PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY OF SCIENCE 2

1
PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY OF SCIENCE(2)

• Vincent F. Hendricks
• Department of Philosophy and Science Studies
• Roskilde University
• vincent_at_ruc.dk
• Thursday, February 19 / 2004

2
PHILOSOPHY / Knowledge

• Epistemology stems from the Greek episteme
  (knowledge), and logos (theory)
• The discipline is located between ontology
  (metaphysics) and methodology
• Ontology Epistemology
  Methodology
• being knowledge / truth
  reliability
• Epistemology is the systematic and detailed study
  of knowledge, its criteria of acquistion, its
  limits and modes of justification
• Knowledge may be of the following kinds
• knowledge of how (procedural, skill, ability
  ...), p. 39
• knowledge by aquaintance (who, where, when ...),
  p. 39
• propositional knowledge (knowledge of p for
  arbitrary proposition p), p. 40
• What conditions should then be met for S knows
  that p to be satisfied for some agent S?

3
PHILOSOPHY / Knowledge

• Implicitly in the work of Plato, Kant, and
  recently explicitly formulated by C.I. Lewis
  knowledge is characterized by three, individually
  necessary, and jointly sufficient ingredients
• belief
• truth
• justification
• These ingrdients in proper conjunction give rise
  to the standard tripartite definition of
  knowledge as justified true belief (JTB)
• S knows that p if and only if
• S believes p (the belief condition)
• p is true (the factual truth condition)
• S is justified in believing p
• Note the way in which the necessity and
  sufficiency connective if and only if works
• If S knows that p, then conditions 1, 2, 3 must
  be satisfied
• If conditions 1, 2, 3, are satisfied, then S
  knows that p
• The JTB-definition of knowledge is the standard
  one in philosophy

4
PHILOSOPHY / Knowledge - Belief

• Belief is typically considered a to being
• a psychological primitive or dispositional
  psychological state
• exisiting independently of manifestation
• connecting the agent S to what is eventually
  known
• A belief may however be
• false and fallible
• obtained by luck, guesswork, randomness ...
• unstable, insecure, and revisable in the light of
  conflicting evidence
• subjective rather than objective
• ...
• Knowledge should (is) none of the above, thus
  belief alone, albeit necessary is insufficient
  for knowledge knowledge is be infallible
• Belief has not raised any serious eyebrows as an
  ingredient of knowledge, although it may be hard
  to specify exactly what belief amounts to
  (philosophy of mind)

5
PHILOSOPHY / Knowledge - Truth

• Humans are free to believe something which is in
  fact, but knowledge is not such a lenient
  committment
• Knowledge of p entails the truth of p
• The notion of truth is one of the most discussed
  in philosophy
• absolutistic truth
• relativistic truth
• theories or criteria of truth p. 43
• correspondence theory of truth A proposition p
  is true if it in some adequate sense corresponds
  with reality
• coherence theory of truth A proposition p is
  true if it in some adequate sense is coherent
  with other propositions believed
• pragmatic theory of truth A proposition p is
  true if it in some adequate sense works or is
  useful
• redundancy theory of truth A proposition p is
  true is to say p
• ...
• Albeit hard to specify there is consensus to the
  effect that some notion of correctness must be
  in place if the notion of knowledge is to
  survive, although this notion of correctness may
  fall short of truth

6
PHILOSOPHY / Knowledge - Jusitifcation

• Although humans are free to believe something
  false, they may also strike upon the truth from
  time to time, and thus believe something true
• True belief may however be the result of blind
  luck, random guesswork, clairvoyance, evidence
  collected under obscure circumstances ...
• The qualify as knowledge not only must the belief
  be rendered true but it must be held true in some
  justified or robust way
• To secure knowledge some argument must be
  presented as to why the belief and the truth
  conditions are adequately connected
• Only furnished with such supportive reasons of
  adequacy or justification together with the two
  other conditions may the agent be said to have
  the necessary and sufficient testimony required
  for knowledge
• Of the conditions discussed, the justification
  condition has been in the eye of the tornado

7
PHILOSOPHY / Knowledge - Justification

• Lenzen recently noted Because of the vagueness
  of such notions as having sufficient reasons for
  believing, being justified in believing it is
  difficult to make a decision concerning the
  adequacy ... that knowledge implies
  justification
• Justification has proved hard to define, and the
  rest of chapter 2 is an attempt to flesh out this
  notion of justification and acquistion of
  knowledge in terms of
• Reasoning, logic and proof
• deduction and validity An argument is valid if
  it is impossible that the premisses are true but
  the conclusion false
• laws of thought / examples laws of identity,
  non-contradiction, excluded middle ...
• induction and inference to best explanation
• other engines of inference ...
• Experience
• sense-perception, introspection
• feeling that / faith
• memory
• ... all of which may be fallible, and thus
  undercutting the reasons and the infallibility of
  knowledge

8
PHILOSOPHY / Knowledge - Justification

• In 1963 a short paper appeared (3 pages) in the
  philosophical journal Analysis by Edmund Gettier
  which rocked the world of epistemology
• Gettier was able to show, using simple logical
  tools, that the JTB account of knowledge is
  flawed
• It is possible to have justified true belief but
  still lack knowledge
• Gettier presented two cases
• Jones owns a Ford / logical tool the rule of
  introduction for the logical connective or
• Getting the job and having 10 in your pocket /
  logical tool the rule of introduction for the
  logical connective there exists, and a
  principle of substitution
• The point about the examples is that the agent
  may get it right for the wrong reasons which
  undercuts the condition of justification
• Nobody suggested abandoning logical principles
  for getting out of the fix
• So much work in epistemology since Gettier has
  gone into remedying the justification condition
  to block the Gettier cases