Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?st1=Edmund L. Gettier', 'Intending' and 'Letters to De Vries'

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4 ideas

9. Objects / D. Essence of Objects / 14. Knowledge of Essences
4869 Experience does not teach us any essences of things [Spinoza]
     Full Idea: Experience does not teach us any essences of things.
     From: Baruch de Spinoza (Letters to De Vries [1664], 1664?)
     A reaction: This, along with Leibniz's claim that experience cannot reveal necessities, may constitute a striking criticism of empiricism, but it invites the obvious reply 'so much the worse for essences'. An essence seems to be a theoretical concept, not a priori.
13. Knowledge Criteria / A. Justification Problems / 2. Justification Challenges / b. Gettier problem
8886 Being a true justified belief is not a sufficient condition for knowledge [Gettier]
     Full Idea: The claim that someone knows a proposition if it is true, it is believed, and the person is justified in their belief is false, in that the conditions do not state a sufficient condition for the claim.
     From: Edmund L. Gettier (Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? [1963], p.145)
     A reaction: This is the beginning of the famous Gettier Problem, which has motivated most epistemology for the last forty years. Gettier implies that justification is necessary, even if it is not sufficient. He gives two counterexamples.
20. Action / B. Preliminaries of Action / 1. Intention to Act / a. Nature of intentions
20076 An intending is a judgement that the action is desirable [Davidson]
     Full Idea: We can identify an intentional action ...with an all-out conditional judgement that the action is desirable. ...In the case of pure intending, I now suggest that the intention simply is an all-out judgement.
     From: Donald Davidson (Intending [1978], p.99), quoted by Rowland Stout - Action 8 'Davidson's'
     A reaction: 'Pure' intending seems to be what Stout calls 'prior' intending, which is clearer. This still strikes me as obviously false. I judge that it is desirable that I make a cup of coffee, but secretly I'm hoping someone else will make it for me.
20. Action / B. Preliminaries of Action / 1. Intention to Act / c. Reducing intentions
20024 Davidson gave up reductive accounts of intention, and said it was a primitive [Davidson, by Wilson/Schpall]
     Full Idea: Later Davidson dropped his reductive treatment of intentions (in terms of 'pro-attitudes' and other beliefs), and accepted that intentions are irreducible, and distinct from pro-attitudes.
     From: report of Donald Davidson (Intending [1978]) by Wilson,G/Schpall,S - Action 2
     A reaction: Only a philosopher would say that intentions cannot be reduced to something else. Since I have a very physicalist view of the mind, I incline to reduce them to powers and dispositions of physical matter.