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Knowledge and Security

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2016

Pierre Le Morvan
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Abstract

The central aim of this paper is to revive and refine an idea inspired by Plato, and to show how it can be developed into a plausible contemporary theory on which factive knowledge is secure true belief. In so doing, I disentangle two Platonic (or at least inspired by Plato) ideas: that knowledge is secure true belief, and that knowledge is true belief secured by a logos. I defend the former but not the latter. My defence involves distinguishing between alethic and doxastic security, and arguing for understanding factive knowledge in terms of both.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 91 , Issue 3 , July 2016 , pp. 411 - 430
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2016 

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References

1 Meno 97d–98a, in Dialogues of Plato (vol 1), translated by Benjamin Jowett, (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1875).

2 Ibid., 98a.

3 However, in Republic V–VII, Plato depicts Socrates as rejecting the notion that knowledge could be understood in terms of belief, for knowledge and belief have different objects: Forms (and necessary truths) in the case of knowledge, and (illusory) physical objects and imitations of them in the case of belief.

4 Factive or factual knowledge (knowing that p is true where p is some proposition) can be distinguished from objectual knowledge (knowing o where o is some thing or being), and procedural knowledge (knowing how to A where A is some activity).

5 However, those of a Williamsonian bent, who take factive knowledge to be unanalysable in terms of belief, will reject the first but not the second of these presuppositions. See Timothy Williamson's contemporary classic Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). For the purposes of this paper I must presuppose, rather than argue for, the analysability of factive knowledge in terms of belief. For critical discussion of the unanalysability thesis, see (among others) Aidan McGlynn, Knowledge First? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

6 Readers who reject the idea that beliefs about the future have truth-values may restrict the following discussion to contingent beliefs about the present.

7 Or to put it more precisely: reliable doxastic processes functioning reliably (a doxastic process that is generally reliable may be unreliable over a range of inputs and circumstances).

8 What has come to be known as safety and sensitivity can be seen as ways of characterizing alethic security. As Ernest Sosa distinguishes them: ‘a belief is safe iff it would be true if held, and sensitive iff it would not be held if false’. See ‘Reply to Keith DeRose’ in Ernest Sosa and His Critics, edited by John Greco, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 276. In general, the more safety and sensitivity a belief enjoys, the stronger its alethic security.

9 See ‘Epistemic Operators’ and ‘The Pragmatic Dimension of Knowledge’ in his Perception, Knowledge and Belief: Selected Essays (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

10 See ‘Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge’, The Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976), 771–791CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 ‘The Theory of Questions, Epistemic Powers, and the Indexical Theory of Knowledge’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy V (1980), 193–237Google Scholar.

12 ‘Skepticism, Relevant Alternatives, and Deductive Closure’, Philosophical Studies 29 (1976), 249–261CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Knowledge and Evidence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 247.

14 Ibid., 245.

15 Theory of Knowledge (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990), 163–164.