176-195.
Knowledge as Factually Grounded Belief.Gualtiero Piccinini - 2022 - American Philosophical Quarterly 59 (4):403-417.

View all 10 citations / Add more citations

References found in this work

Knowledge and its limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Knowledge and lotteries.John Hawthorne - 2004 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility.Harry G. Frankfurt - 1969 - Journal of Philosophy 66 (23):829-839.
Epistemic Luck.Duncan Pritchard - 2005 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK.
Naming and Necessity.Saul Kripke - 1980 - Philosophy 56 (217):431-433.

View all 83 references / Add more references