Fifth part of the definition of knowledge

The notions of knowledge and belief play an important role in philosophy. Unfortunately, the literature is not very consistent about defining these notions. Is belief more fundamental than knowledge or the other way around? Many accounts rely on the widely accepted strategy of appealing to the intuition of the reader. Such an argumentative methodology is fundamentally flawed as it lets the problems of common sense reasoning in through the front door. Instead, I suggest that philosophical arguments should be based on formal-computational models to (a) reduce the ambiguities and uncertainties that come with intuitive arguments and reasoning, and (b) capture the dynamic nature of many philosophical concepts. I present a model of knowledge and belief that lends itself to being implemented on computers. Its purpose is to resolve terminological confusion in favor of a more transparent account. The position I defend is an anti-realist naturalized one: knowledge is best conceived as arising from experience, and is fundamental to belief.

Inquiry, 2019

Does knowledge entail belief? This paper argues that the answer depends on how one interprets 'belief'. There are two different notions of belief: belief as such and belief for knowledge. They often differ in their degrees of conviction such that one but not both might be present in a particular case. The core of the paper is dedicated to a defence of this overlooked distinction. The first two sections present the distinction. Section 3 presents two cases which are supposed to back up the claim that there is an important distinction here while section 4 offers some explanations concerning the structure of these cases. Section 5 adds further considerations in support of the core thesis, and section 6 discusses objections. The distinction is important as such but also has interesting implications concerning the much discussed 'entailment thesis' according to which knowledge entails belief. It is argued here that even if knowledge entails belief-for-knowledge, it does not entail belief-as-such. This constitutes an interesting middle position and compromise in the philosophical debate about the entailment thesis. One further implication of this paper is that the discussion about the entailment thesis needs to take degrees of conviction seriously. Still another implication is that epistemic contextualists can deal very well with the relevant phenomena.

Erkenntnis, 2015

Most discussions in epistemology assume that believing that p is a necessary condition for knowing that p. In this paper, I will present some considerations that put this view into doubt. The candidate cases for knowledge without belief are the kind of cases that are usually used to argue for the so-called 'extended mind' thesis.

Ratio, 2010

In this paper an improved formulation of the classical tripartite view of knowledge is proposed and defended. This formulation solves Gettier's problem by making explicit what is concealed by the symbolic version of the tripartite definition, namely, the perspectival context in which concrete knowledge claims are evaluated. Knowledge is not simply justified true belief, but it is justified true belief justifiably arrived at.

Philosophical Writings, 2014

It is largely admitted that the tripartite conception as Justified True Belief knowledge implying truth is possible but truth is not recognisable per se, that is, knowledge implying self-awareness of having the truth (which is not to be conflated with certainty) is impossible. Borrowing from the theory of meaning I intend to redefine knowledge with the immanence principle and the implicitness principle, which impose the recognisability of the knowledge conditions. Second, I argue that since truth is not directly recognisable it must be inferred. Hence, knowledge is the product of an inference from a belief and a justification to the truthascription of the henceforth-acknowledged belief. The seminal Gettier problems take thus an almost trivial aspect, or at least it is no obstacle to the possibility of knowledge thus defined.

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 2018

In this paper I deal with epistemological issues that stem from the hypothesis that reasoning is not only a means of transmitting knowledge from premise-beliefs to conclusion-beliefs, but also a primary source of knowledge in its own right. The idea is that one can gain new knowledge on the basis of suppositional reasoning. After making some preliminary distinctions, I argue that there are no good reasons to think that purported examples of knowledge grounded on pure reasoning are just examples of premise-based inferences in disguise. Next, I establish what kinds of true propositions can to a first approximation be known on the basis of pure reasoning. Finally, I argue that beliefs that are competently formed on the basis of suppositional reasoning satisfy both externalist and internalist criteria of justification.

Erkenntnis, 2021

What is knowledge? I this paper I defend the claim that knowledge is justified true belief by arguing that, contrary to common belief, Gettier cases do not refute it. My defence will be of the anti-luck kind: I will argue that (1) Gettier cases necessarily involve veritic luck, and (2) that a plausible version of reliabilism excludes veritic luck. There is thus a prominent and plausible account of justification according to which Gettier cases do not feature justified beliefs, and therefore, do not present counterexamples to the tripartite analysis. I defend the account of justification against objections, and contrast my defence of the tripartite analysis to similar ones from the literature. I close by considering some implications of this way of thinking about justification and knowledge.

My main motivation is to revive the Socratic quest for knowledge as a subject based activity with an inseparable link to ethics. I propose an expansion of the Platonist definition of “knowledge” as “justified true belief”: S knows that p =def. I. S seeks knowledge of p, II. S believes p, III. S performs the activity of justification for p maximally, IV. S nurtures p, and V. p is true; Each condition is defined further recursively. Though cumbersome, the definition has a simplicity of structure as it is self-sufficient at every recursive stage, as long as we can appeal to intuitive or common sense notions of belief, justification, truth, etc. Since “p propels S into action” is one of the conditions in the definiens of condition IV, the link to ethics is firmly established. The definition is revisionist as it not only incorporates the important contributions of contemporary philosophical movements such as feminist epistemology, but it is also open-ended, inviting everyone to add on, delete, or revise the proposed definition. Finally, I end with a radical conjecture that the truth condition be dropped from the definition, so that it can remain maximally internalist and an activity.

The central venture I undertake in this paper is twofold: I set out to defend the traditional definition of knowledge as justified true belief [afterwards, the JTB account]; similarly, I proceed to grant it a structure that secures it against the objections laid against it-specifically, the Gettier Problem and its alternatives [Feldman's Havit Case and Chisholm's 'sheep in the field']. Furthermore, I provide a treatment of the strict justification condition: namely, that 'if X could not have been aware of false premises, then X cannot know anything'. It is this treatment that spurs my hypothetical model of knowledge as JTB devoid of contradictory evidence for X.

The Review of Symbolic Logic, 2009

The question of whether knowledge is definable in terms of belief, which has played an important role in epistemology for the last fifty years, is studied here in the framework of epistemic and doxastic logics. Three notions of definability are considered: explicit definability, implicit definability, and reducibility, where explicit definability is equivalent to the combination of implicit definability and reducibility. It is shown that if knowledge satisfies any set of axioms contained in S5, then it cannot be explicitly defined in terms of belief. S5 knowledge can be implicitly defined by belief, but not reduced to it. On the other hand, S4.4 knowledge and weaker notions of knowledge cannot be implicitly defined by belief, but can be reduced to it by defining knowledge as true belief. It is also shown that S5 knowledge cannot be reduced to belief and justification, provided that there are no axioms that involve both belief and justification.