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Knowledge, Truth, and Justification (Three Senses of "Knows"…
Knowledge, Truth, and Justification
Three Senses of "Knows"
Propositional
- Proposition: knowledge of facts/true propositions
- Propositional knowledge is a relation b/w a subject and a true proposition.
- Philosophers are concerned with propositional knowledge because they want to confirm the truth/falsity of claims
Acquaintance
- Knowledge acquired from direct experience/interaction with someone/ some place/sth
- Not "truth focused"
One sense in which someone knows about how sth is done but cannot do it: one merely has propositional knowledge of it
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One can have propositional knowledge of a procedure without having the ability to do it. One can also have the ability to do sth without having propositional knowledge about it.
Propositional Knowledge and Justified True Belief
- Traditional view of having propositional knowledge: To have propositional knowledge is to have epistemically justified true belief.
Mistaken accounts
- Merely believing something is knowing it: not tenable because the belief in question could be false.
- Having a true belief is sufficient for knowing sth: is sth considered knowledge if it is based on happenstance or lucky guesses rather than evidence?
Belief
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Propositional Attitudes
- A belief is a propositional attitude because it relates a subject and a proposition.
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Types of beliefs
- Knowledge requires either occurrent/dispositional beliefs.
- Intensity of belief is not really an important consideration so long as it is justified and true, according to the traditional account.
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Justification, Evidence and Defeat
Types of Evidence
Conclusive
- Evidence guarantees the truth of a propositions
Non-conclusive
- Evidence supports the truth of a proposition but does not guarantee it.
Evidential defeat: we can lose our justification for believing in the truth of a proposition if our evidence is overridden/defeated.
- Our knowledge of the truth/falsity of sth depends on the total evidence we have for it.
Epistemic Justification
- Aims at truth in ways that moral and prudential justifications do not
Points regarding justification:
- Epistemic justification aims at truth in ways that moral and prudential justifications do not.
- A proposition can be true and yet not justified.
- A proposition can be justified but not true.
- Justification can be relative in the sense that a proposition can be justified for one person but not justified for another.
- Epistemic justification comes in degrees: it can be either maximally or minimally justified.
- Though knowledge does not require certainty, it requires a high degree of justification.
- Distinction b/w a proposition being justified and a proposition being well-founded
- So knowledge requires epistemically, well-founded, justified true beliefs.