Internalist views could be said to lead to considering normativity as an issue in Epistemology. That is, what it is we ’should’ or ‘ought’ to believe in various situations such as defining justification or knowledge. For example, whether we should deny situations like the Evil Demon one below, simply because we have to grant ourselves [...]

Filed under: English, Philosophy on January 17th, 2008 | No Comments » | Trackback

We have our basic Justified True Belief (JTB) account of knowledge.
Subject (S) knows something (p) iff:
(P1) p is true
(P2) S believes that p
(P3) S is justified in believing that p.

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Tricky, tricky. What a mess of a debate this is. I’ll give it my best shot to clarify.
First of all, we need to be aware of the distinctions between Externalism about Knowledge (KE) and Internalism about Knowledge (KI). And also, the difference between Externalism about Justification (JE) and Internalism about Justification (JI).

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Okay! Brace yourselves for a tricky piece of work. (Well, it was tricky for me…) I’ll do my best to give an accurate summary of Robert Nozick’s counterfactual account of knowledge, but there may be some slight errors. Basically, Nozick is suggesting that knowledge is belief that tracks the truth. Recall our JTB account of [...]

Filed under: English, Philosophy on January 15th, 2008 | No Comments » | Trackback

Gettier cases! Cases of our beloved Justified True Belief (JTB) account of knowledge gone wrong! Edmund Gettier famously gave several short examples of cases where I could have a true belief that was justified - all 3 of our conditions for knowledge - yet not actually know. How could this be!? Take a gander at [...]

Filed under: English, Philosophy on January 14th, 2008 | No Comments » | Trackback