The Kantian Account of Knowledge

Chapter 11 elaborates on and defends the account of knowledge—the Kantian Account—that follows from a right reasons account of the nature of well properties. Knowledge, it is argued, is a special case of a well property—one which requires believing well along both objective and subjective dimensions. This, it is argued, makes knowledge involve a kind of match between internal and external components that explains why it is prime and why it has distinctive explanatory power, as argued by Williamson. It explains why defeaters for knowledge come in objective and subjective pairs—even according to pragmatic encroachers. It explains where earlier generations of defeasibility accounts of knowledge went wrong, by adopting subjunctive rather than categorical accounts of the sufficiency of reasons, and by insufficiently appreciating the generality of the relationship between reasons and their weight. And it explains how to avoid Linda Zagzebski’s diagnosis of the inevitability of Gettier cases.

Knowledge as Justified True Belief

What is knowledge? I this paper I defend the claim that knowledge is justified true belief by arguing that, contrary to common belief, Gettier cases do not refute it. My defence will be of the anti-luck kind: I will argue that (1) Gettier cases necessarily involve veritic luck, and (2) that a plausible version of reliabilism excludes veritic luck. There is thus a prominent and plausible account of justification according to which Gettier cases do not feature justified beliefs, and therefore, do not present counterexamples to the tripartite analysis. I defend the account of justification against objections, and contrast my defence of the tripartite analysis to similar ones from the literature. I close by considering some implications of this way of thinking about justification and knowledge.

Intentional Action

The project of analyzing intentional action has been out of favor for some time. In part this is due to exhaustion over details—accounts are usually subject to very technical problems or elaborate counterexamples. This chapter builds build on the earlier accounts of control and non-deviance to offer a new account of intentional action. This account builds on Mele and Moser’s influential work, and goes beyond it in some ways. After offering the account, this chapter considers a range of ancillary issues and problem cases. It discusses, for example, side-effect cases, senseless movements, the role of belief and knowledge in intentional action, and action theoretic versions of systematic Gettier cases. Finally, it turns to issues of reductionism that motivate some rejections of causal theories of action. The upshot is that anti-causalists have a new account to contend with, and one that has answers to the problems often thought to be damning for causalism.

Consistency and Shifts in Gettier Cases

Two Gettier cases are described in detail and it is shown how they unfold in terms of reflective and reflexive desiderata. It is argued that the Gettier problem does not pose a problem for conceptions of knowledge as long as we are consistent in how we understand justification and knowledge. It is only by reading the cases with a reflective understanding of justification but a reflexive understanding of knowledge, without acknowledging that this takes place, that the cases become ‘problems.’

Mighty Knowledge

We often claim to know what might be—or probably is—the case. Modal knowledge along these lines creates a puzzle for information-sensitive semantics for epistemic modals. This paper develops a solution. We start with the idea that knowledge requires safe belief: a belief amounts to knowledge only if it could not easily have been held falsely. We then develop an interpretation of the modal operator in safety (could have) that allows it to non-trivially embed information-sensitive contents. The resulting theory avoids various paradoxes that arise from other accounts of modal knowledge. It also delivers plausible predictions about modal Gettier cases.

Gettier Cases, Knowledge and Experimental Inquiry

In 1963, Edmund Gettier published a short paper in the journal Analysis. That paper, entitled “Is Justifi ed True Belief Knowledge?,” purported to demonstrate that even though a person is justified in believing a true proposition p, having that justified true belief (JTB) is not sufficient for the person knowing that p (Gettier, 1963). In particular, Gettier presented examples purporting to show that a person may have a justified true belief, but the belief is, in one way or another, a “lucky belief,” and so the person having the justified true belief that p does not know that p. In what follows, I argue that justified, but luckily true beliefs do count as knowledge. What is important is that there is a limited ability to generalize from such cases, suggesting that many, if not most of what we count as instances of knowledge are, to a greater or lesser extent, localized.

Elusive luck: Contextualist approach to the Gettier problem

Lewis' philosophical ambition to eradicate the skeptical threat towards infallibilism was the driving force behind his contextualist approach to knowledge. One of the discerning characteristics of his conversational contextualism is the claim that it can solve the Gettier problem. The first part of this paper will be directed towards explicating the arguments Lewis employed in reaching said solution. The second part will be concerned with Cohen?s critique of the proposed explanation. Cohen?s considerations result in an insight that contextualism does not have the adequate means to answer the Gettier challenge. Finally, I shall make an attempt at further motivating Cohen?s claim by investigating the essential component of Gettier cases - epistemic luck. This will be done by appealing to Pritchard?s concept of veritic epistemic luck. The author?s goal is to suggest that contextualist resources are neither suitable to solve nor exhaustively articulate the Gettier problem.