To start the party off...

Sep 02, 2005 10:10


...I'll link to a paper on epistemology that I finished recently:  Justified Belief or Knowledge? A Task for Epistemology.

This paper deals with the internalism/externalism debate, and the crucial question of whether the justification of belief can apply prior to a notion of knowledge.  What is knowledge?  Does it actually fall under the genus of belief?  Can either externalism or internalism provide an account of justification without presupposing a notion of knowledge?  I argue that any such attempts at accounting for justification in the 'justified, true belief' model of knowledge reduce that model to a circular definition.  To excerpt from the paper:

The lack of a satisfactory answer to the question of what kind and degree of justification is necessary for a true belief to count as knowledge has driven some contemporary epistemologists to abandon the search for knowledge as such and focus their efforts instead on the nature of belief justification.  They then present theories of internalism, externalism, foundationalism, coherentism, or some combination thereof to account for what it is for a belief to be justified.  Laurence Bonjour, for instance, defends a traditional ‘internalist foundationalism’, in answer to the question of whether we ever have good reasons for supposing our beliefs are true.  Ernest Sosa argues, in contrast, for an ‘externalist virtue theory’ of justification, a view characterized by providing justification outside of the agent’s cognitive awareness, and focusing instead on the reliability of the agent’s own epistemic virtues (which he need not grasp internally).  The question is whether one’s beliefs are justified by reasons internal or external to one’s mind.

But is this question of the rationality of our beliefs actually the main one to address in epistemology, or is there something more basic to settle first?  I will argue that a problem in both the internalist and externalist positions arises from a presupposition of knowledge, and that to focus on justification in this sense while brushing aside the concept of knowledge (as an overly complicated species within the genus of belief) is to pursue epistemology down the wrong path, or at least to walk that path prematurely.  Philosophers should rather focus on the concept of knowledge itself, starting from scratch - that is, without presupposing its definition as ‘justified, true belief’.  This complete separation of belief from knowledge could open up a new frontier for epistemology, as we might then study what it is to truly know something without the problem of a ‘justification’ that must in itself presuppose an account of knowledge that we do not yet have.
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