I challenge a cornerstone of the Gettier debate: that a proposed analysis of the concept of knowledge is inadequate unless it entails that people don’t know in Gettier cases. I do so from the perspective of Carnap’s methodology of explication. It turns out that the Gettier problem per se is not a fatal problem for any account of knowledge, thus understood. It all depends on how the account fares regarding other putative counter examples and the further Carnapian desiderata of exactness, (...) fruitfulness and simplicity. Carnap proposed his methodology more than a decade before Gettier’s seminal paper appeared, making the present solution to the problem a candidate for being the least ad hoc proposal on the market, one whose independent standing cannot be questioned, among solutions that depart from the usual method of revising a theory of knowledge in the light of counterexamples. As an illustration of the method at work, I reconstruct reliabilism as an attempt to provide an explication of the concept of knowledge. (shrink)

It is argued that the part-whole account of the relation between evidence and the larger state of affairs the evidence is evidence of—an account that was elucidated in the paper ‘Truthmaking, Evidence of, and Impossibility Proofs’ —provides a better basis for epistemology than causal relations between events. I apply this to a well-known phenomenon in physics which suggests that causal connectedness is not necessary for knowledge.

Hyman (1999, 2006) argues that knowledge is best conceived as a kind of ability: S knows that p iff S can φ for the reason that p. Hyman motivates this thesis by appealing to Gettier cases. I argue that it is counterexampled by a certain kind of Gettier case where the fact that p is a cause of the subject’s belief that p. One can φ for the reason that p even if one does not know that p. So knowledge (...) is not best conceived as an ability of this kind. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to show that the truthmaker solution to the Gettier counter-examples can solve the Russell case of the stopped clock (other standard cases have already been analysed). The solution amounts to this: the truthmaker for the claim that it is, say, 2.00 pm, is a combination of natural and non-natural determinants. The latter are created by stipulation, but having been so made make it is a perfectly objective matter as to whether it is 2.00 o'clock. (...) To know that it is 2.00 pm is to have the evidence for one's belief evidence of the very state of affairs that make the belief true. Thus, in the Russell case one does not have knowledge, in accord with intuition. (shrink)

I defend the view that propositional knowledge can be defined as follows: A knows that p if and only if A believes that p because p. Spelling out the meaning of 'because' in this formula results in a causal-explanatory view of knowledge.