Nearly all success is due to some mix of ability and luck. But some successes we attribute to the agent’s ability, whereas others we attribute to luck. To better understand the criteria distinguishing credit from luck, we conducted a series of four studies on knowledge attributions. Knowledge is an achievement that involves reaching the truth. But many factors affecting the truth are beyond our control and reaching the truth is often partly due to luck. Which sorts of luck are compatible (...) with knowledge? We find that knowledge attributions are highly sensitive to lucky events that change the explanation for why a belief is true. By contrast, knowledge attributions are surprisingly insensitive to lucky events that threaten but ultimately fail to change the explanation for why a belief is true. These results shed light on our concept of knowledge, help explain apparent inconsistencies in prior work on knowledge attributions, and constitute progress toward a general understanding of the relation between success and luck. (shrink)

A critical review of “Gettier” cases and theoretical attempts to solve “the” "Gettier" "problem".

A standard view in philosophy is that knowledge entails justification. Yet recent research suggests otherwise. We argue that this admirable and striking research suffers from an important limitation: participants were asked about knowledge but not justification. Thus it is possible that people attributed knowledge partly because they thought the belief was justified. Perhaps though, if given the opportunity, people would deny justification while still attributing knowledge. It is also possible that earlier findings were due to perspective taking. This paper reports (...) further research that directly addresses these questions. Our findings support the hypothesis that knowledge entails justification on the ordinary view. (shrink)

“Gettier cases” have played a major role in Anglo-American analytic epistemology over the past fifty years. Philosophers have grouped a bewildering array of examples under the heading “Gettier case.” Philosophers claim that these cases are obvious counterexamples to the “traditional” analysis of knowledge as justified true belief, and they treat correctly classifying the cases as a criterion for judging proposed theories of knowledge. Cognitive scientists recently began testing whether philosophers are right about these cases. It turns out that philosophers were (...) partly right and partly wrong. Some “Gettier cases” are obvious examples of ignorance, but others are obvious examples of knowledge. It also turns out that much research in this area of philosophy is marred by experimenter bias, invented historical claims, dysfunctional categorization of examples, and mischaracterization by philosophers of their own intuitive judgments about particular cases. Despite these shortcomings, lessons learned from studying “Gettier cases” are leading to important insights about knowledge and knowledge attributions, which are central components of social cognition. (shrink)

Professional philosophers say it’s obvious that a Gettier subject does not know. But experimental philosophers and psychologists have argued that laypeople and non-Westerners view Gettier subjects very differently, based on experiments where laypeople tend to ascribe knowledge to Gettier subjects. I argue that when effectively probed, laypeople and non-Westerners unambiguously agree that Gettier subjects do not know.

Traditionally it has been thought that the moral valence of a proposition is, strictly speaking, irrelevant to whether someone knows that the proposition is true, and thus irrelevant to the truth-value of a knowledge ascription. On this view, it’s no easier to know, for example, that a bad thing will happen than that a good thing will happen (other things being equal). But a series of very surprising recent experiments suggest that this is actually not how we view knowledge. On (...) the contrary, people are much more willing to ascribe knowledge of a bad outcome. This is known as the epistemic side-effect effect (ESEE), and is a specific instance of a widely documented phenomenon, the side-effect effect (a.k.a. “the Knobe effect”), which is the most famous finding in experimental philosophy. In this paper, I report a new series of five experiments on ESEE, and in the process accomplish three things. First, I confirm earlier findings on the effect. Second, I show that the effect is virtually unlimited. Third, I introduce a new technique for detecting the effect, which potentially enhances its theoretical significance. In particular, my findings make it more likely that the effect genuinely reflects the way we think about and ascribe knowledge, rather than being the result of a performance error. (shrink)

Justification has long been considered a necessary condition for knowledge, and theories that deny the necessity of justification have been dismissed as nonstarters. In this chapter, we challenge this long-standing view by showing that many of the arguments offered in support of it fall short and by providing empirical evidence that individuals are often willing to attribute knowledge when epistemic justification is lacking.

The paper provides a systematic overview of recent debates in epistemology and philosophy of science on the nature of understanding. We explain why philosophers have turned their attention to understanding and discuss conditions for “explanatory” understanding of why something is the case and for “objectual” understanding of a whole subject matter. The most debated conditions for these types of understanding roughly resemble the three traditional conditions for knowledge: truth, justification and belief. We discuss prominent views about how to construe these (...) conditions for understanding, whether understanding indeed requires conditions of all three types and whether additional conditions are needed. (shrink)

To what extent should we trust our natural instincts about knowledge? The question has special urgency for epistemologists who want to draw evidential support for their theories from certain intuitive epistemic assessments while discounting others as misleading. This paper focuses on the viability of endorsing the legitimacy of Gettier intuitions while resisting the intuitive pull of skepticism – a combination of moves that most mainstream epistemologists find appealing. Awkwardly enough, the “good” Gettier intuitions and the “bad” skeptical intuitions seem to (...) be equally strong. This chapter argues that it is not a coincidence that these two types of intuition register with equal force: they are generated by a common mechanism. However, the input to this mechanism is interestingly different in the two types of case, and different in a way that can support the mainstream view that Gettier cases tell us something about knowledge where skeptical intuitions involve systematic error. (shrink)

According to the usual way of understanding how true knowledge attribution works, it is not right to attribute knowledge of p to S unless p is true and S is justified in believing p. This assumption seems to hold even if we shun away from the idea that we can give an analysis of knowledge in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. I want to raise some suspicions on the correctness of this traditional picture. I suggest that justification is not (...) always perceived as a necessary condition for true knowledge attribution, according to our pre-theoretical usage of standard epistemic terms. This is not to say that justification is never seen as an important requirement; sometimes it certainly is. Still, the full-fledged, traditional position on epistemic justification needs to be seriously qualified. Ultimately, I will contend that this result lends support to a rival epistemological standpoint — what we might dub a Moderate Peircean stance on epistemic matters. (shrink)

I advance a novel argument for an infallibilist theory of knowledge, according to which we know all and only those propositions that are certain for us. I argue that this theory lets us reconcile major extant theories of knowledge, in the following sense: for any of these theories, if we require that its central condition (evidential support, reliability, safety, etc.) obtains to a maximal degree, we get a theory of knowledge extensionally equivalent to infallibilism. As such, the infallibilist can affirm (...) that, when their conditions are suitably interpreted, most post-Gettier theories of knowledge offer necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge. The infallibilist can thus reconcile major theories of knowledge, and is in a better position to explain the intuitive appeal of these theories than the fallibilist who only accepts one of them, and rejects the rest. (shrink)

Matthew Boyle has defended an account of doxastic self-knowledge which he calls “Reflectivism”. I distinguish two claims within Reflectivism: that believing that p and knowing oneself to believe that p are not two distinct cognitive states, but two aspects of the same cognitive state, and that this is because we are in some sense agents in relation to our beliefs. I find claim compelling, but argue that its tenability depends on how we view the metaphysics of knowledge, something Boyle does (...) not consider. I argue that in the context of the standard account of knowledge as a kind of true belief – what I call the Belief Account of knowledge – the claim faces serious problems, and that these simply disappear if we instead adopt an Ability Account of knowledge, along the lines of that defended by John Hyman. I find claim less compelling, and a secondary aim of the paper is to suggest that once we reject the Belief Account of knowledge, and move over to an Ability Account, there is no explanatory role for left to play. (shrink)

In this article I examine several issues concerning reliabilism and deflationism. I critique Alvin Goldman's account of the key differences between correspondence and deflationary theories and his claim that reliabilism can be combined only with those truth theories that maintain a commitment to truthmakers. I then consider how reliability could be analysed from a deflationary perspective and show that deflationism is compatible with reliabilism. I close with a discussion of whether a deflationary theory of knowledge is possible.

Experimental philosophers have investigated various ways in which non‐epistemic evaluations can affect knowledge attributions. For example, several teams of researchers (Beebe and Buckwalter 2010; Beebe and Jensen 2012; Schaffer and Knobe 2012; Beebe and Shea 2013; Buckwalter 2014b; Turri 2014) report that the goodness or badness of an agent’s action can affect whether the agent is taken to have certain kinds of knowledge. These findings raise important questions about how patterns of folk knowledge attributions should influence philosophical theorizing about knowledge.

In a recent paper Jacob Ross presents two ingenious objections against the safety theory of knowledge: one against the claim that safe true belief is necessary for knowledge, the other one against the claim that safe true belief is sufficient for knowledge. While the first objection seems to go through there are problems with the second one: Its core issue is due not to problems of the safety theory but to peculiarities of the proposition used in the objection. Instead of (...) showing that safety is insufficient for knowledge, Ross is really presenting an unknowable proposition. (shrink)

Much of the recent work on epistemology of inquiry defends two related theses. First, inquiry into a question rationally prohibits believing an answer to that question. Second, knowledge is the aim of inquiry. I develop a series of cases which indicate that inquiry is not as narrow as these views suggest. These cases can be accommodated if we take a broader approach and understand inquiry as aiming at epistemic improvement, described more generally. This approach captures a wider range of inquiring (...) phenomena because it accounts for forms of epistemic improvement that fall short of, or go beyond, coming to know the answer to a question. (shrink)

Ivan Boh affirms and Robert Pasnau denies that William Heytesbury holds merely true belief to be sufficient for knowledge in the broad sense. I argue that Boh is correct and Pasnau is mistaken, and that there is a long-running orthodox medieval tradition agreeing with Heytesbury about the conditions for knowledge. I offer a hypothesis about the origins, continuance and demise of that medieval tradition, and some remarks about the tradition's significance.

Sackris and Beebe (2014) report the results of a series of studies that seem to show that there are cases in which many people are willing to attribute knowledge to a protagonist even when her belief is unjustified. These results provide some reason to conclude that the folk concept of knowledge does not treat justification as necessary for its deployment. In this paper, we report a series of results that can be seen as supporting this conclusion by going some way (...) towards ruling out an alternative account of Sackris and Beebe’s results—the possibility that the knowledge attributions that they witnessed largely stem from protagonist projection, a phenomenon in language use and interpretation in which the speaker uses words that the relevant protagonist might use to describe her own situation and the listener interprets the speaker accordingly. With that said, we do caution the reader against drawing the conclusion too strongly, on the basis of results like those reported here and by Sackris and Beebe. There are alternative possibilities regarding what drives the observed knowledge attributions in cases of unjustified true belief that must be ruled out before, on the basis of such results, we can conclude with much confidence that the folk concept of knowledge does not treat justification as necessary for its deployment. (shrink)

Abstract: On the standard story about knowledge, knowledge has a normative dimension by virtue of the fact that knowledge involves justification. On the standard story, justification is necessary but insufficient for knowledge. The additional conditions that distinguish knowledge from justified belief are normatively insignificant. In this chapter we will consider whether the concept of knowledge might be irrelevant to normative questions in epistemology. Some proponents of the standard story might think that it is, but we shall see that the concept (...) of knowledge might play three important roles in answering normative questions in epistemology. The concept might be useful in helping us understand evidence and epistemic reasons, the kind of rational support required for justification, and in formulating epistemic norms. (shrink)

The developing body of empirical work on the "Gettier effect" indicates that, in general, the presence of a Gettier-type structure in a case makes participants less likely to attribute knowledge in that case. But is that a sufficient reason to diverge from a JTB theory of knowledge? I argue that considerations of good model selection, and worries about noise and overfitting, should lead us to consider that a live, open question. The Gettier effect is perhaps so transient, and so sensitive (...) to other, epistemologically-inappropriate factors, that it raises the question of whether it ought to be counted as something to include in our theories -- or as a piece of noise to be excluded from them. (shrink)

The overwhelmingly dominant view of epistemic normativity has been an extreme form of deontology. I argue that although the pull towards deontology is quite understandable, given the traditional concerns of epistemology, there is no good reason for not also adopting a complementary consequentialist notion of epistemic normativity, which can be put to use in applied epistemology. I further argue that this consequentialist notion is not, despite appearances and popular sentiment to the contrary, any less genuinely epistemic than the deontological notion (...) and that it may even be considered more genuinely normative. (shrink)

This compelling reevaluation of the relationship between logic and knowledge affirms the key role that the notion of judgement must play in such a review. The commentary repatriates the concept of judgement in the discussion, banished in recent times by the logical positivism of Wittgenstein, Hilbert and Schlick, and the Platonism of Bolzano. The volume commences with the insights of Swedish philosopher Per Martin-Löf, the father of constructive type theory, for whom logic is a demonstrative science in which judgement is (...) a settled feature of the landscape. His paper opens the first of four sections that examine, in turn, historical philosophical assessments of judgement and reason; their place in early modern philosophy; the notion of judgement and logical theory in Wolff, Kant and Neo-Kantians like Windelband; their development in the Husserlian phenomenological paradigm; and the work of Bolzano, Russell and Frege. The papers, whose authors include Per Martin-Löf, Göran Sundholm, Michael Della Rocca and Robin Rollinger, represent a finely judged editorial selection highlighting work on philosophers exercised by the question of whether or not an epistemic notion of judgement has a role to play in logic. The volume will be of profound interest to students and academicians for its application of historical developments in philosophy to the solution of vexatious contemporary issues in the foundation of logic. ​. (shrink)

The simplest and most natural definition of the term ‘conspiracy theory’ leads us to the conclusion that we are all conspiracy theorists. Yet, I claim that most of us would not self-identify as such. In this paper I call this the problem of self-identification. Since virtually everyone emerges as a conspiracy theorist, the term is essentially theoretically fruitless. It would be like defining intelligence in a way that makes everyone intelligent. This raises the problem for theoretical fruitfulness, i.e. the problem (...) of how to define the concept in a theoretically fruitful way. I suggest that these problems are currently causing confusion in the literature and present us with a dilemma, the conspiracy definition dilemma. I will present an analysis of the literature and what are on my reconstruction the solutions on offer, and argue that none is satisfactory. Either a) the solution will solve the problem of self-identification or b) it will potentially provide a theoretical fruitful definition, but no account does both. (shrink)

This is a work concerned with justification and freedom and the relationship between these. Its summational aim is to defend a transcendental argument for free will – that we could not be epistemically justified in undermining a strong notion of free will, as a strong notion of free will would be required for any such process of undermining to be itself epistemically justified. The book advances two transcendental arguments – for a deontically internalist conception of epistemic justification and the aforementioned (...) argument for a libertarian conception of free will. In defending each of these arguments, the book both defends and relies upon the principle that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. In articulating the latter transcendental argument – for freedom – heavy reliance is made on the earlier, epistemic, work: especially on the deontological conception of rational justification (on epistemic internalism). (shrink)

It is widely held that assertions are partially governed by an epistemic norm. But what is the epistemic condition set out in the norm? Is it knowledge, truth, belief, or something else? In this paper, I defend a view similar to that of Stanley (2008), according to which the relevant epistemic condition is epistemic certainty, where epistemic certainty (but not knowledge) is context-sensitive. I start by distinguishing epistemic certainty, subjective certainty, and knowledge. Then, I explain why it's much more plausible (...) to think that "certain", rather than "know", is context-sensitive. After that, I respond to an important worry raised by Pritchard, according to which the proposed view is too strong to accommodate our current practice of assertion. I then show that the main linguistic and conversational data advanced in the recent literature in favour of the knowledge condition are best explained by the certainty view. Finally, I offer two principled considerations: the certainty view is the only one compatible with three independently plausible claims and it fits very well with the common thought that knowledge does not entail certainty. (shrink)

In his recent book, Knowing and Checking, Guido Melchior argues that, when we attempt to check whether p, we tend to think that we do not know p. Melchior then uses this assumption to explain a number of puzzles about knowledge. One outstanding question for Melchior's account, however, is why this tendency exists. After all, Melchior himself argues that checking is not necessary for knowing, so why would we think that we fail to know that p when we are in (...) the midst of checking that p? I will explore one such suggestion for why this occurs, arguing that the connection between checking and inquiry can shed light on the impact that checking has on knowing. (shrink)

But it’s not the mere fact that the RA theorist needs an account of ‘ruling out’ and ‘relevance’ that has tended to lead people to regard the RA approach with suspicion. In itself, this simply means that the RA theorist has some further work to do; and what theorist doesn’t? No; the principal source of scepticism regarding the ability of the RA theorist to come up with a complete and satisfactory account of knowing stems, rather, from an unhappiness with the (...) specific elaborations of the core RA claim that various theorists have offered; for these elaborations have typically involved some rather controversial claims and/or assumptions, and it is against these claims/assumptions that the bulk of the criticism of the whole RA approach has been directed. (shrink)

The Gettier Problem (henceforth GP) is a milestone in contemporary epistemology. Half a century after the philosophical earthquake caused by the well-known Gettier article (1963), solutions continue to appear and the discussion resurfaces. Because we, like many, choose to adopt an optimistic stance towards the possibility of finding a plausible answer to the GP, in this paper we present an unconventional solution to solve it. Crucially, we argue that the only plausible and non-falsifiable definition of the propositional knowledge is the (...) one given by an “open” formula that contains a placeholder or a “variable” – on the third necessary condition – which takes a value according to which, depending on the circumstances, is necessary and sufficient for epistemic success. (shrink)

This paper discusses Plato’s question from the Meno : Why should we prefer knowledge that p over mere true belief that p? I find I just do prefer knowledge, and not for any further benefit that I am aware of in the particular case. But I should have that preference, because given our practice of approving of testimony only if uttered with knowledge, I could fail to prefer knowledge, when other things seem to me to be equal, only by having (...) the sorts of serious social or psychological defects that would make me unresponsive to the approval of others. Finally, the social practice that produces this particular preference is good for all of us because it improves the average quality of the testimony we receive, which results in greater success in our projects. (shrink)

The radical skeptic argues that I have no knowledge of things I ordinarily claim to know because I have no evidence for or against the possibility of being systematically fed illusions. Recent years have seen a surge of interest in pragmatic responses to skepticism inspired by C. S. Peirce. This essay challenges one such influential response and presents a better Peircean way to refute the skeptic. The account I develop holds that although I do not know whether the skeptical hypothesis (...) is true, I still know things I ordinarily claim to know. Although it will emerge that this reply appears similar to a classic contextualist response to radical skepticism, it avoids two central problems facing that response. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to look at what a parallel deflationist program might be in the theory of knowledge and examine its prospect. In what follows I will simplify matters slightly by focussing on empirical knowledge rather than knowledge in general, though most of what I have to say ought to be applicable, mutatis mutandis, to knowledge in general. Moreover,note that it is not my aim to offer a full defense of a particular deflationist theory of knowledge, which (...) would go well beyond the scope of this paper, but only to defend the utility of taking the deflationist program as regards the theory of knowledge seriously by showing that there is a plausible deflationist position available that is worthy of further scrutiny. (shrink)

This article offers an analysis of ignorance. After a couple of preliminary remarks, I endeavor to show that, contrary to what one might expect and to what nearly all philosophers assume, being ignorant is not equivalent to failing to know, at least not on one of the stronger senses of knowledge. Subsequently, I offer two definitions of ignorance and argue that one’s definition of ignorance crucially depends on one’s account of belief. Finally, I illustrate the relevance of my analysis by (...) paying attention to four philosophical problems in which ignorance plays a crucial role. (shrink)

A problem occupying much contemporary epistemology is that of explaining why knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief. This paper provides an overview of this debate, starting with historical figures and early work. The contemporary debate in mainstream epistemology is then surveyed and some recent developments that deserve special attention are highlighted, including mounting doubts about the prospects for virtue epistemology to solve the value problem as well as renewed interest in classical and reliabilist‐externalist responses.

Pragmatist responses to radical skepticism do not receive much attention in contemporary analytic epistemology. This observation is my motivation for undertaking a search for a coherent pragmatist reply to radical doubt, one that can compete, in terms of clarity and sophistication, with the currently most popular approaches, such as contextualism and relevant alternatives theory. As my point of departure I take the texts of C. S. Peirce and William James. The Jamesian response is seen to consist in the application of (...) a wager argument to the skeptical issue in analogy with Pascal's wager. The Peircean strategy, on the other hand, is to attempt a direct rejection of one of the skeptic's main premises: that we do not know we are not deceived. I argue that while the Jamesian attempt is ultimately incoherent, Peirce's argument contains the core of a detailed and characteristically "pragmatic" rebuttal of skepticism, one that deserves to be taken seriously in the contemporary debate. (shrink)

Alvin Goldman contends that, in addition to the familiar sense or use of the term “knowledge” according to which knowledge is at least true justified belief, there is a weaker yet strict sense or use of the term “knowledge” according to which knowledge amounts to nothing more than information-possession or mere true belief. In this paper, I argue that Goldman has failed to show that there is such a weaker sense, and that, even if he had shown this, he has (...) not shown that this putative weaker sense is a strict one by his own criterion for strictness. (shrink)

I argue that knowing and having points of view are fundamentally different epistemic states if we assume that having justified true beliefs is necessary for knowledge. Knowers necessarily possess justified true beliefs, but persons holding points of view may, for example, lack justification, have false beliefs, or both. I examine these differences and expose other crucial differentiating patterns between the structure of knowledge and points of view that make the latter more likely to lead to disagreements. I hypothesize that these (...) patterns remain invariant in alternative views of knowledge like contextualism as long as we preserve the classical structure. Yet there is much research to be done on the multiple and contrasting properties that emerge if we consider non‐classical analyses of knowledge and points of view. (shrink)

Epistemic minimalism affirms that mere true belief is sufficient for propositional knowledge. I construct a taxonomy of some specific forms of minimalism and locate within that taxonomy the distinct positions of various advocates of minimalism, including Alvin Goldman, Jaakko Hintikka, Crispin Sartwell, Wolfgang Lenzen, Franz von Kutschera, and others. I weigh generic minimalism against William Lycan’s objection that minimalism is incompatible with plausible principles about relations between knowledge, belief, and confidence. I argue that Lycan’s objection fails for equivocation but that (...) some specific forms of minimalism are better able than others to articulate that defense. (shrink)

One thing nearly all epistemologists agree upon is that Gettier cases are decisive counterexamples to the tripartite analysis of knowledge; whatever else is true of knowledge, it is not merely belief that is both justified and true. They now agree that knowledge is not justified true belief because this is consistent with there being too much luck present in the cases, and that knowledge excludes such luck. This is to endorse what has become known as the 'anti-luck platitude'. <br /><br (...) />But what if generations of philosophers have been mistaken about this, blinded at least partially by a deeply entrenched professional bias? There has been another, albeit minority, response to Gettier: to deny that the cases are counterexamples at all. <br /><br />Stephen Hetherington, a principal and vocal proponent of this view, advances what he calls the 'Knowing Luckily Proposal'. If Hetherington is correct, this would call for a major re-evaluation and re-orientation of post-Gettier analytic epistemology, since much of it assumes the anti-luck platitude both in elucidating the concept of knowledge, and in the application of such accounts to central philosophical problems. It is therefore imperative that the Knowing Luckily Proposal be considered and evaluated in detail. <br /><br />In this paper I critically assess the Knowing Luckily Proposal. I argue that while it draws our attention to certain important features of knowledge, ultimately it fails, and the anti-luck platitude emerges unscathed. Whatever else is true of knowledge, therefore, it is non-lucky true belief. For a proposition to count as knowledge, we cannot arrive at its truth accidentally or for the wrong reason. (shrink)

This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to (...) engage in “reflective” thinking. (shrink)

Has any school or movement in all of Western philosophy made a permanent contribution, permanent in the sense that it will last as long as philosophy does? More narrowly, has there ever been put forward a thesis that has achieved lasting consensus? After carefully defining “philosophical thesis” and “consensus,” so as to forestall uninteresting answers, this paper argues that the ancient Greeks made one or two such contributions, and the Analytic philosophers (ca. 1890–1960) made a few, but there have been (...) no others. Moreover (a) the Analytic contributions were more empirical than philosophical, and (b) they were almost entirely negative. So, the basic short answer to our question is “no.” The paper concludes by asking in what way(s) there has been progress in philosophy. (shrink)

A standard objection to the suggestion that the fundamental norm of assertion is the truth norm (i.e., one must not assert p unless p) is that this norm cannot explain why warrant requires knowledge-level evidence. In a recent paper, Whiting has defended the truth-first approach to the norms of assertion by appeal to a distinction between the warrant there is to assert and the warrant one has to assert. I shall argue that this latest defensive strategy is unsuccessful.

Knowledge has almost always been treated as good, better than mere true belief, but it is remarkably difficult to explain what it is about knowledge that makes it better. I call this “the value problem.” I have previously argued that most forms of reliabilism cannot handle the value problem. In this article I argue that the value problem is more general than a problem for reliabilism, infecting a host of different theories, including some that are internalist. An additional problem is (...) that not all instances of true belief seem to be good on balance, so even if a given instance of knowing p is better than merely truly believing p, not all instances of knowing will be good enough to explain why knowledge has received so much attention in the history of philosophy. The article aims to answer two questions: What makes knowingp better than merely truly believing p? The answer involves an exploration of the connection between believing and the agency of the knower. Knowing is an act in which the knower gets credit for achieving truth. What makes some instances of knowing good enough to make the investigation of knowledge worthy of so much attention? The answer involves the connection between the good of believing truths of certain kinds and a good life. In the best kinds of knowing, the knower not only gets credit for getting the truth but also gets credit for getting a desirable truth. The kind of value that makes knowledge a fitting object of extensive philosophical inquiry is not independent of moral value and the wider values of a good life. (shrink)

According to a historical claim oft-repeated by contemporary epistemologists, the ‘traditional’ conception of knowledge prevailed in Western philosophy prior to the publication in 1963 of Edmund’s Gettier’s famous three-page article ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’. On this conception, knowledge consists of justified true belief. In this article, I critically consider evidence for and against this historical claim, and conclude with a puzzle concerning its widespread acceptance.

Suppose that knowledge and ignorance are complements in the sense of being mutually exclusive: for person S and fact p, either S knows that p or is ignorant that p. Understood in this way, ignorance amounts to a lack or absence of knowledge: S is ignorant that p if and only if it is not the case that S knows that p. Let us call the thesis that knowledge and ignorance are opposites the “Complement Thesis”. In this article, I discuss (...) its deployment in an ingenious new argument advanced by Alvin Goldman and Erik Olsson (2009) which, if sound, establishes that there is a kind of knowledge that amounts to nothing more than true belief. I rebut their argument and in doing so delineate some important epistemological lessons brought to light by the contrast between ignorance and knowledge. (shrink)

One of the most venerable and enduring intuitions in epistemology concerns the relationship between true belief and knowledge. Famously articulated by Socrates, it holds that true belief does not suffice for knowledge. I discuss a matching intuition about ignorance according to which true belief does not suffice for the absence of ignorance. I argue that the latter intuition undercuts the New View of Ignorance and supports the Standard View of Ignorance.