Epistemology In John Williamson's Knowledge And Its Limits

556 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: What really constitute knowledge

Williamson in his book Knowledge and It’s Limits primarily seeks to support his novel perspective of “knowledge first” epistemology (v). This approach sets forth the idea that knowledge cannot be analyzed into more basic concepts, such as belief or truth. The basis for this argument is that knowledge is a mental state, and thus it cannot be broken down into the combination of external conditions – like the state of the world such that it makes a proposition true – and internal conditions – like belief in a proposition or the justification of that belief (6). Certainly, Williamson is able to illustrate in his introduction the way in which he equates belief and knowledge as mental states, and refutes the idea that belief is conceptually prior to knowledge. However, Williamson takes the assertion that knowledge is a general factive mental state and supports this claim by offering it as a new approach to epistemology that avoids the problems of trying to analyze knowledge, and instead allows for knowledge to be the central concept used to elucidate others, like justification and eviden...

Show More
Related

  • Krakauer’s Belief in McCandless

    985 Words  | 2 Pages

    The day is unlike any other. The mail has come and lying at the bottom of the stack is the favored Outside magazine. The headline reads, “Exclusive Report: Lost in the Wild.” The cover speaks of a twenty four year old boy who “walked off into America’s Last Frontier hoping to make sense of his life.” The monotony of the ordinary day has now vanished from thought as Jon Krakauer’s captivating article runs through the mind like gasoline to an engine. The article is not soon forgotten, and the book Into the Wild is happened upon three years later. The book relates the full story of Christopher Johnson McCandless and how he left his family and friends after graduating college in order to find himself. Krakauer based the book off of his article on McCandless that was printed in January of 1993. From the time of writing the article to the printing of Into the Wild, Krakauer was obsessed with the tale of the boy who rid himself of society and later turned up dead in the Alaskan frontier. In the foreword of Into the Wild, Krakauer describes McCandless as “an extremely intense young man [who] possessed a streak of stubborn idealism that did not mesh readily with modern existence” and who was in deed searching for a “raw, transcendent experience” (i-ii). Krakauer is correct in assessing this conclusion about McCandless. This conclusion is seen throughout the book in many different assessments. Krakauer uses logical appeal, a comparison to his own life, and assumption to bring about his assessment of McCandless’ life.

    Read More

  • A Critical Analysis Of 'Source D' By Paul Lewis

    239 Words  | 1 Pages

    Source D is an account written by Paul Lewis about what happened during and after John Smith traveled to the americas in a third person's point of view. This source was created in 1966, it is about what Paul lewis believed happened when John smith traveled to the americas. Lewis is skeptic that Pocahontas actually saved John Smith because “[Why would] a chief who had been so friendly before, suddenly decide to kill John Smith”? The author also suggests that Smith added in the fact that Pocahontas saved him to make it seem like she was a hero once she was becoming a well known Native American who has switched to christianity and had started treating the King and Queen of england as her King and Queen. This source was created in 1966. During

    Read More

  • Perspective and the Right Reasons View in Solving Epistemic Disagreements.

    1024 Words  | 3 Pages

    In “The Epistemic Significance of Disagreement”, Thomas Kelly gives two responses to the question “How should awareness of disagreement, with those that you take to be your epistemic equal, effect the rational confidence you have in your beliefs?”. Kelly discusses two possible responses to the question. The first is Richard Foley's first person perspective argument. Adam Elga calls the second the right reasons view (Elga, 2007 pg. 485). Kelly pursues the latter, and does not go further than agreeing with Foley that we should only view these disputes with a first person perspective.

    Read More

  • Linda Zagzebski: A Virtue Based Definition of Knowledge

    1062 Words  | 3 Pages

    How we approach the question of knowledge is pivotal. If the definition of knowledge is a necessary truth, then we should aim for a real definition for theoretical and practical knowledge. Methodology examines the purpose for the definition and how we arrived to it. The reader is now aware of the various ways to dissect what knowledge is. This entails the possibility of knowledge being a set of truths; from which it follows that one cannot possibly give a single definition. The definition given must therefore satisfy certain desiderata , while being strong enough to demonstrate clarity without losing the reader. If we base our definition on every counter-example that disproves our original definition then it becomes ad hoc. This is the case for our current defini...

    Read More

  • Foundationalism, Coherentism, and the Justification of Knowledge

    794 Words  | 2 Pages

    In this short paper I will examine the positions of foundationalism and coherentism, and argue that a form of weak foundationalism is the most satisfactory option as a valid theory of justification for knowledge and is therefore a viable way of avoiding any sort of vicious regress problem and skepticism.

    Read More

  • Adler's Knowledge And Opinion

    1386 Words  | 3 Pages

    The fourth philosophical mistake that Adler discusses are known as “Knowledge and Opinion.” The mistake here puts mathematics, investigative science, and history on the side of knowledge and everything else on the side of opinion. This denies the claim that philosophy gives us truth. Many early philosophers believed philosophy was based on opinion. Adler maintains that philosophy is genuine knowledge and, like the empirical sciences, can be knowledge of reality. If philosophy were mere opinion there would be no philosophical mistakes. You know something when you believe something to be true, you have a reason to believe it is true, and it is true. A child can repeat the phrase 2+2=4 but until they understand why that is, they don’t have knowledge.

    Read More

  • An Analysis Of William James's 'The Will To Believe'

    1103 Words  | 3 Pages

    In the article, "The Will to Believe", William James responds to W.K. Clifford who argued

    Read More

  • On Certainty

    2567 Words  | 6 Pages

    I will argue that Unger mischaracterizes the nature of certainty as it is ordinarily used (something he says is important to his argument), and also that he has mischaracterized one of the sources he used to defend this definition. I will then present W.V.O. Quine’s psychologically based epistemology as presented in “Epistemology Naturalized” and “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, and argue that this theory provides a more adequate account of the way knowledge and certainty are understood. I will also attempt to address the objections to Quine’s theory raised by Jaegwon Kim.

    Read More

  • A Universal Perspective on Belief

    1472 Words  | 3 Pages

    The approaches given by Pierce and Nagel to the epistemological questions of doubt and belief, though diverse in that they are strictly pragmatist and Cartesian, contain a similar underlying principle. They both serve to show that belief cannot come from any source that appeals to one’s feelings or purposes, experiences or impressions. Beliefs must arise from a non-personal means. Although this is a commonality between the two approaches in epistemology, they are greatly different arguments in their focuses. Pierce’s pragmatist approach surfaces along the lines of techniques people use to found their beliefs of reality, here assuming reality from the start, and using that as a foundation to delve into questions of the unknown. Nagel’s look at the Cartesian approach primarily doubts reality, and uses that as the grounds for the rest of his argument, asking how we can know anything beyond ourselves. These approaches lead to very different views on epistemology.

    Read More

  • Transcendentalism And Perception

    987 Words  | 2 Pages

    Perception, the theory of knowledge, is a primary issue in that of explaining how it can either provide someone with ‘knowledge’ or a belief about this world. Can we allow one’s perception to have the same weight as factual information? Nevertheless, the perception of reality existing cannot be fact-based of being entirely true. The strange part about all this is how reality may not exist. The reason why we anticipate in one reality, in one perception, is that we only see our central point of the story. Just because one observes something in a specific way does not make it so. This problem has been looked at in terms of a dubious argument that appears to show that such knowledge and premise are impossible. Although I can concur that the perception

    Read More

  • William James The Will To Believe Analysis

    996 Words  | 2 Pages

    This paper will dispute that scientific beliefs are not the right way to accept a belief and it will question if we should let one accept their rights to their own beliefs. In Williams James article Will to Believe, we accept his perspective on how we set and fix our beliefs. This paper will first outline his overview on the argument that someone does not choose their belief but rather one just has them. Following, it will outline my perspective on how we set our beliefs and agreement with purse. Then it will explain how other methodologies such as science cannot conclude to one’s true beliefs. Science has been seen as a way to perceive life and taken to consideration as the truth. This paper should conclude that humans define ourselves by

    Read More

  • The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism

    1825 Words  | 4 Pages

    Williams, Michael. The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology. (Eds. Greco, J. and Sosa, E.). Blackwell.(1999). Chapter 1. pp. 35-69.

    Read More

  • Donald Davidson’s Three Varieties of Knowledge

    1397 Words  | 3 Pages

    Beliefs are a condition of said knowledge. Davidson’s argument deals a lot with the concept of objective trut...

    Read More

  • The Justified True Belief Theory Of Knowledge

    1519 Words  | 4 Pages

    Some of the objections, such as the ones made by Edmund Gettier, claim that three conditions are not nearly enough to justify a true belief, and that at the very least a fourth must be added. Gettier presents a very valid criticism of the JTB theory of knowledge, and his counter examples highlight flaws in the JTB theory that make it an inadequate theory of knowledge. Gettier claims takes an issue with the third part of the JTB theory, which states that proposition P must be true. Gettier makes the interesting observation that person S may very well be justified in believing in proposition P even if P is false

    Read More

  • Justified True Belief

    1400 Words  | 3 Pages

    Justified true belief can be a properly applicable definition to abstract knowledge. For it is only through abstraction that justification is required. However, justified true belief cannot be a properly applicable definition to direct, intuitive, self evident knowledge. For with such knowledge, one needn’t justify oneself. One may properly hold a basic, simple, directly known propositional belief, without being obligated to provide a justification for such a proposition. However, abstract knowledge, since its essential nature is causal, in the sense that every abstraction is based on a potentially infinite many causal chains, (or, until it, the abstraction, finds bedrock in the self evidently known laws of logic), justification is required.

    Read More

More about Epistemology In John Williamson's Knowledge And Its Limits

Open Document