Defining Knowledge
Method and Metaphysics

This Element asks whether modalized epistemology can succeed, in order to gain insight into knowing's essence.

Stephen Hetherington (Author)

9781009095136, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 10 November 2022

75 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 0.5 cm, 0.13 kg

Post-Gettier epistemology is increasingly modalized epistemology – proposing and debating modally explicable conditionals with suitably epistemic content (an approach initially inspired by Robert Nozick's 1981 account of knowledge), as needing to be added to 'true belief' in order to define or understand knowing's nature. This Element asks whether such modalized attempts – construed as responding to what the author calls Knowing's Further Features question (bequeathed to us by the Meno and the Theaetetus) – can succeed. The answer is that they cannot. Plato's and Aristotle's views on definition reinforce that result. Still, in appreciating this, we might gain insight into knowing's essence. We might find that knowledge is, essentially, nothing more than true belief.

Preface
1. A Quest
2. An Hypothesis
3. Modalized Epistemology
4. Knowing's Further Features Question
5. Knowledge and Luck
6. An Aristotelian Strengthening of the Argument
7. Knowledge-Minimalism
References.

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