Knowledge First: PDF
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Knowledge First? Palgrave Innovations in Philosophy Series Editors: V incent F. Hendricks, University of Copenhagen and Columbia University in New York and Duncan Pritchard, University of Edinburgh. Titles include: Mikkel Gerken EPISTEMIC REASONING AND THE MENTAL Aidan McGlynn KNOWLEDGE FIRST? Kevin Meeker HUME’S RADICAL SCEPTICISM AND THE FATE OF NATURALIZED EPISTEMOLOGY Ted Poston REASON AND EXPLANATION: A DEFENSE OF EXPLANATORY COHERENTISM Forthcoming titles: J. Adam Carter THE PROSPECTS FOR RELATIVISM IN EPISTEMOLOGY E. J. Coffman LUCK: ITS NATURE AND SIGNIFICANCE FOR HUMAN KNOWLEDGE AND AGENCY Annalisa Coliva THE VARIETIES OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE Julian Kiverstein THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PHENOMENOLOGY Jonathan Matheson THE EPISTEMIC SIGNIFICANCE OF DISAGREEMENT David Pedersen POLITICAL EPISTEMOLOGY: Epistemic Theories and Knowledge Institutions Christopher Pincock and Sandra Lapointe ( editors ) INNOVATIONS IN THE HISTORY OF ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY John Turri THE KNOWLEDGE ACCOUNT OF ASSERTION Palgrave Innovations in Philosophy Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–36085–3 (hardback) ( outside North America only ) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England Knowledge First? Aidan McGlynn University of Edinburgh, UK © Aidan McGlynn 2014 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN: 978–1–137–02645–3 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Arthur first This page intentionally left blank Contents Series Editors’ Preface viii Preface and Acknowledgements ix 1 Introduction: Lessons from Gettier 1 Part I Knowledge as the ‘Unexplained Explainer’ 2 Belief 23 3 Justification 39 4 Evidence 51 5 Assertion 82 6 Action 131 Part II Knowledge as a Mental State 7 Luminosity 145 8 Is Knowledge a Mental State? 167 Notes 1 96 Bibliography 2 13 Index 2 25 vii Series Editors’ Preface Palgrave Innovations in Philosophy is a series of short monographs. Each book will constitute the ‘new wave’ of pure or applied philosophy, both in terms of its topic and the research angle, and will be concerned with ‘hot’ new research areas in philosophy and its neighbouring intellectual disciplines. These monographs will provide an overview of an emerging area while at the same time significantly advancing the debate on this topic and giving the reader a sense of where this debate might be heading next. While the series will devote attention to core topics of philosophy, it will also feature books with an interdisciplinary outlook, as we believe that many of the most exciting developments in our discipline involve a fusion of philosophy with other subjects. Vincent Hendricks, Copenhagen Duncan Pritchard, Edinburgh viii Preface and Acknowledgements According to a tradition reaching back to Plato, a central project in epis- temology is to offer an answer to the question ‘What is knowledge?’ The tradition also prescribes the form an answer should take; the project is to offer necessary and sufficient conditions for a proposition to be known, where these conditions make reference to ingredients that are in some sense more basic than knowledge itself. Moreover, Plato’s dialogues seem to suggest a plausible ‘analysis’ of knowledge in just this sense: to know is to have a belief that’s both justified and true. Over two millennia later, this account of knowledge was almost universally abandoned by philos- ophers in light of a two-and-a-half page note in A nalysis by Edmund Gettier (1963), which described two counterexamples to the claim that having a justified true belief is sufficient for knowing. After 50 years of seemingly unsuccessful attempts to patch up or replace the justified true belief account, many philosophers are increasingly sceptical that the Platonic project itself was well conceived. Knowledge first philosophy offers an alternative vision for episte- mology and for related areas of the philosophies of language and mind. The project of offering an analysis of knowledge, in anything like the traditional sense, is eschewed. However, rather than concluding that knowledge is mysterious or insignificant, we are freed to put our grip of the distinction between knowledge and ignorance to work in episte- mology and beyond. I take knowledge first philosophy, so conceived, to originate in a series of papers by Timothy Williamson in the mid-1990s, and to receive its fullest expression so far in Williamson’s 2000 book based on those papers, K nowledge and Its Limits (though as Williamson is the first to recognize, there are important precursors of various aspects of the approach, both recent and not so recent). In the decade and a half since its publication, K nowledge and Its Limits has become so influ- ential that in the introduction to their volume on Williamson’s episte- mology, Patrick Greenough and Duncan Pritchard were able to describe it, without hyperbole, as one of the most important works in philos- ophy published in the last 25 years (Greenough and Pritchard 2009: 1). Increasingly, recent work in the areas of philosophy that the knowledge first approach bears on simply assumes various theses from the book as the framework in which to operate. ix
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