Since Plato, the traditional position on what instances of belief constitute knowledge is a justified, true belief. This justified, true belief (JTB) theory was objected to by Edmund Gettier in 1963, through counterexamples displaying instances of justified, true beliefs which are not knowledge. Many attempts since then have been made to modify the traditional position, with Alan Goldman’s essay “A Causal Theory of Knowledge” chief among the responses. In this paper, I will demonstrate how Goldman’s addition of a causal connection to the traditional analysis of knowledge is insufficient in overcoming the obstacle of Gettier cases. I will do so by first showing the difficulties in reconstruction a causal connection, and secondly by identifying shortcomings of the application his theory to several types of knowledge. Lastly, I will present an example of a justified, true belief which includes Goldman’s concept of causal connection, but only incidentally with the fact that makes it true.
Edmund Gettier’s famous objection to the JTB theory of knowledge was propounded in his 1963 essay “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” In the paper, Gettier presents two cases in which a subject might believe a fact that is true, have good reason to believe it, but still not count as knowing it, therefore
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In this case, Alan decides on Friday that he wants to eat lunch downtown on Saturday. He emails Jane on Friday that he intends to be downtown on Saturday without further explanations. Jane knows Alan to be an honest and reliable person, so she forms the belief that Alan will be downtown on Saturday. However, the email is intercepted by Alan’s jealous ex-girlfriend who is upset that he is going on a date with Jane. She kidnaps him on Saturday morning and locks him in her downtown
(1) Kelly, Thomas (2005). “The Epistemic Significance of Disagreement.” Oxford Studies in Epistemology. Eds. Tamar Szabo Gendler and John Hawthorne. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pg.1 – 36.
I will argue that Unger mischaracterizes the nature of certainty as it is ordinarily used (something he says is important to his argument), and also that he has mischaracterized one of the sources he used to defend this definition. I will then present W.V.O. Quine’s psychologically based epistemology as presented in “Epistemology Naturalized” and “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, and argue that this theory provides a more adequate account of the way knowledge and certainty are understood. I will also attempt to address the objections to Quine’s theory raised by Jaegwon Kim.
In the Second Analogy, Kant argues that we must presuppose, a priori, that each event is determined to occur by some preceding event in accordance with a causal law. Although there have been numerous interpretations of this argument, we have not been able to show that it is valid. In this paper, I develop my own interpretation of this argument. I borrow an insight offered by Robert Paul Wolff. In Kant's argument, our need to presuppose that the causal determination of each event rests not upon our need to impose a 'necessary' and 'irreversible' temporal order upon representations of the states of an object, as Kant is usually interpreted, but upon our need to generate a comprehensive representation that includes a certain a priori conception of events in the world around us. Although the argument I attribute to Kant is valid, it cannot compel the Humean skeptic to accept the necessity of presupposing the causal determination of each event: Kant has not successfully responded to Hume in the Second Analogy.
In order to be considered a non-evidentialist, one must believe that actual evidence is not required for all of our beliefs. Pascal believ...
James, W. (2009, May 8). The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Will to Believe, by William James. Retrieved from The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/26659/pg26659.txt
Hume distinguishes two categories into which “all the objects of human reason or enquiry” may be placed into: Relations of Ideas and Matters of Fact (15). In regards to matters of fact, cause and effect seems to be the main principle involved. It is clear that when we have a fact, it must have been inferred...
“Knowledge is a particular way of being connected to the world, having a specific factual connection to the world: tracking it” - Sven Bernecker Robert Nozick in his essay “Conditions for Knowledge,” presents a reliabilist view of the conditions of knowledge by stating that causal connection is not enough and, as presented in Sven Bernecker’s commentary on the text, “for a true belief to qualify as knowledge it must not be a lucky coincidence that the belief is true…must be non-accidentally true” (Nozick, “Conditions for Knowledge,” 21). In order to provide a reliable relationship, Nozick presents two subjunctive conditionals: variation condition (“not-p not-(S believes that p)) and adherence condition (p S believes that p) (22). The variation
The purpose of this paper is to show that Goldman's causal theory of knowledge does not solve the Gettier problem. First, I will reiterate the Gettier problem. Second, I will show how Goldman's theory attempts to solve the Gettier problem. Next, I will show how over determination points out a major flaw for Goldman's theory. Finally, I will demonstrate that Goldman's theory does not work if the world we live in is not one of absolute truth and void of deception.
This essay attempts to capitalize on Goldman 's “What is justified belief?” to form an opinion about his ideas. Goldman makes a break from traditional views of knowledge to form a theory of externalism. He gives the reader a new point of view for observing the relationship between knowledge and justification. The following passage will weed out some important aspects of his theory and how they relate to his theory as a whole.
Zagzebski defines knowledge by expressing the relationship between the subject and the truth proposition. A truth claim becomes knowledge when your state of belief makes cognitive contact with reality. What it is to know that you understand something is different from having a relationship with something. Propositional knowledge, that can be known or believed, is her focus due to simplicity. The criteria required for belief is to have a thought, followed by augmentation with experience. The minimal criteria for a definition of knowledge must incorporate two types of “good”; a moral and an ethical. These truths are implemented to develop the foundation on which Zagzebski later builds her definition.
Beliefs are a condition of said knowledge. Davidson’s argument deals a lot with the concept of objective trut...
In the selection, ‘Skeptical doubts concerning the operations of the understanding’, David Hume poses a problem for knowledge about the world. This question is related to the problem of induction. David Hume was one of the first who decided to analyze this problem. He starts the selection by providing his form of dividing the human knowledge, and later discusses reasoning and its dependence on experience. Hume states that people believe that the future will resemble the past, but we have no evidence to support this belief. In this paper, I will clarify the forms of knowledge and reasoning and examine Hume’s problem of induction, which is a challenge to Justified True Belief account because we lack a justification for our beliefs.
Some may have a belief that they are strongly agreeing with but they do not necessarily comprehend the correspondence of the argument when there is one; a theory that states the criterion of truth with right propositions. In the beginning of the text, Manuel Velasquez opens with an assumption of a male having a female mate and the likelihood of the male partner understanding whether or not his so called soul-mate truly loves him or not. This situation is very crucial in terms of the perplexity that one side is battling while the other side is neutral in such circumstances; obviously, all actions are done in a practical manner, but going in depth about justification of truth, one person cannot become convinced because of mental insecurity. So, can knowledge be considered a justified belief?
Some of the objections, such as the ones made by Edmund Gettier, claim that three conditions are not nearly enough to justify a true belief, and that at the very least a fourth must be added. Gettier presents a very valid criticism of the JTB theory of knowledge, and his counter examples highlight flaws in the JTB theory that make it an inadequate theory of knowledge. Gettier claims takes an issue with the third part of the JTB theory, which states that proposition P must be true. Gettier makes the interesting observation that person S may very well be justified in believing in proposition P even if P is false
Whether someone's belief is true is not a prerequisite for belief. On the other hand, if something is actually known, then it categorically cannot be false. For example, if a person believes that a bridge is safe enough to support him, and attempts to cross it, but the bridge then collapses under his weight, it could be said that he believed that the bridge was safe but that his belief was mistaken. It would not be accurate to say that he knew that the bridge was safe, because plainly it was not. By contrast, if the bridge actually supported his weight, then he might say that he had believed that the bridge was safe, whereas now, after proving it to himself, he knows it was