Against Knowledge Closure

Presents a new and comprehensive defense of closure failure that is relevant to a wide variety of epistemic issues.

Marc Alspector-Kelly (Author)

9781108474023, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 May 2019

254 pages
23.5 x 15.5 x 1.7 cm, 0.47 kg

'Marc Alspector-Kelly provides the most comprehensive treatment available of the much-debated topic of epistemic closure, and his own arguments are a valuable antidote to the current consensus in favor of closure. Henceforth, epistemologists who discuss closure will have to reckon with Alspector-Kelly's original and sophisticated case against this principle.' Peter Murphy, University of Indianapolis

Knowledge closure is the claim that, if an agent S knows P, recognizes that P implies Q, and believes Q because it is implied by P, then S knows Q. Closure is a pivotal epistemological principle that is widely endorsed by contemporary epistemologists. Against Knowledge Closure is the first book-length treatment of the issue and the most sustained argument for closure failure to date. Unlike most prior arguments for closure failure, Marc Alspector-Kelly's critique of closure does not presuppose any particular epistemological theory; his argument is, instead, intuitively compelling and applicable to a wide variety of epistemological views. His discussion ranges over much of the epistemological landscape, including skepticism, warrant, transmission and transmission failure, fallibilism, sensitivity, safety, evidentialism, reliabilism, contextualism, entitlement, circularity and bootstrapping, justification, and justification closure. As a result, the volume will be of interest to any epistemologist or student of epistemology and related subjects.

1. Motivation, strategy, and definition
2. Counterexamples
3. Denying premise 1: Skepticism
4. Denying premise 2: Warrant transmission
5. Transmission, skepticism, and conditions of warrant
6. Front-loading
7. Denying premise 3: warrant for P as warrant for Q
8. Denying premise 4: warrant by background information
9. Denying premise 5: warrant by entitlement
10. Abominable conjunctions, contextualism, and the spreading problem
11. Bootstrapping, epistemic circularity, and justification closure.

Subject Areas: Philosophy: epistemology & theory of knowledge [HPK], Philosophy [HP]