Meeting 1: Knowledge, belief and conceptual analysis

We will start by establishing some basic relations between knowledge and belief (knowledge entails true belief but not vice versa). It will then be argued that there are unknowable truths, although we cannot know what they are. The question will then be raised as to whether knowledge can be analysed as true belief plus some extra factors, such as justification).

Meeting 2: The problem of scepticism

We will consider how scepticism arise by pushing quite reasonable arguments for caution to the limit, and what the relation is between scepticism and fallibilism. We will then analyse the conception of evidence underlying the sceptic’s arguments, show that it depends on a controversial assumption, and argue that the assumption is false.

Meeting 3: The nature of justification

Having distinguished between epistemic and non-epistemic notions of the justification of belief, we will concentrate on the former. We then distinguish between normative and dialectical senses of epistemic justification, and argue that scepticism can result from confusing the two. Next we explain the difference between internalism and externalism about justification, and generalize the anti-sceptical argument from the previous meeting to an argument for externalism about justification.

Meeting 4: Semantic internalism and externalism, and their implications for justification

We distinguish between semantic internalism and externalism, and analyse the basic Putnam-Burge argument for semantic externalism. We then consider the relation between semantic externalism and externalism about justification.

Reading:

The basic approach of the course will be based on that to be found in my book, Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); chapters 1 and 12 are the most relevant to the first meeting, but are not easy reading. A good recent collection of papers on scepticism is Keith DeRose and Ted Warfield, eds., Skepticism: A Contemporary Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Some of the material on justification in meetings 3 and 4 will be taken from my paper ‘On being justified in one’s head’, forthcoming in J. Greco, A. Mele and M. Timmons, eds., Rationality and the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) but also available on my webpage; that paper is in turn a response to a paper by Robert Audi, ‘An internalist theory of normative grounds’, Philosophical Topics 29 (2001): 19-46. The level of discussion in the classes may be less technical than in the book. Almost any recent standard textbook of epistemology would provide a suitable contrast to the approach to be taken here. Participants in the class should certainly have read Edmund Gettier, ‘Is justified true belief knowledge?’, Analysis 23 (1963): 121-123. For semantic externalism, see Hilary Putnam, ‘Meaning and reference’, Journal of Philosophy 70 (1973): 699-711, and Tyler Burge, ‘Individualism and the mental’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4 (1979): 73-121.