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36 results

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Defining Knowledge
  • Defining Knowledge
  • Method and Metaphysics
  • Stephen Hetherington
  • Published online: 19 October 2022
  • Print publication: 10 November 2022
  • View abstract
    Post-Gettier epistemology is increasingly modalized epistemology – proposing and debating modally explicable conditionals with suitably epistemic content (an approach initially inspired by Robert Nozick's 1981 account of knowledge), as needing to be added to 'true belief' in order to define or understand knowing's nature. This Element asks whether such modalized attempts – construed as responding to what the author calls Knowing's Further Features question (bequeathed to us by the Meno and the Theaetetus) – can succeed. The answer is that they cannot. Plato's and Aristotle's views on definition reinforce that result. Still, in appreciating this, we might gain insight into knowing's essence. We might find that knowledge is, essentially, nothing more than true belief.
  • Fallibilism and Knowing That One Is Not Dreaming
  • Stephen Hetherington
  • Journal: Canadian Journal of Philosophy / Volume 32 / Issue 1 / March 2002
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020, pp. 83-102
  • View extract

    Descartes challenged himself to know that he was not dreaming, with the supposed price to be paid if he lacked that knowledge being his failure to have any knowledge at all of the contingent existence and features of an external world. And subsequent epistemologist after subsequent epistemologist has kept that Cartesian skeptical challenge alive. Recent non-skeptical responses to it — most notably, Robert Nozick's — have focussed on whether one's not knowing that one is not dreaming really does entail one's lacking all external world knowledge. Seemingly, Nozick is unworried by the prospect of one's never knowing that one is not dreaming. He does argue that no one ever has that knowledge, but he reassures us that this does not entail that people do not have a steady and satisfying supply of the more ‘Standard’ sorts of external world knowledge. As I will argue in this paper, though, I see no good reason to concede in the first place that one cannot know that one is not dreaming.

  • Tooley's Theory of Laws of Nature
  • Stephen C. Hetherington
  • Journal: Canadian Journal of Philosophy / Volume 13 / Issue 1 / March 1983
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020, pp. 101-106
  • View extract

    This paper contains a discussion of a theory of laws of nature formulated recently by Michael Tooley. He sees the truth-makers for laws of nature as consisting of particular sorts of contingent relations between universals. He is not alone in this idea; it has also been advanced by Fred Dretske and D.M. Armstrong. However, its most thorough and detailed presentation is by Tooley. Being a challenging and stimulating idea, it merits investigation.

The Gettier Problem
  • The Gettier Problem
  • Edited by Stephen Hetherington
  • Published online: 05 November 2018
  • Print publication: 08 November 2018
  • View description
    When philosophers try to understand the nature of knowledge, they have to confront the Gettier problem. This problem, set out in Edmund Gettier's famous paper of 1963, has yet to be solved, and has challenged our best attempts to define what knowledge is. This volume offers an organised sequence of accessible and distinctive chapters explaining the history of debate surrounding Gettier's challenge, and where that debate should take us next. The chapters describe and evaluate a wide range of ideas about knowledge that have been sparked by philosophical engagements with the Gettier problem, including such phenomena as fallibility, reasoning, evidence, reliability, truth-tracking, context, luck, intellectual virtue, wisdom, conceptual analysis, intuition, experimental philosophy, and explication. The result is an authoritative survey of fifty-plus years of epistemological research - along with provocative ideas for future research – into the nature of knowledge.
  • SHOULD YOU BE AFRAID? ALONENESS SCEPTICISM AND DESCARTES
  • Stephen Hetherington
  • Journal: Think / Volume 17 / Issue 50 / Autumn 2018
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 September 2018, pp. 15-25
  • Print publication: Autumn 2018
  • View abstract

    Philosophers routinely claim that sceptical arguments are not only intellectually but also emotionally confronting. When students first meet these arguments, though, no fear arises. This article presents aloneness scepticism: you never know that other people are not aiming to deceive you or at least not caring about being truthful. Imagine raising this possibility in a classroom by directing it at a single student. He or she should feel fear.

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