Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Philosophical Explanations', 'Reliabilism' and 'Meaning and Necessity'

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6 ideas

11. Knowledge Aims / A. Knowledge / 4. Belief / c. Aim of beliefs
Maybe knowledge is belief which 'tracks' the truth [Nozick, by Williams,M]
     Full Idea: Nozick suggests that knowledge is just belief which 'tracks the truth' (hence leaving out justification).
     From: report of Robert Nozick (Philosophical Explanations [1981]) by Michael Williams - Problems of Knowledge Ch. 2
13. Knowledge Criteria / C. External Justification / 3. Reliabilism / a. Reliable knowledge
Reliabilist knowledge is evidence based belief, with high conditional probability [Comesaņa]
     Full Idea: The best definition of reliabilism seems to be: the agent has evidence, and bases the belief on the evidence, and the actual conditional reliability of the belief on the evidence is high enough.
     From: Juan Comesaņa (Reliabilism [2011], 4.4)
     A reaction: This is Comesaņa's own theory, derived from Alston 1998, and based on conditional probabilities.
13. Knowledge Criteria / C. External Justification / 3. Reliabilism / b. Anti-reliabilism
In a sceptical scenario belief formation is unreliable, so no beliefs at all are justified? [Comesaņa]
     Full Idea: If the processes of belief-formation are unreliable (perhaps in a sceptical scenario), then reliabilism has the consequence that those victims can never have justified beliefs (which Sosa calls the 'new evil demon problem').
     From: Juan Comesaņa (Reliabilism [2011], 4.1)
     A reaction: That may be the right outcome. Could you have mathematical knowledge in a sceptical scenario? But that would be different processes. If I might be a brain in a vat, then it's true that I have no perceptual knowledge.
How do we decide which exact process is the one that needs to be reliable? [Comesaņa]
     Full Idea: The reliabilist has the problem of finding a principled way of selecting, for each token-process of belief formation, the type whose reliability ratio must be high enough for the belief to be justified.
     From: Juan Comesaņa (Reliabilism [2011], 4.3)
     A reaction: The question is which exact process I am employing for some visual knowledge (and how the process should be described). Seeing, staring, squinting, glancing.... This seems to be called the 'generality problem'.
13. Knowledge Criteria / C. External Justification / 4. Tracking the Facts
A true belief isn't knowledge if it would be believed even if false. It should 'track the truth' [Nozick, by Dancy,J]
     Full Idea: Nozick says Gettier cases aren't knowledge because the proposition would be believed even if false. Proper justification must be more sensitive to the truth ("track the truth").
     From: report of Robert Nozick (Philosophical Explanations [1981], 3.1) by Jonathan Dancy - Intro to Contemporary Epistemology 3.1
     A reaction: This is a bad idea. I see a genuine tree in my garden and believe it is there, so I know it. That I might have believed it if I was in virtually reality, or observing a mirror, won't alter that.
19. Language / C. Assigning Meanings / 8. Possible Worlds Semantics
The intension of a sentence is the set of all possible worlds in which it is true [Carnap, by Kaplan]
     Full Idea: Carnap's proposal is to understand the category of intensions appropriate to sentences (his 'propositions') as sets of possible worlds. The intension of the sentence is taken as the set of all possible worlds in which the sentence is true.
     From: report of Rudolph Carnap (Meaning and Necessity [1947]) by David Kaplan - Transworld Heir Lines p.90
     A reaction: [reference?] This extension of the truth-conditions view of meaning strikes me as being very attractive. Except that whole worlds hardly seem to be relevant to my remark about how lunch might have been improved.