scholarly journals Gettiering Goldman

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-78
Author(s):  
Kenneth Stalkfleet
Keyword(s):  
True Belief ◽  
Causal Theory ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Alvin Goldman ◽  
Causal Connections

This paper examines the causal theory of knowledge put forth by Alvin Goldman in his 1967 paper “A Causal Theory of Knowing.” Goldman contends that a justified, true belief is knowledge if and only ifit is causally connected to the fact that makes it true. This paper provides examples, however, of justified, true beliefs with such causal connections that are clearly not knowledge. The paper further shows that attempts to salvage the causal theory are unsatisfactory.

4. The analysis of knowledge

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Nagel
Keyword(s):  
True Belief ◽  
Causal Theory ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Classical Analysis ◽  
Alvin Goldman ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Analysis Of Knowledge

‘The analysis of knowledge’ begins with Edmund Gettier who challenged the ‘classical analysis of knowledge’ that equates knowledge with justified true belief. His no-false-belief proposal had some flaws. Alvin Goldman then proposed the causal theory of knowledge: experience-based knowledge that requires the knower to be appropriately causally connected to a fact. Goldman went on to launch a fresh analysis of knowledge, focused on reliability. Reliabilism is when knowledge is true belief that is produced by a mechanism likely to produce true belief. But can knowing be analysed at all? The relationship between knowing and believing is considered in the knowledge-first and belief-first movements of epistemology.

Knowledge, causal theory of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marshall Swain
Keyword(s):  
Causal Theory ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Causal Connection ◽  
Causal Process ◽  
Information Theoretic ◽  
Causal Processes ◽  
Causal Connections ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
Coming To Know

Epistemologists have always recognized the importance of causal processes in accounting for our knowledge of things. In discussions of perception, memory and reasoning, for example, it is commonly assumed that these ways of coming to know are fundamentally causal. We perceive things and thus come to have knowledge about them via complex causal processes; memory is, at least in part, the retention of previously gained knowledge through some sort of causal process; and reasoning is a causal process that takes beliefs as inputs and generates beliefs as outputs. A causal theory of knowledge is a form of externalism and is based on the fundamental idea that a person knows some proposition, p, only if there is an appropriate causal connection between the state of affairs that makes p true and the person’s belief in p. Although this kind of theory has roots that extend to ancient times, contemporary versions attempt to make more precise the nature of the causal connections required for knowledge. The causal theory is closely related to other forms of externalist theories, such as the conclusive reasons theory, information-theoretic views and the various forms of reliabilism.

When Is True Belief Knowledge?

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Foley
Keyword(s):  
True Belief ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Central Problem ◽  
Significant Aspect ◽  
Coming To Know ◽  
Contemporary Epistemology ◽  
What Matters

A woman glances at a broken clock and comes to believe it is a quarter past seven. Yet, despite the broken clock, it really does happen to be a quarter past seven. Her belief is true, but it isn't knowledge. This is a classic illustration of a central problem in epistemology: determining what knowledge requires in addition to true belief. This book finds a new solution to the problem in the observation that whenever someone has a true belief but not knowledge, there is some significant aspect of the situation about which she lacks true beliefs—something important that she doesn't quite “get.” This may seem a modest point but, as the book shows, it has the potential to reorient the theory of knowledge. Whether a true belief counts as knowledge depends on the importance of the information one does or doesn't have. This means that questions of knowledge cannot be separated from questions about human concerns and values. It also means that, contrary to what is often thought, there is no privileged way of coming to know. Knowledge is a mutt. Proper pedigree is not required. What matters is that one doesn't lack important nearby information. Challenging some of the central assumptions of contemporary epistemology, this is an original and important account of knowledge.

Hume on Necessary Causal Connections

Philosophy ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 66 (258) ◽  
pp. 517-521
Author(s):  
Katherin A. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
David Hume ◽  
Causal Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cause And Effect ◽  
Causal Connections ◽  
Repeated Observation ◽  
The Mind

According to David Hume our idea of a necessary connection between what we call cause and effect is produced when repeated observation of the conjunction of two events determines the mind to consider one upon the appearance of the other. No matter how we interpret Hume's theory of causation this explanation of the genesis of the idea of necessity is fraught with difficulty. I hope to show, looking at the three major interpretations of Hume's causal theory, that his account is contradictory, plainly wrong, or (at best) inherently impossible to verify.

Intuitions

Philosophy ◽  
2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Ichikawa ◽  
Ernest Sosa
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
True Belief ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Hypothetical Case ◽  
Belief Theory ◽  
Contemporary Work

Philosophy often proceeds via appeals to intuition. In a prototypical instance, a theory is rejected on the basis of its counterintuitive verdict about a real or hypothetical case. A famous example is Edmund Gettier’s rejection of the justified “true belief” theory of knowledge; the dominant view was that knowledge was equivalent to justified true belief, but Gettier provided thought experiments involving subjects with beliefs derived from justified falsehoods, which happened by luck to be true—these thought experiments generally gave rise to intuitions to the effect that they described cases of justified true belief without knowledge. And on this basis, 20th-century epistemologists generally rejected the justified true belief theory. In recent decades, significant metaphilosophical attention has turned to such uses of intuitions in philosophy. What are intuitions? In what sense do arguments such as Gettier’s rely on the use of intuitions? Why should we trust them? What can they show us? This entry focuses on contemporary work on these and related topics.

Kripke, Saul Aaron (1940–)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arif Ahmed
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Meaningful Use ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Saul Kripke ◽  
Formal Treatment ◽  
Causal Connections ◽  
Essential Properties ◽  
Naming And Necessity

Saul Kripke is one of the most influential philosophers to have written on logic, metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind in the twentieth century. In logic, he made an early and seminal contribution to the formal treatment of modality, that is, thoughts and statements about how things might have been or must have been (§2). In metaphysics, his work on modality has also been important, contributing as it did to the revival of the Aristotelian idea that the ways a thing might have been or must be (its contingent and its essential properties) were features of that very thing itself. This was in opposition to the view, prevalent in various forms throughout the first half of the twentieth century, that necessity was always relative to some classification or description of the object (§3). In the philosophy of language, he attacked– – in Naming and Necessity – the Russellian idea that proper names are simply abbreviated descriptions of the things that they name, arguing that instead they can refer directly to things via causal connections of which the users of language might be unaware (§4). Again, in the philosophy of language, his work on Wittgenstein on rule-following evinced what seemed to be a radical and devastating skepticism about the very possibility of the meaningful use of language (§6). And his proposed solution constituted a novel re-interpretation of Wittgenstein’s "private language argument," one that seemed to reveal the essentially social character of language (§8). In the philosophy of mind, he used the semantic machinery developed in Naming and Necessity to revive the long-discredited Cartesian argument against identifying mental and physical states (§5). Saul Kripke has also written ground-breaking works on the theory of truth (1975), the theory of knowledge (2011), and the semantics of fictional discourse (2013).

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