Aune, Bruce - An Empiricist Epistemology Ch 1 "Knowledge and Analysis"

05/04/2007

Unpublished Manuscript

The author has introduced in the preface how he intends to do some work of defending the empiricist notion of the analytic (or at least Carnap's version of it) against Quine's assaults.

The first chapter is devoted to sorting out some of the different senses of knowledge, how the different senses sometimes work in everyday language, and then to give a 'rational reconstruction' of two senses of knowledge.

Author first points out the various disagreements regarding the actual method to employ when trying to answer the question 'what is knowledge?' Is it an analysis that points to necessary and sufficient conditions? Is it conceptual analysis that tries to capture all (or most of) our intuitions? Is it trying to identify a property that is true of us when we know something? This last approach seems to be taken by Chisholm's followers, which assumes that such a property exists, even before we can find one. Author reviews the rejection of 'essential properties' talk, e.g. the famous critique given by Wittgenstein regarding a 'game', and so on. Given the difficulty since the Gettier examples to show a property of knowledge, it is unlikely to be located.

Author review the Gettier cases and points out that if we have two senses of knowledge, one being an ancient traditional approach of 'rational certainty' and the other as one that is based on inconclusive evidence, the Gettier cases only refute the later cases, not the former. One reply to the Gettier cases for inconclusive knowledge is Lewis' contextualism. Contextualism is a positive account that says that a subject S knows P when S has eliminated all relevant alternatives to P that are reasonable to consider given the context that S is in. Author points out that his major problem with this theory is that it requires relevant alternatives to P to be eliminated, but sometimes there are none.

Author proposes to avoid Gettier-like counterexamples by having access to the evidence that makes the proposition true. This 'making-true' concept author wants to keep elementary enough to avoid endorsing Armstrong's elaborate notions of 'truth-makers'.

At the end of the chapter, author gives his rational reconstruction of inconclusive or imperfect knowledge: S has imperfect knowledge of P in a context C only when (i) P is true, (ii) S has the information that P, (iii) The evidence for P is high enough in C to be considered adequate, (iv) S has evidential access to a sufficient truth-maker for P.