User:Dominic Mayers/sandbox/Notes on epistemology

This is work in progress to try to capture what is epistemology and improves Epistemology. At this stage, it is only a few notes on different aspects that are related to epistemology. My recent thoughts is that what is "central" in epistemology is far from being clear. Even the centrality of knowledge is questionned: some say it is understanding, not knowledge, that is central.

Epistemology as a branch of philosophy

William P. Alston wrote:

if anything is clear with respect to those portions of the work of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, and Reid—to mention a few—that have been treated in the twentieth century as contributions to epistemology, it is not only that they are intimately connected with cognitive psychology but that they are best classified as cognitive psychology, with the result that extensive surgery is required to extract those portions that we are inclined to regard as “pure” epistemology.

Main questions of epistemology

Brian C. Barnett wrote:

Epistemology—as traditionally construed—is the study of knowledge. Its name derives from the Greek epistémé, which translates as “knowledge” or “understanding.” This study includes four main questions:

• The What-Is-It Question: What is knowledge?
• The Justification Question: What makes a belief reasonable or rational or justified?
• The Source Question: What are the ultimate sources of knowledge (or justification)?
• The Scope Question: What, if anything, do (or can) we know?

John Greco wrote:

Epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, is driven by two main questions: "What is knowledge?" and "What can we know?" If we think we can know something, as nearly everyone does, then a third main question arises: "How do we know what we do know?" Most of what has been written in epistemology over the ages addresses at least one of these three questions.

Later, in a section entitled "Foundationalism and Coherentism", he wrote:

In Laurence BonJour's essay, the question "What is knowledge?" takes on a different dimension. The question becomes: "How must our total system of beliefs be structured in order for any of our beliefs to qualify as knowledge?" This question is closely related to Agrippa's Trilemma [...] BonJour's essay is divided into four main parts. First, he reviews the epistemic regress problem, or the problem of adequately grounding one's knowledge in good reasons. Second, he explores the foundationalist response to this problem. [...] Next BonJour considers the coherentist solution to the regress problem. This is the idea that reasons can be in a relationship of mutual support, so that an infinite number of reasons is avoided even though all knowledge must be backed up by good reasons. BonJour reviews some objections to coherentism and judges them to be fatal. [...] This inspires the final part of the essay, which is a reconsideration of foundationalism.

Alvin I. Goldman wrote:

Epistemics generally is my (partly ‘reforming’) conception of epistemology, with three main divisions: primary individual epistemics, secondary individual epistemics, and social epistemics. All three divisions seek to make evaluations in terms of veritistic ends, i.e., in terms of the effect on people getting truths and avoiding errors. The objects or targets of evaluation, however, differ from division to division. Primary epistemics studies the veritistic properties of basic psychological processes. Secondary epistemics assesses the veritistic properties of learnable problem-solving methods, such as mathematical proof techniques, carbon dating procedures, and the like. Social epistemics studies the veritistic properties of social practices, or institutional rules that directly or indirectly govern communication and doxastic decision. Judicial rules of evidence clearly fall in this last category.'

In the Introduction to a part entitled "Externalism and Internalism", Sven Bernecker and Fred Dretske wrote:

Four general lines of argument are commonly advanced in favour of externalism. [...(1)...] to ascribe knowledge to higher animals, small children, unsophisticated adults, and certain artificial cognitive devices. [...] the beliefs and inferences required by internalism about justification are too complicated to be plausibly ascribed to such subjects. [...(2)...] externalism [...] is a good way to naturalize epistemology (cf. Quine Chapter 20). It promises to be a way of eliminating normative language in epistemology—the language of rationality, justification, and so on—and substitute natural relations (causal, informational, etc.) [...(3)...] internalism has conspicuously failed to provide defensible, non-sceptical solutions to the classical problems of epistemology while externalism makes these problems easily solvable. Internalists, of course, think the externalist solution is much too easy. [...(4)...] externalism [...] yields answers to questions that otherwise remain puzzling. Why, for instance, can one know that P without knowing (or being justified in believing) that one knows it? Because, the externalist replies, knowledge has little or nothing to do with subjective justification; it is a matter of standing in the right relations to the facts.

Alvin I. Goldman with a more externalist view, wrote:

In the same vein it should be noted that I have made no attempt to answer skeptical problems. My analysis gives no answer to the skeptic who asks that I start from the content of my own experience and then prove that I know there is a material world, a past, etc. I do not take this to be one of the jobs of giving truth conditions for ‘S knows that p.’

The analysis presented here flies in the face of a well-established tradition in epistemology, the view that epistemological questions are questions of logic or justification, not causal or genetic questions. This traditional view, however, must not go unquestioned. Indeed, I think my analysis shows that the question of whether someone knows a certain proposition is, in part, a causal question, although, of course, the question of what the correct analysis is of “S knows that p’ is not a causal question.

Noah Lemos wrote:

Epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, is one of the cornerstones of analytic philosophy, and this book provides a clear and accessible introduction to the subject. It discusses some of the main theories of justification, including foundationalism, coherentism, reliabilism, and virtue epistemology. Other topics include the Gettier problem, internalism and externalism, skepticism, the problem of epistemic circularity, the problem of the criterion, a priori knowledge, and naturalized epistemology.

The main questions in the references given in Epistemology

The references are the entries Epistemology in the three encyclopedies SEP, IEP and Borchert.

In SEP, Steup, Matthias and Ram Neta wrote:

Defined narrowly, epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. As the study of knowledge, epistemology is concerned with the following questions: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge? What are its sources? What is its structure, and what are its limits? As the study of justified belief, epistemology aims to answer questions such as: How we are to understand the concept of justification? What makes justified beliefs justified? Is justification internal or external to one's own mind? Understood more broadly, epistemology is about issues having to do with the creation and dissemination of knowledge in particular areas of inquiry.

In IEP, David A. Truncellito wrote:

Epistemologists concern themselves with a number of tasks, which we might sort into two categories.

First, we must determine the nature of knowledge; that is, what does it mean to say that someone knows, or fails to know, something? This is a matter of understanding what knowledge is, and how to distinguish between cases in which someone knows something and cases in which someone does not know something. While there is some general agreement about some aspects of this issue, we shall see that this question is much more difficult than one might imagine.

Second, we must determine the extent of human knowledge; that is, how much do we, or can we, know? How can we use our reason, our senses, the testimony of others, and other resources to acquire knowledge? Are there limits to what we can know? For instance, are some things unknowable? Is it possible that we do not know nearl as much as we think we do? Should we have a legitimate worry about skepticism, the view that we do not or can- not know anything at all?

In the Borchert, Earl Conee and Richard Feldman wrote:

Epistemology attempts to explain the nature and scope of knowledge and rational belief. Its purview also includes formulating and assessing arguments for skeptical conclusions that we do not have knowledge of various kinds. In addition, epistemologists address topics that are closely related to these core concerns, including evaluations of thought processes and the relationship of science to philosophy.

On central concepts

Laurence Bonjour, while discussing Sosa's virtue epistemology, wrote:

Thus being epistemically justified will be at most only one way of being epistemically apt, and justification will cease to be the central concept of epistemology.

Brian C. Barnett wrote:

Knowledge is the central concept of traditional epistemology. But what is knowledge? This is the most basic question about the central concept, and so the appropriate starting place. Answers traditionally come in the form of conceptual analysis: a set of more basic concepts out of which the analyzed concept is built, arranged to form a definition.

and later

Returning to Plato’s footsteps, it may be more promising to seek what distinguishes true belief from knowledge—a TB+ account. As Alvin Plantinga defined the term, warrant is that “elusive quality or quantity enough of which, together with truth and belief, is sufficient for knowledge” (1993, v).

and again later :

Fast-forward several decades. Thousands of pages of ink have been spilled on the fourth condition, warrant, veritic luck, the knowledge-yielding virtues, and so forth. Some believe they have the solution. Others continue to pursue new solutions. Perhaps you will be the one to find it! For now, there’s no agreed-upon answer. We live in a post-Gettier age: the problem no longer occupies center stage. Still, it inspired what came next.
In the aftermath, some epistemologists came to suspect that knowledge is not subject to analysis—that no component can be added to (J)TB to get knowledge (Zagzebski 1994). If true, this doesn’t render knowledge mysterious. Some concepts are basic, and perhaps knowledge is one of them. Yes, knowledge may entail JTB, but this does not mean it can be divvied into neat chunks that seamlessly reassemble without remainder. This gave birth to knowledge-first epistemology, advocated most prominently by Timothy Williamson (2000).

Eric Schwitzgebel wrote:

To be a human thinker or rational agent is, in part, to regard the world and the things in it as having certain features. Believing is just this aspect of being a thinker or agent. Belief is thus a central concept in epistemology. Standard epistemological accounts of knowledge treat knowledge as a species of belief—justified true beliefs, perhaps, or justified true beliefs that meet some further conditions.

In the context of Bayesian epistemology, Stephan Hartmann and Jan Sprenger wrote:

A central concept in modern epistemology and modern science is evidence. Something is evidence for a proposition or a scientific theory A, something makes us believe that A, etc. Philosophy of science has, over the past decades, exploited the probabilistic machinery to explicate what it means that a scientific theory is confirmed or under- mined. Although this debate mainly took place in philosophy of science journals, it is obviously significant for epistemology: probabilistic confirmation renders a theory more credible, in other words, it is evidence for the theory, and evidence is, in turn, central to justifications and reasons.

John Pollock and Joseph Cruz wrote:

Furthermore, it is not satisfactory to leave the central concept of epistemology unanalyzed. Only by providing some sort of analysis or clarification of the concept can we ultimately resolve these disputes. Unfortunately, providing such an analysis has proven to be a very hard problem. Most epistemologists have remained mute on the subject, not because they have no interest in it but because they have no answers to propose. The only epistemologists to propose analyses have been the externalists,

In the context of Bayesian Epistemology, Alan Hajek and Stephan Hartmann wrote (expressing caveats with their approach):

Caveats: When we speak of “traditional epistemology”, we lump together a plethora of positions as if they form a monolithic whole. Other articles in this volume distinguish carefully among various positions that our broad banner conflates. For our purposes, they start out regarding knowledge and belief as the central concepts of epistemology, and then to go on to study the properties, grounds, and limits of these binary notions. We also speak of “Bayesianism” as if it is a unified school of thought, when in fact there are numerous intra-mural disputes.

978-2-8399-1562-5

Review of Liber Amicorum Pascal Engel

I will not review all the articles in this book, but only those that seems related to epistemology or at the least written by an author that is often cited in epistemology oriented papers.

Common Sense and Skepticism : A Lecture by Keith Lehrer

Lehrer is known among epistemologists as one of the best proponents of a coherence theory of knowledge, but his contribution in the book is more about Thomas Reid and his theory of common sense, which is also an area of interest for Lehrer. I will not go into much details. Essentially, Lehrer argues that we must trust our faculties, in particular, our faculty of perception. He goes into a theory of exemplars to make sense of Moore's argument that waving hands is a "proof" that they exist.

Engel on pragmatic encroachment and epistemic value by Duncan Pritchard

Pragmatic encroachment is the rejection of what Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath describes as epistemological purism:

two subjects alike with respect to their strength of epistemic position with respect to p are alike with respect to whether they know that p (or at least with respect to whether they are in a position to know that p). (Fantl & McGrath 2010, 562 ; Cf. Fantl & McGrath 2007, 558)

Pritchard argues (and says he follows Engel here) that intuitive arguments in support of pragmatic encroachment are misleading. He also says

provided we are clear about the manner in which pragmatic factors can confer value on knowledge, then one can accept this claim without it having any bearing at all on whether epistemological purism is true.

Anyway, after having read quickly the article, it seems to be an argument that non epistemic factors can influence epistemic factors, but this does not imply that knowledge is not entirely determined by these epistemic factors and therefore epistemic purism still hold, even though non epistemic factors can influence knowledge.

Epistemology and views on knowledge

The view on knowledge as a subject of study in philosophy changed over times. Pierre Wagner says science had a different meaning, something close to "sagesse", before Lock. That was the highest kind of knowledge for philosophers. The word science has a different meaning today, but still before the mid 20th century scientific knowledge in opposition to ordinary knowledge was the studied knowledge, the one that needs investigation, etc. Knowledge in philosophy was identified with scientific knowledge or moral knowledge. Clearly, what is epistemology, if we define it as the theory of knowledge, changed over time. Let us focus on views after the start of the 19th century, because before that Erkenntnistheorie, which is the ancestor of epistemology, was not even a branch of philosophy.

Emiliano Trizio wrote:

Common-sense knowledge is not exempt from quinean holism, nor are those sciences, such as zoology or botany that are (or we should say were at the time of Duhem) mainly based on common-sense observations. Indeed the crucial divergence between Duhem and Quine lies in their opposite views concerning the relationship between science and common-sense knowledge: Duhem would firmly reject Quine’s gradualism on this issue:
Science is a continuation of common sense
We are working up our science from infancy onward.

Review of Thomasson's Phenomenology and the Development of Analytic Philosophy

it is likely that a better comprehension of the link between continental and analytic philosophy will shade some light on the birth or renaissance of epistemology. This should complete Floridi's account of this renaissance. Here is a passage in Thomasson's Phenomenology and the Development of Analytic Philosophy. We know Ryle for his distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that. This is a part of Ryles's larger program of finding a method for philosophy. He wrote (p. 117):

The central problem around which Ryle’s philosophical work focuses is the problem of what constitutes the proper role for and method of philosophy, or as he puts it “What constitutes a philosophical problem; and what is the way to solve it?” (1970, 12). In this, of course, Ryle was not alone—the attempt to discern the legitimate role of philosophy in the face of modern experimental science directed the development of such major twentieth century schools as positivism, analytic philosophy, and (as I shall discuss shortly) phenomenology. Indeed Ryle reports addressing this question as a major preoccupation for him and his contemporaries throughout the 1920s and ’30s, “We philosophers were in for a near-lifetime of enquiry into our own title to be enquirers” (1970, 10).

and (p.119)

As Ryle himself tells the historical story, the eighteenth and nineteenth century answer given to the question of philosophy’s role, given the development of the experimental natural sciences, was that philosophy was simply that branch of natural science dealing with “internal, mental phenomena” as opposed to that dealing with “external, physical phenomena” (1971b, 366)-that is, philosophy was considered to be more or less a study of psychology, and as a result, the traditional fields of mathematics, logic, and metaphysics were characterized as merely providing studies of empirical psychological laws.

and (p.119)

What Brentano calls “genetic psychology” or “physiological psychology” is the empirical study of mental phenomena, based in experimentation

and statistical methods, from which we can search for laws and causes. By contrast, what he calls “descriptive psychology,” “pure psychology,” “descriptive phenomenology,” or “psychognosy” is concerned not with a search for laws of cause and effect, nor (as the name might suggest) with describing particular psycho-

logical episodes but rather with analyzing the fundamental types of mental phenomena in order to determine their general characteristics. In several series of lectures over the two

and (p. 121)

Approaching the mind by analyzing the very concepts of certain types of mental states or events is precisely and self-consciously the approach Ryle adopts in The Concept of Mind and continues to pursue in his studies of thinking later in his career.

and (p.123)

Ryle’s answer remained as one of the enduring views of the proper role for philosophy and was to influence generations of later philosophers united in the dedication to “analytical” philosophy. Thus the very idea of what philosophy is that helped form analytic philosophy as a school and give it its name derived from attempts by early phenomenologists to distinguish philosophy from empirical psychology.

To be continued, because how Ryle saw a solution to skepticism in his externalist view is important.

History of knowledges, the plural

Floridi notes that Sir William Hamilton wrote:

Knowledges, in common use with Bacon and our English philosophers [...] ought not to be discarded. It is however unnoticed by any English Lexicographer.

Peter Burke wrote:

What is knowledge? Are we or should we be trying to write the history of information, erudition, science, or wisdom? All these things, surely—and there is a case for adding the term “prudence” to the list—whether we are thinking about ancient Greece, when Aristotle discussed phronesis, about the sixteenth century, when the humanist Justus Lipsius viewed prudentia as a major goal of educational travel, or about our own time, when Bent Flyvberg argues that “applied phronesis” is the goal of what he calls “real social science.”3 Historians have made various choices related to the culture they come from. North Americans, for example, living in a culture of pragmatism, prefer the term information.4 The German tradition emphasizes Wissenschaft, not so much “science” as academic knowledge in general, formerly known as Gelahrtheit.5 Hence, I heartily agree with Marwa Elshakry’s rejection of a “singular” history of knowledge, preferring the idea of “knowledges” in the plural—shorthand for what are variously called orders of knowledge, systems of knowledge, cultures of knowledge, communities of knowledge, or savoirs-mondes.

Knowledge by acquaintance

Thomas Vinci wrote: "Russell offers sense-data and universals as examples of things known by acquaintance."

Recollection and genetic epistemology in Floridi

Floridi seems to have a deep analysis of the different problems about knowledge and as a part of that analysis he mentions recollection:

Plato's theory of recollection, however, is a good example of a Genetic theory of knowing. And it might be argued that Hegel and Dewey had Genetic epistemologies (if Hegel can be said to have had a clear epistemology at all).

Kant and its contemporary metaphysics

Pierre Kerszberg wrote:

Kant claims that philosophy can be interpreted as the upshot of an interrogation which originally passed beyond the human condition. This original interrogation was theological, and it is only when this inter- rogation was de-theologized that it earned the name of metaphysics (KrV, A 853/B 881). Now, this transformation was responsible for the fall of thought into a series of embedded inextricable dilemmas: is the highest reality accessible through the senses or through the understanding? Does knowledge originate in sensible experience or in the ideas? From the beginning there was no way of making a final decision between the two opposite sides of each question.

Review of Floridi's The Renaissance of epistemology

Floridi covers the perspective of many philosophers. The review presents these views together with general points.

Introduction

In the introduction, Floridi presents epistemology as the outcome of a reaction against idealism in favor of an anti-metaphysical and naturalist approach: "At the turn of the [20th] century there had been a resurgence of interest in epistemology through an anti-metaphysical, naturalist, reaction against the nineteenth-century development of Neo-Kantian and Neo-Hegelian idealism." Floridi says this reaction is seen in Hermann von Helmholtz, G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, William James and C.S. Peirce

• Helmholtz (1821 – 1894) scientifically reinterpreted Kant in Franz Brentano's (1838 – 1917) phenomenology and Ernst Mach's (1838–1916) neutral monism, says Floridi.

  SEP on Brentano says : "A central principle of Brentano’s philosophy [...] was that philosophy should be done in a rigorous, scientific manner." This seems to explain why Floridi says it was a scientific reinterpretation. The SEP article adds that Brentano stated:

  “Mathematical analysis, which is the main means of scientific progress in some areas of natural science, does not play nearly any role at all in others.”

  The SEP article says also that Brentano argued that the right procedure [in psychology] consisted in observing and describing the relevant phenomena and establishing the general laws on the basis of induction. The article continues : the particularity of Brentano’s method lies in the fact that psychology is based mainly on observation that is performed from a first person point of view. The phenomenology of Brentano, mentioned in Floridi's statement, is described as follows in the SEP article :

  Descriptive psychology (to which Brentano sometimes also referred as “phenomenology” (cf. DP 137)) aims at describing consciousness from a first-person point of view. Its goal is to list “fully the basic components out of which everything internally perceived by humans is composed, and … [to enumerate] the ways in which these components can be connected”

  The central aspect of Brentano's descriptive psychology or phenomenology is the notion of intentionality and of intentional object. The intentional object exists in the mental. So, interestingly, Brentano had an idealistic side. One can say that he was a realist, because he believed in objective objects besides the intentional objects, but the link between them was not understood by his students, in particular Husserl.

• G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, in the British philosophy, rebutted Hegelianism.
• William James and C. S. Peirce, in America, proposed a new pragmatist epistemology that directed attention away from the traditional a priori and toward the natural sciences.

It is in the introduction that Floridi says that "The interwar renaissance of epistemology, however, was not just a continuation of this emancipation from idealism. It was also prompted by major advances in mathematics, logic, and physics which engendered new methodological concerns (as in the influential tradition of French philosophers of science: Duhem, Poincaré, Bachelard).

The two faces of skepticism

It starts by stating two questions. K : Is knowledge possible ? KK : Is an epistemology that answers K possible ? Floridi suggests the intuitive image that K is a bottom-up question whereas KK is a top-down question. Floridi says "But one can never be in a position to establish an answer to (K) if no satisfactory reply to (KK) can be provided. Questioning the possibility of epistemology rests on the problem of the criterion (Sextus Empiricus 1976: II.2) [...]’. The problem of the criterion is discussed by Cling. Next, Floridi discusses Husserl's view.

• The view point of Floridi is that Husserl, strongly influenced by the notion of intentionality of Brentano, his teacher, criticised naturalism and concluded that "the only correct way of dealing with K is by means of principled and convincing arguments".

The natural question is what is the link between the sceptic argument, Husserl's view and anti-naturalism. Dan Zahavi presents Husserl's anti-naturalism as seen by Roy, Petitot, Pachoud, and Varela.

Husserl distinguished two types of eidetic sciences, an axiomatic type and a descriptive type. The descriptive type deals with non-exact, vague, or morphological essences, whereas the axiomatic type deals with exact essences. When it comes to subjectivity and the investigation of experiential structures, Husserl was emphatic about the fact that lived experiences belong to the domain of vague essences. And according to Roy et al. (1999), Husserl’s anti-naturalism was closely linked to his rejection of the possibility of developing a mathematical description or reconstruction of the vague, morphological, essences. Despite his own background in mathematics, Husserl had been convinced that mathematics was only of limited usefulness for phenomenology.

— Dan Zahavi

Zahavi also presents Evan Thompson's adaptation of Husserl's view to progress in science.

Thompson emphasizes that the naturalism he favours is of a non-reductive kind; indeed one of his points is precisely that phenomenology and biology are on equal footing. He also argues that our best contemporary scientific understanding of (physical and biological) nature differs rather markedly from the view that Husserl was criticizing—nature is no longer seen simply as an assemblage of externally juxtaposed objects—and that part of Husserl’s motive for embracing anti-naturalism has for this reason simply been superseded by more recent developments in science (Thompson 2007:357).

— Dan Zahavi

So, again, what is the link between the sceptic argument, Husserl's view and anti-naturalism? I have the vague impression that Floridi's point is that it is a fallacy to claim that the sceptic argument leads us to an idealistic view with, say Hegel's dialectic or Husserl's phenomenology, as the methodology to bring knowledge. But, it would also be a fallacy to claim that it leads to naturalism with the scientific methodology as the way to gain knowledge. Besides, I do not see a fundamental distinction between the scientific methodology and dialectic or phenomenology in the following sense that in all three cases we have no clue why it works. In all three cases, to explain why it works, we need strong meta-physical assumptions. I must grant, however, that today's way to gain knowledge is science. So, it's natural to replace dialectic or phenomenology by the scientific method, but it's the same meta-physical and epistemological pattern and the sceptical argument leads us to this pattern, either in the form of a dialectical, phenomenological or scientific methodology. More to the point, Hegel believes, [...] his dialectical method [is] genuinely scientific. As he says, “the dialectical constitutes the moving soul of scientific progression”. A similar statement can be found for Husserl's phenomenology. This is bad news for our objective to explain the scope of epistemology as covered in the Wikipedia article: unless a specific form of naturalism is considered, it's not so much the naturalistic approach that explains this scope, because the response to the eternal sceptic argument has always been a form a scientific methodology that supposedly explains how knowledge is gained.

Parentheses

Regarding Kant's view on appearances versus reality

Kant believed that, by means of the “first antinomy of pure reason,” he had demonstrated the proposition (a) that nothing whatever exists in time—that no two things are such that one precedes or comes before the other. [...] in time. He conceded, however, (b) that there are things which appear to exist in time—that some things appear to precede or come before others. And he took (b) to imply (c) that appearances of things do exist in time. Time, together with space, he said, constitutes the “form of intuition”—the way in which we must sense appearances: this form, according to Kant, “is not to be looked for in the object in itself but in the subject to which the object appears; nevertheless it belongs really and necessarily to the appearance of this object.” * Kant did not notice, apparently, that his propositions (a) and (c) are contradictory.

— Roderick M. Chisholm, Perceiving: A Philosophical Study

A complement to Floridi

Martin Curd and Stathis Psillos wrote:

This project of conceiving the philosophy of science as the logic of science culminated, in the 1950s, in Rudolf Carnap’s construction of a formal system of inductive logic and in Carl Hempel’s deductive-nomological model of explanation. Though Karl Popper put forward a different conception of scientific method, based on the falsifiability of scientific hypotheses and the rejection of inductivism, Popper’s critical rationalism shared with logical positivism the hostility to psychologism and the view that philosophy of science is, by and large, a normative enterprise. Before the 1960s, philosophy of science had become synonymous with anti-psychologism, anti-historicism, and anti-naturalism.
This conception of philosophy of science was strongly challenged by three important and influential thinkers. First, W. V. Quine rejected the analytic-synthetic distinction that lay at the heart of the logical positivist approach. [...] Second, Wilfrid Sellars attacked instrumentalism (the view that scientific theories are merely instruments for classifying, summarizing, and predicting observable phenomena) and defended scientific realism. [...] Finally, Thomas Kuhn argued that any adequate understanding of science should pay serious attention to the actual history of science (as opposed to the “rational reconstructions” concocted by philosophers of science as an idealized substitute).

— Martin Curd and Stathis Psillos, Introduction in Martin Curd and Stathis Psillos, The Routledge companion to philosophy of science.

A parenthesis about the scepticism of Sextus

Sextus describes scepticism as a “philosophy” and a “way of life”, identifying both a theoretical and an anti-theoretical practical component in Pyrrhonian scepticism. The appearance of paradox is genuine, for the sceptic engages in theoretical reasoning in order finally to do away with it. [...] The sceptic himself, Sextus says, initially set out to determine the truth or falsity of his impressions of things in an effort to attain ataraxia, the tranquil and untroubled state of mind put forth as the end (telos) of scepticism (see ATARAXIA). But instead he found himself confronted with contradictory appearances and arguments of equal weight and credibility (see ISOSTHENEIA). Unable to decide between them, he adopted a neutral attitude, suspending judgement about their truth or falsity (epoche), and found “as if by chance” that ataraxia followed “as a shadow follows its object” (Outlines, I 26).

— Charlotte Stough, Sextus Empiricus in Jonathan Dancy, Ernest Sosa, and Matthias Steup (eds), A Companion to Epistemology

Definition of naturalism

Here is a description of naturalism.

Naturalism in the philosophy of science. and philosophy generally. is more an overall approach to the subject than a set of specific doctrines. In philosophy it may be characterized only by the most general ontological and epistemological principles, and then more by what it opposes than by what it proposes.

Ontologically. naturalism implies the rejection of supernaturalism. Traditionally this has meant primarily the rejection of any deity, such as the Judea-Christian God, which stands outside nature as creator or actor. Positively, naturalists hold that reality, including human life and society, is exhausted by what exists in the causal order of nature. Some naturalists have embraced materialism, while others have struggled to avoid it.

Epistemologically, naturalism implies the rejection of all forms of a priori knowledge, including that of higher-level principles of epistemic validation. Positively, naturalists claim that all knowledge derives from human interactions with the natural world. This includes sense perception, but may also include both techniques and technologies of human origin, such as statistical hypothesis testing and microscopes.

— Ronald N. Giere, Naturalism in A Companion to the Philosophy of Science

A parenthesis about naturalism and the analytic turn

Since Euclid, the conception of mathematical proof had been the deduction of theorems by logically transparent steps from self-evident axioms, but in the late nineteenth century, radical progress in mathematics transformed the discipline to such a degree that the search for foundations arose with a new urgency (Mehrtens 1990). One response to this had been that of Frege’s program of “logicism”—the attempt to find the certain foundations for mathematics in logic itself. [...] In short, “naturalism” was far from being an obvious self-conception of analytic philosophy at the time of its origins, and the route to a naturalistic version of it might not be expected to have been either straight or smooth.

— Paul Redding

A parenthesis about naturalism and the fact/value distinction

The fact/value distinction (anti-naturalism) assumes, against the naturalist, that there is some logical gap between fact and evaluation – between “is” and “ought.” Evaluations go beyond the natural facts. And, in the subjectivist version, they require a contribution from the subject. If so, evaluative judgments, unlike factual ones, are not wholly responsible to the world, and evaluative argument may break down in a way that factual argument cannot: two opponents may agree about all the facts, and yet commit their will differently and so be left in a bare opposition of will or attitude, without any rational error (see ANSCOMBE).

— Gavin Lawrence, Philippa Foot (1920– ) in Blackwell Companions to Philosophy: A Companion to Analytic Philosophy

A parenthesis about naturalism in Hume and Kant

There might be a lot to say on the subject. Here, I simply present a short quote from Ilya Kasavin and Evgeny Blinov about a chapter of Heiner Klemme in a book that Ilya Kasavin edited.

Alisdair MacIntyre in his highly influential work “After virtue” suggests that Hume’s and Kant's critique prevents contemporary philosophers from treating moral judgments as “factual statements.” For Klemme it is an occasion to revisit Humean naturalism as well as Kantian supra-naturalism ...

— Ilya Kasavin and Evgeny Blinov, Introduction in David Hume and Contemporary Philosophy

A parenthesis about social sciences vs natural sciences

Keat and Urry indicate (1982:142-3) that their defence of a realist scientific approach to the study of social reality commits them to a 'naturalist' position which advocates the methodological unity of the natural and social sciences. [...] They recognise (1982:143) that one of the objections against the adoption of a 'naturalist' position is the claim that such a position is unable to make provision for the study of meanings in social life. [...] Keat and Urry suggest (1982: 142-3) that in order to defend their (realist) 'naturalism' against the claims of 'anti-naturalism', it is necessary to consider the realist approach to meanings in social life.

— Norma R. A. Romm

A parenthesis about the law of contradiction

Given Brentano's conception of logic as the doctrine of correct judgment and his insistence that this practical discipline is derived from the psychology of judgment, the question arises as to how he understands the laws of logic. If these were laws about judgments, then they would apparently have to do with limitations on the judgments we can make. The law of contradiction, for instance, would tell us "that the appearance of any positive mode of consciousness cannot occur without excluding a correlative negative mode; and that the negative mode cannot occur without excluding the corrclative positive mode". Accordingly it would be impossible for an affirmation and the corresponding negation to occur simultaneously in the same consciousness. Such a formulation of the law of contradiction and of the laws of logic is however not the one accepted by Brentano. He points out that there are, after all, philosophers such as Hegel and (to a more limited extent) Trendelenburg (Brentano's own mentor) who deny the law of contradiction and are indeed eager to point out concrete examples where contradictions obtain.

— Robin D. Rollinger

Anti-naturalism and the foundational problem in German-speaking philosophy

The section first says that Kant's a priori approach is not a "justification" for scientific knowledge, despite Kant's claim, and that Kant did not consider the possibility of an epistemology, a theory that could answer the question of the possibility of knowledge. It continues "In 1807, the Kantian philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries addressed this issue in his Neue oder anthropologische Kritik der Vernunft." This is the well known Fries's trilemma, which the section briefly explains. It says that in the 1910s and 1920s there was a Fries's renaissance, particularly in the work of Leonard Nelson.

• Nelson (1882-1927) was a German Philosopher. In his 1912 address "Die Unmoglichkeit der Erkenntnistheorie" (The Impossibility of "The Theory of Knowledge"), after having argued for the impossibility of a theory of knowledge he said

  There is no contradiction in the assumption that a cognition that does not arise from reflection reaches our consciousness only through the mediation of reflection. Immediacy of cognition and immediacy of consciousness of the cognition are logically two different things. The illusion of the logical completeness of the disjunction between reflection and intuition as sources of knowledge arises only as a result of the confusion of these two concepts, in other words, as a result of the false conclusion of the immediacy of consciousness from the immediacy of cognition.

  — Leonard Nelson

  Floridi says that "Drawing on Fries’s analysis, Nelson came to object to the entire project of an epistemology in the Cartesian, antisceptical, and justificatory sense, and to favour a more descriptive and psychologistic approach (Nelson 1930, 1965)." My understanding is that Nelson used a skeptical argument, not against knowledge, but against a view on knowledge. The above quote gives an idea of his view on knowledge, which he says is robust against this skeptical attack, not that we cannot doubt its explanatory value.

Floridi continues on Nelson and says "Despite his criticism of foundational debates, Nelson’s ‘naturalised epistemology’ contributed greatly to reawakening philosophers’ interest in the foundational issue in the late 1920s and early 1930s. One philosopher especially influenced by his work was Moritz Schlick."

• Schlick, says Floridi, endorsed the Cartesian requirement that there be an absolutely certain foundation of knowledge. He also accepted that it was ‘self-evident that the problem of the foundation of all knowledge is nothing else but the question of the criterion of truth’ (Schlick 1979: II, 374) and supported a correspondence theory of truth. ... So he came to defend a foundationalism according to which there are objective facts, external to the knower’s doxastic states, that are accessible by the knower and capable of justifying the knower’s beliefs in a way that is sufficient for knowledge. He had a theory of protocol propositions (basic statements) and more senses related ‘affirmations’ (Konstatierungen) (used to test the basic statements) that constituted the empirical basis of science.

It appeared to critics such as Otto Neurath similar to a philosophy of intuition; they argued that it was beset with solipsistic difficulties and contained unacceptable metaphysical theses.

• Neurath's approach is that the epistemic justification of science was not to be achieved by means of an appeal to external facts or alleged intuitions, but internally, through logical coherence (which did not necessarily exclude some ordering relations), instrumental economy, pragmatic considerations of social and scientific ends, a rational use of conventions by the scientific community, and a constantly open and public debate. Following Duhem, Neurath argued that, given an apparently successful theory, rival explanations can be made to fit the same evidence that supports it, and that in replacing or revising a theory, hypotheses and observation statements come under scrutiny as whole networks, not individually. Practical expedience rather than absolute truth was determinant. Floridi continues : Neurath summarised his position in a famous analogy: ‘We are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship [the system of knowledge] on the open sea, without ever being able to dismantle it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from its best components’ (Neurath 1983: 92).

Though, Floridi does not go into it, I found useful to read Zolo's Neurath versus Popper, because they seem to have similar positions. For example, Popper's swamp metaphor is very much like Neurath's ship metaphor. It is interesting that the first distinction that Zolo mentions is related to the fact that Popper saw the empirical basis as a part of objective knowledge. Neurath criticized Popper on that respect. Zolo writes "Still more significantly, Popper had ignored the relationship between a language and the individual users of it. This had led to his failure to recognise the historical variability and pluralism of scientific languages and to his supposition of the existence of a universal, semantically pure, scientific language."

An obscure paragraph

The following paragraph in Floridi's paper is obscure to me.

[Regarding the ship metaphor,] Hegel had stressed a similar point: ‘the examination of knowledge can only be carried out by an act of knowledge. To examine this so-called instrument is the same thing as to know it. But to seek to know before we know [i.e. Kant’s critical project] is as absurd as the wise resolution of Scholasticus, not to venture into the water until he had learned to swim’ (Hegel 1830 [1975: 14]). This was not the only similarity between Neurath’s and Hegel’s coherentism. A direct consequence of the former’s holistic and non-subjectivist ‘pan-internalism’ was a strong tendency towards a unified and synoptic approach to the entire domain of human knowledge. This ‘epistemological totalitarianism’ was a feature shared by other approaches to the foundational problem, such as Hilbert’s and Cassirer’s, which were similarly suspicious of the Cartesian subjective turn, though favourable to Kantian constructionism rather than pure coherentism.

He seems to interpret the metaphor and what it expresses as a part of coherentism, because he describes it as a point common to both Neurath's and Hegel's coherentism. Also, I believe that "former’s holistic and non-subjectivist ‘pan-internalism’" refers to Hegel's view, but he does not describe it here, unless he refers to Hegel's position just stated as being similar to Neurath's view. He had a similar statement in chapter 6 of Logic of Information. It makes sense to assume that Floridi refers to Hegel, because just after he says "In Neurath, this tendency was reflected in his project for an International Encyclopedia of Unified Science (1938–70)." If my understanding is correct, Floridi puts coherentism in the same boat as Cartesian foundationalism and Kantian reconstructionism : forms of "epistemological totalitarianism".

End of obscure paragraph—continuing

Ok, enough about that obscure paragraph, Floridi says Schlick, who was presented earlier, was firmly hostile to Neurath’s coherentism.

• Schlick's view is that, if epistemic statements are not based on a specific set of more basic protocol propositions ultimately rooted in sense-experience of the world, all propositions may be regarded as in principle corrigible and their truth can only consist in their mutual agreement within the system of knowledge. Schick argued that such coherence provides too little – truth can be equated to logical consistency only in a formal system but not in an empirical science, since a coherent tale may otherwise become as acceptable as a scientific fact. Moreover, the absence of coherence leaves it utterly unclear what propositions may need to be revised, eliminated, or adjusted, and how.

The section ends with "Neurath’s coherentism found an ally in the pragmatist movement, which was equally anti-Cartesian. Quine’s fallibilist and holistic, naturalised epistemology can be interpreted as its latest development (Quine 1969, 1992). Another philosopher deeply influenced by the ‘Fries Renaissance’ was Popper (Popper 1962, 1979). He mentions the influence of Popper.

Coherentism, naturalism, and the refutation of scepticism in British philosophy

The first sentence

The section begins by going back to the previous section. The sentence "Coherentism in epistemology is a natural ally of anti-realism in ontology, ..." is interesting. I find it interesting, because the previous section is a lot about coherentism and, among other things, says that Neurath was opposed to Schilk's Cartesian search for a solid foundation and found an ally in the pragmatist movement, which was equally anti-Cartesian. Schilk's Cartesian search for a solid foundation does not refer to the specific approach used by Descartes : Schilk used a special notion of "objective facts, external to the knower’s doxastic states, that are accessible by the knower and capable of justifying the knower’s beliefs in a way that is sufficient for knowledge." That was not Descartes's approach. Anti-Cartesian should be understood in the same way, in reference to a search for a solid bed rock foundation. The point is that coherentism, as seen by Neurath, is against any thing shaky such as a supposedly existing solid foundation, but in doing so it also rejects realism as being pointless and metaphysical. It is interesting, because realists see this external reality in the opposite way.

This interesting sentence continues " ... and both [coherentism in epistemology and anti-realism in ontology] find a fertile environment in idealistic philosophies, whose claims about the contradictory nature of appearances in defence of a monistic supra-naturalism may easily make use of the sceptic’s dualist anti-naturalism (Hegel 1802)." To help interpret this second part of the sentence, here is the definition of supranaturalism in webster913.com : The state of being supernatural; belief in supernatural agency or revelation; supernaturalism. That second part of the sentence refers to Hegel's idealism. The overall sentence says that not asking for epistemic foundation allows one not to ask for realism and both find support in idealism, but what it says about idealistic philosophies after, starting with "whose claims about the contradictory nature of appearances", is obscure.

Hentrup says that it is in the source given, (Hegel 1802), that "engaging with G.E. Schulze’s Neo-Humean challenge to Kant’s critical project, that Hegel first develops the link between skepticism and negativity, finding that “skepticism is in its inmost heart at one with every true philosophy”". What is this dualist anti-naturalism of the sceptic that Hegel seems to make use of? Well, I read what Hentrup wrote about Hegel's 1802 paper and I found no clue what it could be. This quote illustrates the difficulty

First let us reconsider the debate about naturalism amongst contemporary interpreters of Hegel. Some, notably including Frederick Beiser, see Hegel and the German idealists as naturalists while others, including Sebastian Gardner, see Hegel and the idealists as anti-naturalists. On inspection, the nature of this interpretive division will turn out to be more nuanced than it initially appears. This points us towards a less polarised way of considering how Hegel stands vis-a-vis naturalism.
[...] That is: naturalism has various strands, so that any particular philosopher might incline towards naturalism along one or several strands of the cluster but not others. Spicer includes the following strands, amongst others: 1. Rejection of the idea of first philosophy; 2. Belief that philosophy is continuous with the sciences; 3. Disbelief in supernatural entities/processes; 4. Physicalism about the mind; 5. Opposition to non-naturalism about ethics/values; 6. Rejection of a priorism. If a philosopher can incline towards naturalism along some strands of the cluster but not others, then how naturalistic or anti-naturalistic a philosophy is is not an absolute matter but one of degree.

— Alison Stone

This point of view of Dan Zahavi might also give a context :

Thus, whereas one around 1980 might have been inclined to characterize the development of twentieth-century philosophy in terms of a linguistic turn, from a philosophy of subjectivity to a philosophy of language, it might today be more apt to describe the development in terms of a turn from anti-naturalism to naturalism.
According to some readings, a commitment to naturalism simply amounts to taking one’s departure in what is natural (rather than supernatural or spooky), but generally speaking, the use of the term in the current discourse is far more narrow, and indicates an alignment with the natural sciences.
[...] Insofar as naturalists would consider the scientific account of reality authoritative, a commitment to naturalism is bound to put pressure on the idea that philosophy (including phenomenology) can make a distinctive contribution to the study of reality.

— Dan Zahavi

Idealism in coherentism

During the post-First World War period the most interesting and influential idealist epistemology remained that of F. H. Bradley (Bradley 1914, 1922, 1930). [...] The kind of holistic coherence involved here that Bradley and his friend Bernard Bosanquet (1920) seemed to have in mind, and that was further refined by J. J. Joachim (1939) and Brand Blanshard (1939), is richer than Neurath’s mere logical consistency. It can be compared to the web of internal, reciprocal relations linking a set of words in a complex crossword, or a set of pieces in a puzzle: each truth is meant to interlock, meaningfully and uniquely, with the other components to constitute the whole, final system.

— Floridi

Conceding something to the sceptics

The reaction against idealism amongst British philosophers had been motivated in part by scepticism concerning these metaphysical commitments (e.g. internal relations and organic wholes). [...] Against the sceptical position, Moore held that there are many commonsensical beliefs that everyone is naturally inclined to hold and that are endorsed upon reflection by all. These beliefs have the highest (a) presumptive and (b) pervasive credibility. [...] We are perfectly entitled to start by accepting [some beliefs] as being prima facie epistemically justified, leaving to the sceptic the hard task of showing that, on the whole, there are better reasons to believe that not-p rather than p. Their pervasive credibility means that the sceptic’s claims are incoherent. The denial of p’s credibility presupposes p itself or a system of credible ps. [...] Moore’s antisceptical strategy rested on an inadequate, if influential, assessment of scepticism. Ancient sceptics themselves had already disposed of (b) (Sextus Empiricus 1976: II, 144–203). Scepticism is not a doctrine but a process of immanent criticism that gradually rots away Neurath’s ship from within. As for (a), it could not be employed against the sceptic without presupposing an antisceptical answer to (K) and hence begging the question.

— Floridi

List of common authors

In epistemology as theory of justified true belief

• SEP : Epistemology in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• IEP : Epistemology in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Bor : Conee and Feldman, Epistemology in Borchert, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• BD : Sven Bernecker (Editor), Fred I. Dretske (Editor), Knowledge: Readings in Contemporary Epistemology
• Res : Rescher, Nicholas, Epistemology an introduction to the theory of knowledge.
• Bon : Bonjour, Laurence, Epistemology : Classic Problems and Contemporary Response
• Lam : Lammenranta, Markus, Theories of Justification in Handbook of Epistemology
• Sho : Shope, Robert K., Analysis of knowing in Handbook of Epistemology

In other aspects of epistemology

• SSF : Richard Samuels, Stephen Stich, AND Luc Faucher, Reason and Rationality in Handbook of Epistemology
• Bri : Avrum Stroll, Epistemololy in www.Britannica.com

Authors in epistemology as theory of justifified and/or true belief

Name	SEP	IEP	Bor	BD	Res	Bon	Lam	Sho	??	SSF	Bri	??
Alston, William	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	N	-	N	N
Antognazzia, Maria Rosa	N	N	N	N	N	N	N	N	-	N	N
Armstrong, David	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	N	N	-	N	N
Ayer, A. J	N	N	N	Y			N	Y	-	N	Y
Bach, Kent	N	N	N	Y			N	N	-	N	N
Barwise, Jon	N	N	N	Y			N	N	-	N	N
Bennett, Jonathan	N	N	Y	Y	Y	Y	N	N	-	N	N
Bernecker, Sven	N	N	N	Y			N	N	-	N	N
Boghossian, Paul A.	N	N	N	Y			N	N	-	N	N
Bonjour, Laurence	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	N	-	N	N
Burge, Tyler	N	N	N	Y			N	N	-	N	N
Coady, C. A. J.	N	N	N	Y			N	N	-	N	N
Cohen, Stewart	N	N	Y	Y	N		Y	N	-	N	N
Conee, Earl	Y	Y	Y	N	N	Y	Y	N	-	N	N
Dancy, Jonathan	N	Y	N	Y	N		Y	Y	-	N	N
Davidson, Donald	N	N	N	Y			Y	Y	-	N	N
DeRose, Keith	N	Y	Y	Y	N	N	N	N	-	N	N
David, Marian	Y	N	N	N			N	N	-	N	N
Dretske, Fred	Y	N	Y	Y	N	Y	N	Y	-	N	N
Engel, Mylan	Y	N	N	N			N	N	-	N	N
Feldman, Richard	Y	Y	Y	Y	N	Y	Y	Y	-	N	N
Foley, Richard	N	N	N	Y			Y	Y	-	Y	N
Ginet, Carl	Y	N	N	Y	N		Y	Y	-	N	N
Goldman, Alvin	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	-	Y	N
Goodman, Nelson	N	N	Y	Y	N		N	N	-	N	N
Haack, Susan	Y	N	Y	Y	N		Y	N	-	Y	N
Harman, Gilbert H.	N	N	N	Y			Y	Y	-	Y	N
Hawthorne, John	N	N	Y	N			N	N	-	N	N
Hintikka, Jaakko	N	N	N	Y	N	N	N	N	-	N	N
Huemer, Michael	N	N	Y	N			N	N	-	N	N
Kitcher, Philip	N	N	Y	Y	N		N	N	-	Y	N
Klein, Peter	N	N	Y	Y	Y	N	N	Y	-	N	N
Kornblith, Hilary	N	N	Y	Y	N		Y	N	-	N	N
Kripke, Saul	N	N	Y	Y	N		N	N	-	N	Y
Kvanvig, J. L.	Y	N	N	N			Y	Y	-	N	N
Lehrer, Keith	N	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	-	N	N
Lewis, David	N	Y	Y	Y	N	N	N	N	-	N	N
Mackie, J. L.	N	N	N	Y			N	N	-	N	N
Moore, G.E.	Y	N	N	Y	Y		N	N	-	N	Y
Nozick, Robert	Y	N	Y	Y	Y	Y	N	Y	-	Y	N
Nuccetelli, Susana	N	N	Y	N			N	N	-	N	N
Paxson, Thomas D. Jr	N	N	N	Y			N	Y	-	N	N
Pollock, John	Y	Y	N	Y	Y	N	Y	Y	-	N	N
Plantinga, Alvin	Y	N	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	-	N	N
Price, H. H.	N	N	N	Y			N	N	-	N	Y
Pritchard	Y	N	N	N			N	N	-	N	N
Pryor, James	N	N	Y	N			N	N	-	N	N
Putnam, Hilary	N	N	Y	Y	Y		Y	N	-	N	N
Quine, W. V. O.	N	N	Y	Y	Y	Y	N	Y	-	N	Y
Reichenbach, Hans	N	N	N	Y			N	N	-	N	N
Rescher, Nicholas	N	N	N	Y			Y	N	-	N	N
Russell, Bruce	Y	N	N	N			N	N	-	N	N
Ryan	Y	N	N	N			N	N	-	N	N
Ryle, Gilbert	N	N	N	Y			N	Y	-	N	Y
Schmitt, Frederick	N	N	Y	N			Y	N	-	N	N
Shope, Robert	Y	N	Y	Y	Y	Y	N	Y	-	N	N
Skyrms, Brian	N	N	N	Y			N	N	-	N	N
Sosa, Ernest	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	-	N	N
Steup, Matthias	Y	N	Y	N	N		N	N	-	N	N
Stroud, Barry	N	N	N	Y			N	N	-	N	N
Swain, Marshall	Y	N	N	Y	N		Y	Y	-	N	N
Unger, Peter	N	N	N	Y			N	N	-	N	N
Vogel, Jonathan	N	N	Y	N			N	N	-	N	N
Warfield, Ted	N	Y	N	N			N	N	-	N	N
Williams, Bernard	N	N	Y	N			N	N	-	N	N
Williamson, Timothy	Y	N	Y	N	Y		N	N	-	N	N

Review of Yuri Cath's Knowing How

Cath 2019 introduces it as usual, by referring to skills such as knowing how to drive a bicycle, but it gets more complicated. Apparently. Ryle (1949) has defined it as anti-intellectualism (meaning it cannot be knowing-that) and abilitism or dispositionalism (meaning there must be a dispositional state). He says this was the "traditional view", which was seriously challenged for the first time by Stanley and Williamson’s (2001) paper ‘Knowing How’, which rejected the two sides of Ryle definition and provided an argument for his own definition: S-W "provided a linguistic argument for an intellectualist view according to which knowing how to Φ is a matter of knowing a proposition that answers the embedded ‘how to Φ’ question." The key point, as far as the scope of Cath's article is concerned, is that it reviews the "explosion of new work on knowledge-how" that the S-W paper steered between 2009 and 2019 (and also before when useful). So, I am not convinced that this will provide us with the most general picture on Know-how. I don't think that we should accept blindly the importance given by Cath to the literature that he covers in his review, though I have no doubt that the issue raised is central. It's definitively a valid start.

Argument based on what we expect from common language

One S-W argument is that common language suggests that how to digest is not a know-how. Similarly, if, say Alice, annoys Bob at some occasions, but does not know why, even if she beliefs that she knows why, she does not really know how to annoy Bob. So, in order to respect these subtleties the definition gets more complicated. With more arguments of this kind, the following definition is suggested: S knows how to Φ if and only if S has the ability to Φ intentionally. He says that this definition has been criticized for being both too strong and too weak, using some other arguments based on common language.

To argue that it is too strong, cases of know-how (acknowledged in terms of common language) are given that fails to respect the definition. For example, someone knows how to do a pudding, but then the mondial reserve of sugar is destroyed. The person still knows-how, but has lost the ability to do a pudding. Cath says "A common strategy in replying to such cases (Fridland 2015, Löwenstein 2017, Markie 2018) is to appeal to Hawley’s (2003) influential idea that knowing how to Φ does entail reliable success in action, but only in contextually relevant counterfactual circumstances, where usually these will be circumstances deemed to be normal." But other examples are raised where the limitation in the know-how occurs in normal circumstances, such as computational limitation, one knows how to factorize numbers, but cannot factorize large numbers. (Personnally, I think, and cryptographers will agree with me, the person does not really know how to factorize large numbers. Thus, the issue is superficial, a simple lack of precision when we say that we know how to factorize numbers.)

Subtle linguistic analysis

Besides the common interpretation of the language, a formal linguistic analysis can also help us clarify the definition of know-how. The sentence "Mary knows how to ride a bicycle" belong to a group of sentences that can be divided in four categories. One sentence in this group is "Mary knows how she could ride a bicycle". This first one has the meaning that we also attribute to "Mary knows how to ride a bicycle". There are three others. "Mary knows how she ought to ride a bicycle", "Mary knows how one ought to ride a bicycle" and "Mary knows how one could ride a bicycle". The analysis says that the first of the these three can also be a valid interpretation of "Mary knows how to ride a bicycle". This analysis allows us to specify that the correct interpretation in know-how knowledge is not the "ought to" but the "could". Consider the example of a ski instructor who knows how to perform a certain difficult trick that they have never been able to perform themselves, and which only the very best athletes can perform (S&W 2001, Stanley 2011a). This is an example of "ought to" and therefore is not an example of knowledge how. The other aspect of this analysis is that we never use the interpretation with the pronoun "one", but the interpreration where the hidden pronoun corresponds to the main subject. This last point is going to be important later.

A critic of Rylean's view

Cath wrote "This issue connects with a big-picture worry for Rylean views which is that they cannot account for the epistemic or cognitive dimensions of knowledge-how, given that the abilities (or dispositions) that feature in their analyses are not meant to involve any states of knowledge-that or true belief. Annas (2001: 248) voices this kind of worry when she suggests that if knowledge-how does not involve any kind of knowledge-that then it cannot be more than an “inarticulate practical knack”, and Bengson and Moffett (2011a, 2011b) argue at length that Rylean views cannot account for the cognitive dimensions of knowledge-how."

This critic was ignored for a while, but recent responses to these attacks proposed to "relax the constraint that the relevant abilities not involve any states of knowledge-that, by claiming that these abilities will entail the possession of certain forms of knowledge-that (Löwenstein 2017; Habgood-Coote 2018a). Others, like Elzinga (2019), try to understand the intelligence of knowledge-how without appealing to knowledge-that at all. A common theme in many of these works is to attempt to explain the cognitive or epistemic properties of knowledge-how in terms of the norms regulating actions and abilities."

Review of Maria Rosa Antognazza's history of philosophy

Not yet written

Review of Stroud's Epistemology, the History of Epistemology, Historical Epistemology

Stroud wrote: "Without informed recognition of how the central questions and ideas of epistemology have come down to us, what you say in epistemology is likely to be of very little value. This seems to me to be borne out by a great deal of what has been going on in the subject for a long time. Much of it is really of very little value. An understanding of history is therefore important. But rather than speaking of an historically ‘oriented’ epistemology, I would prefer to call it historically informed epistemology. [...] There is not much sign of this kind of diagnostic interest in current and recent philosophical epistemology. That is due in part to the apparently widely-held assumption that it is pretty well known what the real problems of epistemology are, and we just need to get on with the effort of solving them. There is the further assumption, on the part of many philosophers, not only that the questions are not primarily historical, but that epistemology is simply a different subject from the history of epistemology. [...] questions? These are diagnostic concerns. Attention to philosophical ways of thinking in the past can help reveal how the questions we now regard as epistemological have come to have the significance they have for us. This is something I think we need to understand better than we do before we can be sure we know what the problems really are and what it would take to make progress on them. The same is true, after all, of painting and music. [...] There is a long and still-continuing tradition of understanding perception in a way that I think makes knowledge of the world impossible, or at least impossible to explain. [...] That is why I think philosophical epistemology now needs to get to the bottom of what I see as an impasse. This is where I think history comes into play."

In his Theaetetus Plato argues that knowledge is not the same thing as perception on the grounds that no case of perception as such is a case of knowledge.’ Perception involves a bodily sense-organ, but it is taken to be nothing more than a purely passive affection that usually brings about an effect in the mind. Perception itself cannot be knowledge since knowledge involves belief, which in turn requires an activity of “the mind”. “Knowledge is to be found”, Socrates says, “not in the experiences but in the process of reasoning about them”. It is “not in the experiences that it is possible to grasp being and truth” (Theaetetus 186D). "

The internalism/externalism debate

The internalism/externalism debate occupies center stage in contemporary epistemology. While externalists offer a number of different arguments in support of their approach to understanding epistemic concepts, an important advantage they often claim for their views is that they can avoid classical arguments for skepticism.

— Richard Fumerton, Skepticism and Epistemic Externalism in Bernecker & Pritchard 2011

Richard Fumerton is one of the most cited expert on the internalism/externalism debate. His book Metaepistemology and Skepticism published by Roman and Littlefield (1995) is a classic on the subject.

The internalism-externalism debate versus the dualism-materialism debate

Fumerton's view

Richard Fumerton wrote:

Put crudely, the externalist seems to argue that a given internal state is the belief, desire, fear, or more generally, thought that it is, only if that state bears appropriate relations to objects, conditions, or states that lie outside the individual. A causal theory of mental content, for example, might attempt to identify the fact that I am now thinking of the color red with the fact that some past encounter with redness is causally responsible (in the right way) for some image in my mind. [...]
At the same time, it has seemed perfectly obvious to a lot of philosophers that we have a special kind of epistemic access to our thoughts and beliefs. [...]
[This] might seem to be incompatible with views that identify being in a mental state with being in a state that bears certain relations (usually construed as partially causal) to other people and objects. [...]
The philosophical debate inevitably raises a host of controversial issues concerning the nature of both analysis and introspection.

Then Fumerton brings Descartes into the debate:

[The internalist] argument has a troubled history. A much criticized version of it seemed to constitute the basis of Descartes’ argument for dualism. I know that I exist in a way different from the way in which I know that my body exists. Therefore, I cannot be identical with my body. Critics of the argument relied on powerful analogies. Lois Lane knew that Clark Kent existed before she knew that Superman existed, but it hardly follows that the legend of Superman is unintelligible.

and

If Descartes’ argument for dualism fails, why should the externalist about mental states have anything to fear? So I know that I’m thinking of my son in a way different from the way in which I know that I am in a state with a certain causal origin. Why should that preclude one from identifying the thought of my son’s height with my being in a state having a certain causal origin? Both the dualist and the internalist have a response to this reply, but its development requires the defense of a number of controversial metaphilosophical and philosophical views.

In particular, he adds:

The internalist who is a physicalist puts the thought in the head or in the brain. The dualist, of course, puts that same thought ‘‘in’’ the mind.

After having discussed controversies about the ontological meaning of sentences, he says:

Our present concern is not to settle these ontological controversies. It is rather simply to note that internalists will allow that there is a sense (a trivial sense) in which my thought that the Eiffel Tower is in France, for example, is a thought of the Eiffel Tower only if that tower exists. There is another sense, however, in which the internalist is convinced that this very thought (with its content—with its capacity to refer) could have existed without an Eiffel Tower. Its only that second sense of thought in which thought is claimed to be an internal state, something to which an internalist thinks one can have introspective access.

Humm! The last statement seems to assume an indirect dualist perspective, but we will see. In any case, he adds:

one might well suppose that any remotely plausible version of internalism should be restricted to de dicto intentional states.

and comments that the issue is deeper than that:

one must sharply distinguish the highly controversial thesis that there is a metaphysical distinction to be made between two kinds of intentional states, and what should be the relatively innocuous claim that there is an ambiguity between what we can call de re and de dicto ascriptions of belief.

He insists that:

In any event, the internalist need not and should not deny that there are de re ascriptions of intentional states that carry with them existential import with respect to entities outside the subject who is in the intentional state.

Ah, but he then says something that seems to contradict my impression that he assumes indirect dualism:

That same internalist might insist, however, that there is only one metaphysical sort of intentional state and claim that it should always be identified with an internal state.

Next, he goes into more details about internalism:

Perhaps the most straightforward way of defining an internal state is to contrast it with a relational state. [...] The difficulty, [...] Simple thoughts, for Russell, were analyzed employing the relational concept of acquaintance. My thought of red, for example, is just my being acquainted with the universal red. [...] Certainly, Russell thought that the universal red had an existence outside of me. [...] Well, perhaps the internalist is attempting to stress an epistemological feature of thought.

He next discusses "the precise nature of the externalist’s thesis". He analyses 8 theses, but keep only two:

Ext1 The proposition that S is thinking that p is analytically equivalent to the proposition that S is in a state that bears relation R to objects y and z.
Ext8 The fact that S is thinking that p is constituted by S ’s being in a state that bears R to y and z.

Next, he argues that Descartes's argument for dualism threatens Ext1. To do so, he first revisits Descartes's argument for his dualism in terms of mind and body. But, before I go into the details, I must say that Descartes's dualism, in Fumerton's view, is not between what is within the brain (or within the skin) and what is outside that region, but between the mind and the body. Others such as Popkin adds that it is also between the mind and the physical world, but it's not so different, because the body is seen as a physical reality different from the mind. For Descartes, the link with the mind was done in some part of the brain. My understanding is that Fumerton argues that Descartes is correct that given that what S knows from a physical perspective about « S is in a state that bears relation R to objects x and y » is not the same as (not equivalent to) what S knows from a mind perspective about « S is thinking that p », then these propositions cannot be analytically equivalent (for S). Hum, but their non equivalence might be due to the difference between the way we learn in these two perspectives. Descartes would be correct, but only about the propositions themselves. Let us see if this is what Fumerton is saying. He wrote:

The better response of the identity theorist to Descartes’ argument is to distinguish claims about the identity of propositions (or of the meanings of statements) from claims about the identity of what is described by those propositions or statements (this sort of response was made by J. J. C. Smart in 1962).

and

If knowledge is of statements- with-a-meaning, we can infer from the difference in knowledge that the statement that I exist has a different meaning from the statement that my body exists. But it doesn’t follow that the two propositions (state- ments) have a different subject matter. Unbeknownst to me, the two propositions (statements) can turn out to be about one and the same entity. [...] The retreat, then, is to a claim about the common subject matter of two propositions. The concept of common subject matter, however, requires close attention. [...] In addition, I suspect many externalists are going to be unhappy with my implicit suggestion that facts are the most appropriate candidates for being the ‘‘subject matter’’ of propositions. Someone like Davidson, for example, might be much happier formulating the externalist’s identity thesis by employing the category of event.

Other views

Brie Gertler wrote:

For internalism and externalism are, in spirit, ontologically neutral. This neutrality is reflected in the fact that each of the following positions has been defended by influential philosophers: internalist dualism (Descartes, David Chalmers); internalist materialism (Jerry Fodor8 , Frank Jackson9 , Gabriel Segal); externalist dualism (Tyler Burge and perhaps Donald Davidson10 ); externalist materialism (Fred Dretske, Hilary Putnam, Michael Tye, and numerous others).

Personally, I don't understand why dualism is opposed to materialism. Yes, materialism in an ontological monism, but there other monisms. For example, physicalism is very frequent among philosophers and it would not be fair to include it under materialism, because it is not so easy to distinguish it from a monism on the mind side. Gertier might discuss these things. I did not check.

Descartes's semantic internalism

Brie Gertler wrote:

Perhaps the clearest indication of this flaw is that this criterion classifies Descartes — standardly regarded as the archetypal internalist — as an externalist. For Descartes denies that mental contents metaphysically supervene on any physical properties.

Jill Vance Buroker wrote:

The third position goes a step further, claiming that Kant actually believed that thought depends on language in the strong sense that there can be no non-linguistic cognitive thought. This position, known to us today as “externalism,” opposes the “internalist” view of Descartes and his followers, that (pure) thought cannot be linguistic since the phenomenon of language depends on having a body.

and

Externalism about mental content maintains that to have certain types of intentional mental states, such as beliefs, one must be related to the environment in the right way. In contrast, the internalist claims that having intentional mental states depends only on one’s intrinsic properties. (Lau and Deutsch 2019, 1– 2) Classic Cartesian internalism is based on substance dualism, the view that minds are non-corporeal substances, independent of bodies or corporeal substances. Since the mind is non-corporeal, its ideas are all innate and purely intellectual, being independent of sensory states such as sensations, appetites, and emotions originating in the body. For Descartes, the God-given storehouse of innate ideas to which minds have access is fixed and non-subjective; their content is based on the common notions (such as “nothing comes from nothing”) and the true and immutable natures of things.

and

By contrast with the non-corporeal nature of ideas, language is understood to be inherently corporeal.

Susana Nuccetelli wrote:

Semantic externalism or anti-individualism is often cast as the rejection of semantic internalism or individualism, a view favored by philosophers at least since Descartes (hereafter, ‘externalism’ and ‘internalism’). The latter takes mental properties with content to supervene upon the intrinsic properties of individuals, while the former denies that thesis, holding instead that, necessarily, two individuals could be identical in all their intrinsic properties (nonintentionally described) and have mental properties with different content.

Descartes's dualism and the debate

In the view of Alvin Platinga, except for a few exceptions, no philosophy before Descartes qualifies as an internalist view as defined in the contemporary internalist/externalist debate. Hilla Jacobson-Horowitz, while defending the presence of some externalist trend in Descartes' phylosophy, says that philosophers argued, in the form of a criticism, that Cartesian dualism is responsible for internalism in modern philosophy. Descartes is well known for his dualism, but he is mostly known for his skeptic approach. He used this approach, not to deny that the objects of sensory experiences follow precise laws that can be known, but to gain certainty in the mind side, in the cogito, and he used this as a platform for his notion of clear and distinct idea. In that respect,  Descartes was influenced by Plato. However, Descartes argued for a different kind of dualism. The new aspect of Cartesian dualism, with no counterpart in Plato's dualism, is the existence of a real physical world behind the sensory experiences with its own laws and a real mental substance behind our mental experiences and a causal relation between these two worlds. This view, in which the external world is real but known to us only indirectly, is called indirect realism. In that sense, Descartes was the father of modern realism and, for realists, of modern philosophy as well. Descartes's interactionism (interaction between the physical reality and the substance of the mind) was abandoned in the nineteenth century because of the growing popularity of philosophical mechanism. Realism itself was not abandoned, only the coexistence of an independent substance behind the mind was abandoned.

Richard Foley wrote:

Descartes’s search for an internally defensible procedure that would provide an external guarantee of knowledge proved not to be feasible, but the lesson is not that either the internal or external aspects of the Cartesian project has to be abandoned. The lesson, rather, is that there are different, equally legitimate projects for epistemologists to pursue but that these projects need to be distinguished.

Difference between epistemic (conceptual) and ontological (real) divisions

The following attitude attributed to Davidson by Hans-Johann Glock plays an important rôle in understanding different kinds of externalism:

[Davidson's] philosophy of mind combines a conceptual dualism with a monistic physicalist ontology. Although we talk about mental events and human actions in terms that cannot be reduced to physics, these events and actions are ultimately physical events.

False dichotomy

I used the expression "False dichotomy" to refer some kinds of externalism that, in some ontological perspective, were not opposed to internalism, but that was before I realized that there are many kinds of externalism. So, this section can be seen as a move toward the next section about different forms of externalism.

Richard Fumerton wrote:

Sosa’s epistemology has long been marked by an effort to avoid unnecessary polarization through compromise that incorporates the insights of opposing camps. He has recently urged us to view both the foundationalist/coherentist and the internalist/externalist controversies in epistemology as false dichotomies. Can we find neutral ground between these warring epistemological factions?

and

When the young gazelle encounters a hungry lion for the first time, it is indeed fortunate that it does not need to employ inductive reasoning to reach the conclusion that flight would be appropriate. If the world is as we think it is, nature has no doubt taken care of this for the gazelle, and although it may involve anthropomorphizing on our part, it is certainly noteworthy that we describe the gazelle as knowing instinctively (without needing to rely on experience) that there is danger present. While human beings are far more complex than gazelles, and may have the capacity to form intentional states that precede such things as flight behavior, it is hardly plausible to suppose that all of owr beliefs and expectations are at the mercy of our reasoning ability.

Man-To Tang wrote:

Husserl’s phenomenology has been employed into the debate on internalism and externalism. There are two interpretations. The first one is greatly influenced by Heideggerian interpretation of Husserl that Husserl is an internalist (Carman 2003; Keller 1999). The second interpretation, which is the most welcomed by Husserlians, refutes the internalistic interpretation of Husserl and argues that neither internalism nor externalism can faithfully understand MHusserl’s phenomenology because Husserl’s phenomenology does not tie to any tradition metaphysical commitment, namely internalism and externalism (Zahavi 2004, 2008; Crowell 2008; O’Murchadha 2008). Husserlians within the second camp share three common beliefs that (1) the doctrine of ‘noema’ is not a representation, and Husserl does not commit _ to representationalism; (2) there is a tight link between Husserl’s phenomenology and externalism, but they are not equivalent to each other; (3) Husserl’s proper accounts of intentionality and reduction lead him to transcendental idealism which is an alternative option available than internalism or externalism.

Christian Skirke says that Husserl's phenomenology does not endorse either internalism or externalism:

As its founders noted, phenomenology occupies an uneasy place between idealism and realism because idealism and realism are metaphysical positions with distinctive ontological commitments; yet phenomenology purports to examine structures of subjectivity without committing to any specific ontology.

Dan Zahavi wrote:

Where should one place phenomenology on the internalism-externalism scale? One reply is that no univocal answer can be given. Whereas Husserl remains a Cartesian, a methodological solipsist, and a representationalist, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty break with Cartesianism, are methodological socialists, and dispense with representations in favour of a direct opening onto the world. According to this kind of reading, Husserl’s transcendental methodology commits him to internalism, whereas the existential phenomenologies of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are committed to a form of externalism, since they fully endorse the view that the mind is essentially determined by its intentional relationship to the world (cf. McClamrock 1995; Keller 1999; Carman 2003).

Ronald McIntyre and David Woodruff Smith say Phenomenology cannot be understood without the concept of "intentionality":

Intentionality is a central concept in philosophy of mind and in Husserl’s phenomenology. Indeed, Husserl calls intentionality the “fundamental property of consciousness” and the “principle theme of phenomenology”.

Christian Skirke wrote:

Epistemic internalism can be understood as content internalism with additional normative specifications. It looks at justification as a mental process that, drawing exclusively on the subject's own reasons and evidences, establishes what the correct object of cognition is (see Conee & Feldman, 2001). Allison makes clear that Kant is not an epistemic internalist of this kind. This is not because Kant endorses externalism about reasons and evidences but because reason and evidence are not the pertinent terms for him. The central normative topic in Kant's epistemology is that of “a priori conditions through which the cognizer grounds the objectivity of his judgments” (Allison, 2015, p. 148).

In that context, Stalnaker's point that there is a kind of incompatibility between objective knowledge and internal subjective knowledge is interesting: "This means that the set of propositions that you know is closed under consequence. But that seems absurd."

Different forms of externalism

Alvin Platinga wrote:

Although classical foundationalism has fallen into ruins in the last half of the present century, the same most emphatically cannot be said for classical deontologism and internalism.
Nevertheless, one of the most exciting developments in twentieth‐century theory of knowledge is the rejection of deontology and the sudden appearance of various forms of externalism. More precisely, this development is less the appearance than the reappearance of externalism in epistemology. Externalism goes a long way back, to Thomas Reid, to Thomas Aquinas—back, in fact, all the way to Aristotle. Indeed, we may venture to say that (apart, perhaps, from Augustine and some of the skeptics of the later Platonic Academy) internalists in epistemology are rarae aves in Western thought prior to Descartes.

Hilla Jacobson-Horowitz wrote:

It is a widely shared assumption among contemporary philosophers (e.g., Fodor 1980, Burge 1986, McDowell 1986) that Descartes was the founder of internalism. In Burge’s words, “Individualism as a theory of mind derives from Descartes” (Burge 1986, 117). In the writings of some of these philosophers this ascription takes the form of an accusation: Descartes is responsible for a false conception of the relations between our thoughts and the world, a conception that has dominated the post-Cartesian tradition until recently (when it was undermined by the arguments of Putnam, Kripke, and Burge).' My main purpose in this paper is to try to rebuff this accusation by exposing strong externalist trends in Descartes’ conception of sensory representation.

Here, Sven Bernecker describes content externalism, which he opposes to justification externalism in a note:

Content externalism (also known as “semantic externalism”) is the thesis that the contents of an individual's thoughts and the meanings of his words depend on relations that the individual bears to aspects of his physical or social environment. Mental content and semantic meaning are not determined solely by internal properties of the individual's mind and brain. At least some properties of the content of thoughts and the meaning of words are external to the subject's skin, to the body or to the brain. Content externalism stands opposed to content internalism, which holds that the contents of an individual's mental states can be individuated fully in ways that do not require reference to any particular objects or properties in the environment.

Content externalism comes in many different flavors. First, we can distinguish between global and local externalism, where the former holds for all kinds of thoughts and all classes of expressions while the latter is restricted to certain expressions and thoughts (e.g., thoughts involving natural kind words, proper names, and indexicals). [...]

Second, we can divide externalism into two varieties – physical and social – depending on the kind of environmental factors that figure in the determination of mental content.

Later, he adds:

Different kinds of externalism take different kinds of environmental facts as responsible for the determination of thought content. Two well-known kinds of externalism are due to Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge. Putnam holds a kind of physical externalism whereby the hidden (e.g., chemical) structure of objects determines the reference of natural kind terms. Burge argues for a version of social externalism (which he calls “anti-individualism”), whereby thought content is determined by the linguistic norms and practices of the language community.

References

Here, Sven Bernecker mentions a few kinds of externalism:

Burge relies on nothing but the most general externalist view, notwithstanding the different kinds of externalism such as social externalism (Burge), causal-essentialist externalism (Putnam), and causal-informational externalism (Dretske). [...]
The advantage of Burge’s social externalism over other forms of externalism, such as Putnam’s, is precisely that it isn’t restricted to natural kind words but is applicable to most word classes. Apart from some sensation words and certain logical constants, social externalism is said to cover all words.

William Alston does not say it explicitly, but he considers different kinds of justification internalism and thus of justification externalism. This can be seenin many sentences such as:

First let's consider the possibility that [perspective internalism] is a special case of [access internalism]. Is the restriction of justifiers to the subject's viewpoint a special case of a restriction of justifiers to what is directly accessible? Only if ones own perspective is directly accessible, and this does not seem to be the case. The sum total of my justified beliefs cannot be depended on to spread themselves before my eyes on demand, not even that segment thereof that is relevant to a particular belief under consideration.

Alston defines externalism in opposition to internalism and thus he defines different kind of externalism through a definition of different kinds of internalism. He defines two different kinds of internalism: "Access Internalism" (AI) and "Perspective Internalism". He defines the subject's perspective "disjunctively as what the subject 'knows, believes, or justifiably believes." He says that "it will make a considerable difference what choice we make from between these alternatives. For the present let's proceed in terms of justified belief."

Timothy McGrew wrote (emphasis mine):

Acquaintance foundationalism is a form of epistemic internalism, and the notion of evidence generally plays a much more significant role in internalist epistemologies than it does in various forms of externalism. It would be overstatement to say that evidence plays no role in externalism, but the role is very different, in part because evidence itself is understood differently by externalists than by internalists. In Timothy Williamson’s form of “knowledge first” externalism, for example, one’s evidence is simply equated with the set of things one knows, where the concept of knowledge is taken to be primitive rather than analyzed into more fundamental concepts (see “Knowledge First Epistemology,” Chapter 20 in this volume).

Ryan Nichols wrote:

Reid is the first to articulate an externalist theory about the basis of epistemic justification and to adopt a broadly naturalistic method that sees epistemology as a form of psychology (see ‘Externalism/Internalism’, Chapter 14 in this volume). Reid’s epistemology resembles contemporary forms of externalism in two key ways: the key epistemic feature of any belief type is its veridicality, and Reid is more concerned with the psychological and physiological genesis of belief than he is with the deontological justification of belief (Alston 1985). We might laugh at the fact that Reid writes thousands and thousands of words about double vision (INQ 6.15-17), but only by taking this to heart can we understand the as yet unappreciated lengths to which Reid goes to bring epistemology into relationship with psychology. Reid endorses a nuanced form of externalism on the basis of commitments to proper functionalism, theism, and common sense.

J. Adam Carter wrote:

Cognitive innativism involves rejecting not only a Clark and Chalmers-style extended mind (e.g. part of your memory could be stored in your iPhone or notebook) but also that e.g. embedded synthetic brain chips could ever play any role in actively driving cognitive processes (as opposed to being merely external accessories to, or causal antecedents of, cognitive processes).

Note

J. Adam Carter, Emma C. Gordon, and Benjamin W. Jarvis wrote:

The suggestion that there are, among mental states, some that are factive is provocative. Although Putnam-Burge semantic externalism entails that a persons state of mind—in particular, what these states or mind are directed towards or about—depends on what kind of environment the person has interacted with, one might—even after accepting this species of externalism—still resist the idea that a persons state of mind depends on what the facts—potentially outside of her—are.

Notes

The point of view of Joseph L. Cruz is that (justification) externalism is a kind of non doxatic view on knowledge: all doxatic views are (justification) internalist views:

We have surveyed existing theories of knowledge and concluded that most are subject to fatal objections. Doxastic theories, both foundationalist and coherence, fail because they cannot accommodate perception and memory. These are cognitive processes that produce beliefs in us, and the beliefs are sometimes justified and sometimes unjustified, but whether they are justified is not just a function of one's other beliefs. It follows that justifiability is a function of more than doxastic states, and hence the true epistemological theory must be a nondoxastic theory. Nondoxastic theories can be internalist or externalist. We have sketched an internalist nondoxastic theory direct realism and one of our ultimate purposes in this book is to defend a variety of direct realism.

Later, he adds:

There may be other concepts that can reasonably be labeled Òepistemic justification, but it is the procedural concept that is the focus of the present book and is involved in traditional epistemological problems.

Again later, he adds:

The traditional epistemologist asks, ÒHow is it possible for me to be justified in my beliefs about the external world, about other minds, about the past, and so on? These are questions about what to believe. Epistemic norms are the norms in terms of which these questions are to be answered, so these norms are used in a first-person reason-guiding or procedural capacity.

Later, he clarifies that the norms exist, but are followed in an automatic manner:

The intellectualist model of the way norms guide behavior is almost always wrong. This point has been insufficiently appreciated. It is of major importance in understanding epistemic norms. Reasoning is more like riding a bicycle than it is like being in the navy.

Cruz further explains:

Using a computer metaphor, psychologists sometimes talk about procedural knowledge being Òcompiled-inÓ. When we subsequently undertake to do X, our behavior is automatically channeled into that plan. This is just a fact of psychology.

Later, he explains that the norms might not be learned, but innate:

The mystery surrounding epistemic norms evaporates once we recognize that the governing process is a general one and its application to epistemic norms and epistemic cognition is not much different from its application to any other kind of procedural norms. Of course, unlike most norms our epistemic norms may be innate, in which case there is no process of internalization that is required to make them available for use in guiding our cognition.

and later:

To say that we know how to reason is to invoke a competence/performance distinction. It is no way precludes our making mistakes. It does not even preclude our almost always making mistakes in specific kinds of reasoning. All it requires is that we can, in principle, discover the errors of our ways and correct them.

An interesting point is that, in a next section, Cruz distinguish between justification of knowledge and justification of the norms used to justify knowledge:

On the one hand, external considerations could enter into the formulation of correct epistemic norms. On the other hand, it might be granted that epistemic norms can only appeal to internal considerations, but it might be insisted that external considerations are relevant to determining which set of internalist norms is correct. Thus we are led to a distinction between two kinds of externalism.

He calls then "belief externalism" and "norm externalism" and clarifies internalism with this terminology:

internalism implies the denial of both belief and norm externalism. That is, the internalist maintains that epistemic norms must be formulated in terms of relations between beliefs or between beliefs and nondoxastic internal states (e.g., perceptual states), and she denies that these norms are subject to evaluation in terms of external considerations.

Noah Lemos considers that the debate is about justification:

Internalism and externalism are general views about what is relevant to epistemic justification. Assessing the debate between internalists and externalists is difficult because different writers often use the terms ‘‘internalism’’ and ‘‘externalism’’ to mean different things.

Later, he adds:

Externalists, however, deny that justification depends solely upon what is internal to the subject’s perspective. Externalists hold that whether a belief is justified might also depend on whether it came about in the right way, through good intellectual procedure or on the basis of an intellectual virtue.

Later, again, he adds:

there are different kinds of epistemic evaluation or different kinds of epistemic merit. Some forms of epistemic evaluation are to be understood along internalist lines, others externalistically. As we have seen, some internalists suggest that we should distinguish epistemic justification from other kinds of epistemic appraisal such as epistemic responsibility. [...] The main point is that even if one concedes that there is some concept of justification which is internalist, one might think that there are other forms of positive epistemic status which are to be understood externalistically and that these forms of epistemic evaluation are important. [...] even if one concedes that there is an important notion of justification which is internalist, an adequate understanding of knowledge requires that we consider other kinds of positive epistemic status which are externalist

Referring to Alston, he discusses the problem of circularity when we try to justify and accepts that we must be "practical":

The very same problems of epistemic circularity that beset our attempts to support the reliability of our current practices would confront these alternatives. So, given these facts, Alston concludes that it is practically rational for us to continue engaging in our own firmly established practices.

The importance of the different forms of externalism

Robert J. Fogelin wrote:

There is no completely natural way to classify theories of epistemic justification, since they can vary in several dimensions. In the liter­ature, we often find a broad contrast drawn between theories that are internalist and those that are externalist. Unfortunately, this contrast can be taken in a number of ways, and it is not always clear what contrast an epistemologist has in mind when she describes (or accuses) another philosopher of being either an internalist or an externalist.

Fogelin defines his own categories of internalisms and says that there exist, correspondingly, two categories of externalism (defined as opposition to these internalisms). I am not sure his choice of names have been accepted, but he calls "ontological internalism" the internalism that says the warrant must be subjectively accessible to the subject (his words are "in the mind" and qualify it with "provide the immediately accessible evidence needed to provide a secure basis for knowledge") and calls "methodological internalism" the internalism that requires that the "justified believer base her belief on grounds that justify it".

In the following, Ali Hasan defines a particular form of externalism and a particular form of internalism that make it easy to reject externalism in favour of internalism. First, Hasan defines internalism in a way that does not refer to the physical brain as described by neuroscience, but only requires a subjective or epistemic access to the warrant:

Roughly, according to the internalist, having a justified belief requires that something relevant to the truth, or probable truth, of one’s belief must be internal to, or accessible from, the subject’s first-person perspective. More specifically, the subject must have first-person access to good grounds or evidence for belief—that is, reasons to think that the belief is (probably) true. A natural way to think of the internalist view is to say that it identifies justification with rationality.

Hasan continues:

For the externalist, something about the belief or the way it is formed must be appropriately related to the truth for the belief to be justified. There must be some non-accidental connection—some lawful, causal, or other probabilistic connection—to the truth of what one believes. But the subject need not have first-person access to grounds to think there is such a connection.

This is a form of externalism. Other forms of externalism might require a direct access to the warrant: if knowledge itself is not internal, it might have access to what is not internal. That's not weird because what is the range of the mind if not the range of the knowledge that it contains. It gets a bit complicated because Halan adds:

It’s important to see that internalists can and typically do accept that what we might call “external conditions” are necessary for knowledge.

This allows Halan to defend internalism as follows:

And if externalists come up with “Gettier-proof” conditions, internalists can build these external conditions into the account of knowledge, but still insist on an internalist account of epistemic justification.

Jonathan Egeland (also Jonathan Egeland Harouny) went through a similar argument, citing Bonjour and Lehrer, and similarly concluded:

What BonJour and Lehrer here tell us is that simple process reliabilism (and other forms of externalism) cannot be correct since it counts reliably produced beliefs that are wholly arbitrary or unsupported from the subject's first person perspective as justified.

Similarly, Gail Fine considers a similar kind of externalism:

Reliabilism about knowledge is a species of externalism. That is, it takes knowledge to depend on factors that are, or may be, external to the knower’s awareness: factors she is not, or may not be, aware of. In Armstrong’s version, for example, I know that p just in case there is a law-like connection between my true belief that p and the state of affairs that makes p true—whether or not I am aware that this law-like connection obtains.¹⁴ Externalism contrasts with internalism, according to one version of which knowledge requires justification, where justification must be something internal to the knower, in the sense that it must consist in reasons or arguments she can herself give or articulate; such reasons are internal to the knower, in the sense that they are available to her.

Lehrer seems against some form of justification externalism. He began the chapter EXTERNALISM AND THE TRUTH CONNECTION of his book Theory of knowledge with:

Our analysis of irrefutable and undefeated justification in terms of coherence and truth within an acceptance system brings us into conflict with an important competing theory of knowledge called externalism. The fundamental doctrine of externalism is that what must be added to true belief to obtain knowledge is the appropriate connection between belief and truth. An earlier account presented by Alvin Goldman affirmed that the appropriate connection is causal.

He clearly, as early as the year 2000, indicates that justification externalism is not the only kind of externalism:

have believed what she did if it were not for the truth of the belief. Goldman now claims that justified belief, which he takes as a necessary condi- tion of knowledge, must be the result of a belief-forming process that reliably yields truth. Other externalists deny that justification is necessary for knowledge.

However, even if justification is not needed, Lehrer claimed that all externalists:

agree, however, that a belief resulting from a certain kind of process or relationship connecting beliefs with truth can convert them to knowledge without the sustenance or support of any other beliefs or system of beliefs.

The key point is that knowledge is still a belief, a true belief, but with an extra external warrant, which apparently does not count as a justification. He gives as an example, the externalism of Dretske or Nozick:

According to Dretske or Nozick, for example, there is no need either to justify beliefs or posit self-justified beliefs because, contrary to the traditional analysis, the justification of beliefs is not required to convert true beliefs into knowledge. Beliefs or true beliefs having the appropriate sort of naturalistic external relationships to the facts are, as a result of such relationships, converted into knowledge without being justified.

He next criticises this general view on externalism.

There is, however, a general objection to all externalist theories that is as simple to state as it is fundamental: the external relationship might be opaque to the subject, who has no idea that her beliefs are produced, caused, or causally sustained by a reliable belief-forming process or properly functioning cognitive faculty. The person might fail to know because of the opacity to her of the external relationship and her ignorance of it.

However, this is a criticism of justification externalism and a self-justified knowledge can be internally justified and not a part of that criticism. In addition, this self-justified knowledge, which avoid the criticism by being internally (self-)justified, can at the same time be (content) external. In what follows, Cruz says that all forms of externalism fail to deal with "this problem adequately", but he refers to justication externalism:

All forms Of externalism fail to deal with this problem adequately. To know that the information one possesses is correct, one requires background information about that information. One requires information about whether the received information is correct or not, and lacking such information, one falls short of knowledge.

Guy Axtell mentions Sosa as an example of an externalist that accepts the "traditional" internalist requirement:

Since the aptness of the agent’s belief entails that its correctness is attributable to a competence exercised in appropriate conditions, the concept of aptness is an externalist one, and the condition is an externalist condition. Yet Sosa accommodates certain intuitions traditionally associated with epistemic internalism by retaining the importance of “reflective coherence” in the individual and a strong sense of human knowledge even at its lowest rungs as an achievement.

He further adds later:

It is important to point out at this juncture that none of the authors mentioned here see a need to ‘‘go internalist’’ in order to acknowledge and respect ‘‘the understanding and coherence dear to intellectuals.’’ Sosa, Greco, Zagzebski, Riggs, Axtell, and others each adopt what has been called a ‘‘compatibilist’’ view of the relationship between our internalist anhi externalist interests in explanation. They each articulate a distinction between personal and objective justification that they take to be miscast as a distinction between internalism and externalism conceived, as they typically are, as mutually exclusive and exhaustive accounts of epistemic justification.

Notes

It is interesting that this suggests that they all agree that justification is needed for knowledge. So, Williamson and, before him Popper, do not belong in this list. We could add that Plato also is not in this list, if we accept that recollection (anámnisi) is not a justification.

Sven Bernecker wrote:

When one is determining whether someone is justified in holding a certain beiief or whether someone knows something, one must do so from some point of view. One can work from the point of view of the subject, or from the point of view of someone who knows all the relevant facts, some of which might not be available to the subject. Roughly speaking, those who adopt the subject’s point of view for making these evaluations are internalists, and those who adopt a bird’s-eye view are externalists.

And later adds:

Some combine internalism and externalism by distinguishing between knowledge and justification. The idea is simply that internalism is right about justification while externalism is correct about knowledge. [...]
A little thought reveals that this proposal stands no chance of convincing either of the conflicting parties and thus fails to settle the dispute. Both internalists and externalists claim to account for both justification and knowledge. So while it is easy to combine internalism about justification with externalism about knowledge, the real challenge is to come up with parallel internalist and externalist views both for justification alone or for knowledge alone.

The claim that all requires that we cover justification is kind of surprising, because some philosophers would say that justification is not needed or, to say it otherwise, that knowledge can be self-justified and self-justification is not really a justification, because there is nothing to do except having the knowledge. In my view, including a self-justification as a justification is only playing with words.

Content versus epistemic externalism/internalism

(Conee & Feldman 1996) wrote:

Externalism in the philosophy of mind, usually called content externalism, is the widely held view that environ- mental factors can help to determine the identity of some mental states.[...] the theory appears to be incompatible with the conjunction of two plausible epistemological doctrines. One of the doctrines is that we can know the contents of our own thoughts by just giving introspective attention to them. [...] Yet, according to a second plausible epistemological doctrine, knowledge of our environment is not so easy. It requires empirical information. [...] Critics of this line of reasoning have asked whether it can really be known, without empirical investigation, that content externalism applies to any of our concepts.

(Conee & Feldman 2004) wrote:

We will not debate the merits of content externalism here. If it is correct, then internalism about justification can be modified without abandoning the spirit of the view. The modification will appeal to "counterpart propositions". [...] Using this notion of a counterpart proposition, we can characterize internalism about justification as the thesis that if two individuals are internally alike, then one is justified in believing a proposition exactly to the extent that the other is justified in believing that person's counterpart proposition.

Richard Feldman and Andrew Cullison wrote:

While this [twin earth] thought experiment is used to motivate content externalism in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind,13 it has been argued that it also has serious epistemological implications. One might think that Oscar’s total evidence justifies him in believing that he is drinking water and Twoscar’s total evidence justifies him in believing that he is drinking twater. If they are internal duplicates and have the exact same total evidence, then we have a reason to reject evidentialism.
This seems like the clearest way to formulate an objection to the Same Evidence thesis, but now there are two plausible options for the evidentialist. First, one could deny that content externalism is true. [...] There are content internalists who argue that Oscar and Twoscar really don’t believe different propositions. Any plausible defense of this view could be embraced by the evidentialist. [...] Another option for evidentialism would be to preserve semantic externalism. [...] Evidence thesis will be preserved—the same evidence won’t always justify internal duplicates in believing the same propositions, but it will always justify people in accepting some similar internal mentalese sentence (or way).

Hamid Vahid wrote:

The externalism/internalism debate in contemporary epistemology arises out of concerns for a proper explication of the concept of epistemic justification. Internalists maintain that something can confer justification on an agent’s belief only if it falls within his or her perspective on the world. Different versions of internalism result from how the notion of perspective is to be understood. Externalism, by contrast, allows, at least, some justifying factors of a belief to be external to the agent’s cognitive perspective. The internalism/externalism question in epistemology should not be confused with an identically named dispute in the philosophy of mind where externalist theories of mental content, according to which the contents of an individual’s thoughts do not supervene on her intrinsic properties, currently enjoy something like the status of orthodoxy. This has led to an interesting question (which we shall not address here) as to whether content externalism favors any side of the internalism/externalism divide (Goldberg 2007).

Mahmoud Morvarid wrote:

Even from the early days in which Putnam (1975) and Burge (1979) put forward their influential arguments for content externalism, many philosophers have felt that content externalism might have substantive epistemological implications. In the last 3 decades, for example, a huge literature has appeared as to whether content externalism is compatible with the privileged access thesis, namely the intuitive idea that one can know the content of one’s current thoughts in an a priori manner.

Here is the abstract of Carter & Palermos 2015:

Abstract Internalist approaches to epistemic justification are, though controversial, considered a live option in contemporary epistemology. Accordingly, if ‘active’ externalist approaches in the philosophy of mind—e.g. the extended cognition and extended mind theses—are in principle incompatible with internalist approaches to justification in epistemology, then this will be an epistemological strike against, at least the prima facie appeal of, active externalism. It is shown here however that, contrary to pretheoretical intuitions, neither the extended cognition nor the extended mind theses are in principle incompatible with two prominent versions of epistemic internalism—viz., accessibilism and mentalism. In fact, one possible diagnosis is that pretheoretical intuitions regarding the incompatibility of active externalism with epistemic internalism are symptomatic of a tacit yet incorrect identification of epistemic internalism with epistemic individualism. Thus, active externalism is not in principle incompatible with epistemic internalism per se and does not (despite initial appearances to the contrary) significantly restrict one’s options in epistemology.

In Carter & Palermos 2016, we have:

Now, however one may formulate epistemic internalism, the point we mean to accentuate here is that the commonly received, pre-theoretical intuition is that these two views—content externalism and epistemic internalism—do not go hand in hand. The underlying worry, in short, is that it is primafacie puzzling how a subject S’s epistemic justification for her belief that p will be—as the epistemic internalist has it—internal to S’s mental life or reflectively accessible psychology, if the very content of S’s belief that p is externally individuated—as the content externalist has it. [...] Laurence Bonjour (1992), targets the compatibility of Access J-Internalism with content externalism. [...] James Chase (2001), targets the compatibility of Mentalist J-Internalism and content externalism.

They continue:

Specifically, we will argue that if, following Greco (1999), a distinction between subjective and objec- tive justification can be motivated, we will soon notice that both arguments equivocate between these two kinds of justification. And that if, as Chase suggests in his rejection of Bonjour’s argument on the basis of the new evil demon intuition, epistemic internalism is concerned only with subjective justification, then one may be (subjectively) justified— both in the Accessibilist and the Mentalist sense—even if mental content is externally individuated.

One point made in Carter & Palermos 2016 is that the argument that opposes access J-Internalism to content externalism also applies to an opposition of mentalist J-Internalism to content externalism. An ingredient in this claim is that two subjects must be duplicates on their justificatory process if they are to be duplicates on their justification, which is not obvious to me (but I am also not clear about what is meant by the justificatory process):

the justificatory process leading to a belief is relevant to the justification of the relevant belief—a point we’ll return to.

Notes

Rowlands's view of the debate

NOTE ADDED: It is not easy to make sense of his informal definition of "supervenience". I suppose the formal one attributed to Jaegwon Kim, which applies to family of properties, makes sense. If we consider that the informal definition also applies to family of properties, even though Rowlands seems to apply it directly to individual properties, it could start to make sense. My intuitive understanding is that "A supervenes on B" means that if one needs A, one is OK with B. Formally, in every situation x that has a property p in A, you can find a q in B, also a property of x, that is more info than p. It seems that an example of A being a supervenience of B is when A and B are partitions and B is a refinement of A.

First, it is useful to consider Mark Rowlands's view of Cartesian internalism:

Internalism cuts across the distinction between dualism and materialism, and most versions of both views are internalist ones.

Rowlands later adds:

Chapter 2 introduces the concept of internalism, and traces its logical historical development to the work of Descartes. I argue that this Cartesian (and I shall use the terms “Cartesian” and “internalist” interchangeably) conception of the mind – the conception bequeathed us by Descartes – is made up of three broad strands: ontological, epistemological and axiological. The ontological component of Cartesianism is composed of what I call the Location Claim, according to which mental particulars are spatially located inside the skins of mental subjects, and the Possession Claim, according to which the possession of mental properties by a subject is logically independent of anything external to that subject. Most views of the mind, at least until fairly recently, are forms of Cartesian internalism in that they are committed to both the Location Claim and the Possession Claim, and this is true whether these views are dualist or materialist in character.

and later even:

Cartesian dualism may have been expunged but its internalist cousin has not.[...]
Cartesian internalism can be regarded as the combination of two, closely connected, theses: one concerning the location of mental phenomena, the other concerning the possession of such phenomena by a subject.
Cartesian internalism

The Location Claim: any mental phenomenon is spatially located inside the boundaries of the subject, S, that has or undergoes it.

The Possession Claim: the possession of any mental phenomenon by a subject S does not depend on any feature that is external to the boundaries of S.

The claims are, in fact, quite distinct. The first claim concerns the location of mental phenomena and applies most naturally to mental particulars: concrete, non-repeatable, event-, state- and process-tokens. The second claim concerns the possession of mental phenomena and applies most naturally to mental properties, which, for the purposes of this book, we can treat as abstract, multiply-exemplifiable, event-, state- and process-types.

and

Descartes's dualism and his internalism have, arguably, the same root: the rise of mechanism associated with the scientific revolution. This revolution reintroduced the classical concept of the atom in somewhat new attire as an essentially mathematical entity whose primary qualities could be precisely quantified as modes or aspects of Euclidean space.

Next, Rowlands describes externalism and internalism as follows:

Externalism

[Negation of] The Location Claim (LOC): at least some mental phenomena are not spatially located inside the boundaries of the subject, S, that has or undergoes them.

[Negation of] The Possession Claim (POS): the possession of at least some mental phenomena by a subject S depends on features that are external to the boundaries of S.

A position is externalist, then, if it is committed to one, or both, of these claims; a position is internalist if it denies both of them.

This implies that externalism is not the negation of internalism. Rowlands adds something very interesting:

There are two ways of understanding externalist positions, depending on whether such positions involve commitment to one of or both LOC and POS. Commitment to both makes such a position the logical opposite of internalism. Commitment to POS alone makes the position the opposite of idealism.

I am a bit puzzled by the notion that anything can be idealism here, because the whole thing seems to be written in a realist perspective in which there is an external world. Anyway, in support to the idea that externalism is not the opposite of internalism, which is the key point here, Roska-Hardy wrote:

Internalism is often characterized as the negation of externalism or vice versa This characterization is problematic, because there are different forms of externalism and internalism and they are motivated by different arguments.

Edmund Husserl's internalism or externalism and Jean-Paul Sartre's externalism

Rowlands, after having introduced Descartes's internalism, goes to Husserl and Sartre:

One influential twentieth-century version of internalism, and ensuing idealism, is to be found in the work of the father of modern phenomenology, Edmund Husserl. However, in followers of Husserl we find the beginnings of a reaction to this internalism—idealism complex that takes an identifiably externalist form. Jean-Paul Sartre famously defends a view of consciousness as nothing but a directedness towards objects. In this, Sartre is developing the notion of intentionality that is central to Husserl's phenomenology. However, Sartre insists on the claim that these objects of consciousness are transcendent with respect to that consciousness. That is, these objects are not conscious or mental items; they are irredeemably external to consciousness and all things mental.

However, A. David Smith argued that already Husserl was an externalist:

The sort of externalism I am concerned with in this paper is what is sometimes termed ‘content externalism’ (as opposed to a type of externalism discussed in connection with analyses of knowledge). John McDowell captures the central tenet of such externalism as follows: “Which configurations a mind can get itself into is partly determined by which objects exist in the world” (McDowell, 1986, p. 139). And there seem to be five distinct forms of such externalism on the market at the present time. [...] so could not be had if those particular objects had not existed.* A full investigation of the question whether Husserl was an externalist or not would raise this question in relation to each of the above forms of externalism. That, however, is beyond the scope of the present paper. I shall, therefore, restrict myself to claiming that Husserl subscribed to the last two forms of externalism. I should, therefore, say a little more about what I take these two positions to involve.

Smith then define disjunctivism, the first of these two positions:

The central idea of disjunctivism is best conveyed through a consideration of some perceptual experience in which some real object in the physical world is perceived and a possible hallucination that perfectly matches it. In regard to such a pair of experiences, disjunctivism is essentially a negative thesis. It denies that these two experiences, indistinguishable to the subject though they may be, are, even qua experiences, of the same fundamental kind. The kind of experience that one has when one perceives a real object is simply unavailable when some such real physical object is not being perceived.

Before, he described de re externalism:

there is what we might call de re externalism, which is the idea that certain thoughts and perceptual experiences are essentially about particular objects in the world, and so could not be had if those particular objects had not existed.

He says that disjunctivism and de re externalism are independent:

For a disjunctivist could hold that two qualitatively identical perceptual experiences of two qualitatively identical but numerically distinct real objects fall under the same fundamental experiential kind; and even that a certain perceptual experience could have been the perception of a numerically different, though qualitatively identical, object.

Next, referring to de re externalism, he adds:

The view I shall be attributing to Husserl is, however, stronger than the essentialist claim [a form of de re externalism] just discussed. It is, more precisely, the claim that the particular object of a perceptual experience is essential to that experience in virtue of that experience's content. [...] I shall be arguing, Husserl’s acceptance of disjunctivism—which certainly is an externalist position—is inextricably linked to his acceptance of this essentialist claim.

Donald Davidson's, Hilary Putnam's and Tyler Burge's externalism

Louise Roska-Hardy wrote:

In "Knowing One's Own Mind" (1987a) Donald Davidson maintains that there is no reason to suppose that mental states like belief and knowing the meaning of a word, ordinarily construed, do not satisfy two controversial conditions:

(I) They are 'inner' in the sense that they do not presuppose the existence of any individual other than the subject to whom the state is ascribed; and

(II) They are the very states which we normally identify and individuate as we do beliefs and other propositional attitudes (1987a: 444).

Davidson's thesis that ordinary mental states satisfy condition (I) and condition (II) is contentious. In contemporary philosophy of mind, both externalists and internalists have argued that no ordinary mental states satisfy both (I) and (II). [...]
Hilary Putnam has explicitly denied that psychological or mental states such as beliefs about natural kinds or knowing the meaning of a natural kind term jointly satisfy conditions (I) and (II); he famously concludes on the basis of his Twin Earth thought experiment, "Meanings ain't in the head". In a series of similar thought experiments, Tyler Burge has argued that the content of mental states which we normally specify by means of 'that' clauses depends not only on the natural or physical environment, but on the social environment, too, e.g., on the linguistic practices of the community to which the thinker belongs. Putnam and Burge understand the identification and individuation of mental states by the ascription of semantic content, i.e., in accordance with condition (II), to preclude satisfaction of condition (I).

Later, she wrote:

Condition (I) is generally understood as an internalist condition: mental states are internal states of an individual’s body. Although there are different forms of internalism, all claim that mental states like beliefs are internal states of an individual thinker and thus can be identified without essential reference to objects and events in the external environment.

Again, later she add:

According to the various forms of externalism, the identity conditions of mental states essentially involve facts about the physical and/or social environment of the individual thinker. Externalists maintain that the environment of the individual is constitutive of mental states in the sense that it determines what these mental states are. Although the debate between internalists and externalists centres on the conditions for the individuation of contentful mental states, i.e., the identity and existence conditions of mental states like beliefs, it has immediate ramifications for broader issues in the philosophy of mind, e.g., for the relation of the mental and the physical, for whether we know in an authoritative way what we mean or think and for the explanatory role of beliefs in the causal explanation of behaviour.

Notes

Williamson's externalism with mental states

This section asks a delicate question: how can mental states be factive?

Martin Smith wrote:

My concern in this chapter is the claim that knowledge is a mental state—a claim that Williamson places front and centre in Knowledge and Its Limits (Williamson 2000). While I am not by any means convinced that the claim is false, I do think it carries certain costs that have not been widely appreciated. One source of resistance to this claim derives from internalism about the mental—the view, roughly speaking, that one’s mental states are determined by one’s internal physical state.

Later, he continues:

When a person on Earth sincerely utters the sentence ‘there is water in my flask’ he expresses a belief that is true iff there is H2O in his flask. When his duplicate on Twin Earth [with H20 replaced with XYZ] utters the same words, he doesn’t express a belief about H2O—neither he, nor anyone on his planet, has ever come into contact with this substance. [...] If we accept this verdict then we are led to a view we might call natural kind externalism—the content of certain beliefs involving natural kind concepts depends on what natural kinds are present in the believer’s environment. [...]
There are, of course, a number of objections to natural kind externalism and to the standard verdicts about Twin Earth thought experiments—but I won’t explore them. [...] My aim, rather, is to show that, even if all of these kinds of externalism be simultaneously accepted, the claim that knowledge is a mental state still represents a considerable further step in an externalist direction.

However, the way the cost is analysed gets complicated. Smith considers aspects such speed of switching, frequency of switching and some notion of range.

The related subject of the intersubjectivity (or material) requirement

Zahar wrote:

a physical law, as Duhem clearly noted, is not only a series of symbols, but a formula provided with an interpretation.

He explains that otherwise we could:

evade a refutation by changing the meaning of terms that enter into the formulation of a scientific hypothesis.

This is taken up by Boyer:

This kind of “immunizing strategies” amounts to surreptitiously changing theories.

Externalism and the KK principle

John Heil seems to provide a good context:

Let us be clear about what is at issue here. The apparent impossibility of producing an epistemically noncircular demonstration that your beliefs about goings-on in the world around you are true poses no immediate challenge to the possibility of knowledge or justified belief. You have knowledge that something is so, or you believe this justifiably, just in case certain conditions are satisfied. You have knowledge (or believe justifiably) quite independently of any beliefs (justified or not) you might have about these conditions.3 For just this reason, you can have knowledge (or believe justifiably) that you have knowledge (or believe justifiably) provided your belief to this effect satisfies the pertinent conditions. The threat of epistemic circularity is not a threat to the possibility of knowledge or justified belief; it is not even a threat to our knowing (or believing justifiably) provided your belief to this effect satisfies the pertinent conditions. [...] The threat, rather, is to our being able to produce a satisfying demonstration of the hypothesis that we have knowledge or believe justifiably.

He elaborates on this point:

Suppose that a belief possesses knowledge-level justification just in case it possesses a property, φ. φ might be the property of being self-evident, or the property of being reliably caused, or the property of cohering with the agent's other beliefs. Take your pick.

Heil explains that a regress occurs if we also require that there is a justification of "it possesses a property φ". I am not sure this is the usual way a regress is created, but Heil expands on this point:

It is worth recalling that, in the Meditations, Descartes does not make this mistake.6 Descartes requires only that a belief be self-evident (or "clear and distinct") for it to be justified, not that a believer recognize the belief to be self-evident.

The question is what is included in "self-evident". There is nothing wrong to say that it includes the (self-)justification of the knowledge and its recognition, that is, in a reflexive manner, that knowledge contains its own justification. Well, Heil is correct that we do not in addition require that this property of being self-justified is recognized, but it would not be a problem to include it in the definition of self-evident. In other words, given that we included the justification of the knowledge in the knowledge itself, we could as well include the recognition of this justification and the extra justification that this justification is included, etc. What is confusing to me is that Heil says that, for any property φ, the following criteria for justification is external:

(J) S's belief that p is justified just in case S's belief that p possesses φ.

What about the case φ = "p is self-evident for S", just as in the case of Descartes. OK, Heil says that it is "external" with quotation mark. Later, Heil insists:

I have said that Descartes provides an account of justification that is externalist in the sense that it allows agents to be justified in holding a particular belief provided only that the belief satisfy a certain nonepistemic condition: the belief is clear and distinct, or, as I have put it, self-evident.

It's not clear why being self-evident is a nonepistemic condition.

Michael Ayers in Knowing and Seeing wrote:

like any epistemological externalist, Williamson seems satisfied that, given the existence of cases of knowledge the subject doesn’t know they have, the KK principle can effectively be dismissed from serious consideration of what knowledge is. [...] In contrast, I claim that a KK principle holds, and does so essentially, for what I have called ‘primary’ knowledge, and I interpret the implicit or explicit assumption of the KK principle by traditional philosophers from Plato to Locke as just one aspect of their adoption of a narrower notion of knowledge than the everyday one.

In the next 15 pages or so, Ayers discusses that propositional knowledge must respect something similar (but he does not say it explicitly) to Popper's material requirement. In that view, Popper's material requirement is an externalist concept. In the subsequent section, Ayers explains his view that perception is primary knowledge:

I believe that this traditional empiricist response at least points us in the right direction, not only in rejecting the rationalist thought that it is by some kind of reasoning or inference that we arrive at perceptual knowledge of external objects, but also in recognizing conscious perceptual knowledge as the paradigm of (what I have called) primary knowledge, the foundation of knowledge owing nothing to reasoning or ‘reason’.

He next explains that he considers that the skeptic argument is wrong when used to reject perceptual knowledge. Interestingly, it is related to Popper's point that the material requirement is usually not problematic, but ignores that individual scientific observations are not ordinary perceptual knowledge and, though the material condition is not problematic, individual scientific observations are often problematic. Perhaps, one of the five modes of Agrippa is being forgotten here: the one that asks if the knowledge is true according to a person or in general. He adds:

Here the problem taken to be posed by sceptical argument and avoided by externalism is the demand for non-circular justification. So David Lewis, citing our capacity to recognize a face without knowing how we do so as evidence that justification is not necessary for knowledge, adds ‘What (non-circular) argument supports our reliance on perception, on memory, and on testimony? And yet we do gain knowledge by these means.’ We will come back to that strange, double-edged rhetorical question.

Ayers next asks what kind of reliability is needed:

The difficulty of identifying reliable ‘ways’ of acquiring beliefs purely externalistically can be illustrated by examples. Suppose that I was hypnotized, without my knowledge, to believe (if it is belief) a number of propositions about (say) unimportant details of ways of life in various parts of the world about which I otherwise know nothing and care less. All of these propositions have been scrupulously chosen by the hypnotist because he knows that they are true. Now, when fed carefully planted questions by my acquaintances, I find myself urged to give, and believe, what are in fact true answers. It seems implausible to suppose that I know these facts, so is this a counter-example to reliabilism?

My view, which I am sure has been presented by others (and I have only to see where), is that it's not reliability of the way to gain knowledge that matters, but the reliability when it is used. Both are externalist views, but the latter is connected with value, desire and action, not the former. Whether it is sufficient for knowledge is another story. My impression is that, if it is really reliable no matter the circumstances, it is knowledge, but beliefs are only valid in some circumstances. So beliefs are not knowledge. Knowledge is hidden and not formulated and influences our beliefs. The belief in the law of universal gravitation exhibit knowledge, but is not itself knowledge. We do have that knowledge, but it is behind the belief, not the belief itself. There is something true behind the law of universal gravitation and we know that, but we know it is false in some circumstances. Whatever is true and will remain true is the knowledge.

The debate and skepticism

Guy Axtell wrote:

The debate and Plato

Gail fine wrote:

Armstrong suggests, Meno is advocating reliabilism, a view Armstrong endorses. I argued that Meno was not proposing reliabilism. But one might think that Plato has now done so, in arguing that knowledge is more stable than mere true belief. However, as noted in section 2, reliabilism is a species of externalism. But on Plato’s view, knowledge is stable for internalist reasons. His idea is that the person with knowledge can explain why what she knows is true.

The debate and creative (non justifiable) induction

If the requirement of internalism is that justification must be internal, one might oppose to internalism, not that justification is external, but that justification is not even possible. That might seem a form of "externalism" in the sense that it is opposed to internalism, but not really, because it might refer to non justifiable mechanisms that bring knowledge to the individual in a way that is internal. This seems to be the case in Louis Groarke's book An Aristotelian Account of Induction: Creating Something from Nothing (Groarke 2009). In a review of the book, P.C Biondi wrote:

The heart of the [book's] argument is perhaps summed up best when the author states: ‘The traditional [i.e. Aristotelian] account solves the problem of induction in the following way. First, it accepts the legitimacy of human intelligence. Second, it divides the world into natural kinds’.
Regarding the first claim about human intelligence, Groarke argues that human rationality cannot be reduced to or identified with argumentative reasoning, for it requires another kind of rationality. All reasoning starts with first principles which are unquestioned, indubitable, infallible, and simply not argued for. These first principles are acquired by inductive reason, that is, a capacity for intelligent insight which is a nondiscursive ‘mental illumination,’ ‘a leap of understanding,’ ‘a radical leap of creativity,’ and so on.

The review criticizes some aspects of this description of "recollection".

The entry Internalism and Externalism by Poston in IEP

Ted Poston in Poston 2008 of IEP wrote:

The rise of the Internalism-Externalism debate coincides with the rebirth of epistemology after Edmund Gettier’s famous 1963 paper, 'Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?'

The JTB account was recent in accordance with Dutant and others. The JTB account emerged with the abandon of truth marker, of infallibility, and the use of weakened truth markers. The resulting focus was on the requirement for discernibility, because infallibility was abandoned. The requirement for discernibility is what Dutant calls the internalist view. So, of course the attack on the internalist view without the infallibilism view by Gettier coincide with the Internalism-Externalism debate. It's not a coincidence. It almost was forced.

Poston distinguishes two categories of externalism (seen as opposition to internalism): either justification is not needed or it is needed, but does not need to be internal:

Internalists maintained that knowledge requires justification and that the nature of this justification is completely determined by a subject’s internal states or reasons. Externalists denied at least one of these commitments: either knowledge does not require justification or the nature of justification is not completely determined by internal factors alone. On the latter view, externalists maintained that the facts that determine a belief’s justification include external facts such as whether the belief is caused by the state of affairs that makes the belief true, whether the belief is counterfactually dependent on the states of affairs that makes it true, whether the belief is produced by a reliable belief-producing process, or whether the belief is objectively likely to be true.

To understand better what comes next, it seems better to replace "is" by "must be" in the first sentence. It becomes "... the nature of this justification must be completely determined by a subject’s internal states or reasons". There is a subtlety, because, as we will see later, internalism can make use of a basing relation, which is a relation with external supports. It is subtle, because the key point of internalism is still, despite the existence of this basing relation, that the justification must depend on internal factors. With this view, given that it is the negation of internalism, we understand that externalism says that either justification is not needed or the justification is dispensed from using internal factors. In that view, externalism is a weakening of the requirement: there is no need to always be internal. Again, there is the subtlety that the basing relation is not with internal factors. Therefore, in a way, internalism dispenses also itself from always using internal support. One needs to go through the details to understand the distinction between internalism and externalism. Later Poston wrote:

A significant aspect of the issue of how one should understand externalism is whether the term ‘justification’ is a term of logic or merely a place-holder for a necessary condition for knowledge. If ‘justification’ is a term of logic then it invokes notions of consistency, inconsistency, implication, and coherence. On this conception of justification an externalist analysis of the nature of justification is implausible. However, if ‘justification’ is merely a place-holder for a condition in an account of knowledge then the nature of justification might be amenable to an externalist analysis. Externalists have defended both views.

I find the previous extract a bit confusing because, even for internalism, a justification only based on logic (of propositions) is implausible. This is why, I guess, Poston does not say that internalism is restricted to logical justification. The extract would be clearer, but a tautology, if it replaced the expression "a term of logic" with the expression "using internal reasons or mental states". It makes it easy to understand that, when externalists accept that justification must use internal supports, they also say that it is not needed.

Poston presents three complications in the debate:

The simple conception of the I-E debate as a dispute over whether the facts that determine justification are all internal to a person is complicated by several factors. First, some epistemologists understand externalism as a view that knowledge does not require justification while others think it should be understood as an externalist view of justification. Second, there is an important distinction between having good reasons for one’s belief (that is, propositional justification) and basing one’s belief on the good reasons one possesses (that is, doxastic justification). This distinction matters to the nature of the internalist thesis and consequently the I-E debate itself. Third, there are two different and prominent ways of understanding what is internal to a person. This bears on the nature of the internalist thesis and externalist arguments against internalism.

In the case of the first complication, even when justification is not required, Poston seems to say that all epistemologists require that knowledge is analysed in terms of true belief together with something else, but it seems that this fails to consider Williamson's position that knowledge is first. Perhaps one way to understand Williamson's point is that one could define knowledge as inclusive of the doxatic state in such a way that there is no need for justification. If in addition, we argue that the doxatic state is not entirely internal, then this takes care of the basing relation. This seems to say that knowledge is self-justified.

In the case of the second complication, he gives a good example of the distinction between "basing a belief on some reasons" and "having good reasons" and says "this marks the distinction between propositional and doxastic justification": he associates "having" with "propositional" and "basing" with "doxatic". A personal note that help me: this distinction is similar to the distinction between “inductive syllogism” and “induction proper” seen by Groarke in Aristotles's philosophy. It corresponds also to the two phases of science: logical deductive inference from given conjectures and the creative construction of these conjectures. The key point is that the first is logical and the other is not. He next argues, using the idea that basing on [or having] good reasons must be an external relation [i.e., the good reasons must be external], that "internalists should not claim that every factor that determines doxastic [or propositional] justification is internal". He thus concludes that even internalists need a "basing relation" that is external.

The third complication refers to the meaning of "internal":

But what are one’s internal states? One’s internal states could be one’s bodily states, one’s brain states, one’s mental states (if these are different than brain states), or one’s reflectively accessible states. The two most common ways of understanding internalism has been to take internal states as either reflectively accessible states or mental states. The former view is known as accessibilism and it has been championed by Roderick Chisholm and Laurence BonJour (see also Matthias Steup (1999)). The latter view is known as mentalism and it has been defended by Richard Feldman and Earl Conee.

An intereresting point is that the existence of different meaning of "internal" means that there is a debate among internalists and this debate might be as important, if not more important, than the debate internalism/externalism. In particular, the point that mental states might be different than brain [or bodily] states is certainly controversial. The next statement could have been controversial, but since it is about "reflexive accessibility" and "propositionally", and there is a use of "in general", it is not that much controversial:

Since the causal origins of one’s beliefs are not, in general, reflectively accessible they do not determine whether one’s belief is propositionally justified.

Poston summarized the notions of internalism and externalism as follows:

We can think of internalism as the view that all the factors that determine justification apart from a basing requirement are internal. Let us call these justification determining factors, minus the basing requirement, the J-factors. Externalists about justification deny that the J-factors are all internal. [...] At a certain level of generality, externalism is best viewed as stressing the justificatory significance of dependency relations between one’s belief and the environment.

It should be noted that, in this summary, the case "justification is not needed " of externalism is ignored. It seems that Poston has taken a sense of "justification" that is amenable to an external analysis and thus must now be required by externalists. It will become clear later that, for Poston, externalism says that internal justification (with a basing relation) is not needed for knowledge. In other words, internalism is like a requirement for reflexive justification and externalism denies this.

In the next extract, presenting and discussing a classical support for internalism, Poston emphasizes the need in internalism for non propositional support in the case of basic beliefs and that externalism says it is not sufficient:

But not every belief of mine is supported by other beliefs I have. These kinds of beliefs are called basic beliefs, beliefs that are not supported by other beliefs. Consider your belief that there’s a cube on the table. What reason do you have for this belief? It might be difficult to say. Yet internalism requires that you have some reason (typically, the content of one’s experience) that supports this belief if that belief is rational. Externalists think that that is just too tall of an order. In fact one of the early motivations for externalism was to handle the justification of basic beliefs (see Armstrong 1973).

Here is perhaps one central point:

One complication with this, though, is that some externalists think a basic belief require reasons but that reasons should be understood in an externalist fashion (see Alston 1988). I shall ignore this complication because on Alston’s analysis justification depends on factors outside one’s ken.

Alston's externalism has a purpose similar to the purpose of the basing relation. The point is that both Alston and Poston see the need for a connection with external factors. Alston says it is the justification of the internal ground that can be external. Poston says a basing relation is needed to connect with external factors.

Alston, present two other kinds of support for internalism, besides the classical support: deontological and something he calls "Natural Judgment about Cases." I am not covering the deontological arguments here and the "Natural judgment about Cases" seems to repeat the usual arguments for and against naturalism.

I am stopping here, because the whole thing seems to be centered within a view that "external" support (not external to the subject, but external to the propositional belief) or a warrant is needed. This corresponds to the fact that Williamson, Putnam, Popper, etc., who supported a different kind of knowledge that is neither internal or external, are not mentioned nor cited in the entry.

General points not classified

(Plantinga 1993), (Nozick 1981), (Dretske 2000, Conclusive Reasons (1971)) and (Dretske 1981) have been cited in (Steup 2005) as sources that present an externalist view.

Role of ordinary language analysis

Ordinary language analysis plays an important role in contemporary epistemology. Here are some extracts on this subject. Jonathan Kvanvig wrote:

In the context of the Gettier Problem, this approach is familiar. Implicit in this methodology is the commonsense influence of G. E. Moore and the obvious fact that ordinary language is replete with attributions of knowledge, so the assumption was that the skeptic had to be wrong and that a suitable account of this particular piece of natural language would have to characterize it in terms that made it compatible with fallibility and the merely probable character of the reasons at our disposal.

and later adds:

A similar worry applies to knowledge-first approaches. Once we abandon the idea that epistemology is investigating the scope of a term of ordinary language, we lose the standard basis for thinking there is some unified thing that all epistemologists are investigating.

Jonathan Lopez wrote:

Epistemologists have traditionally approached questions about the nature of knowledge and epistemic justification using informal methods, such as intuition, introspection, everyday concepts, and ordinary language.

Riccardo Chiaradonna says the connection between ordinary language and scientific knowledge was considered in the Roman Empire by Galen:

Basically, Galen takes dialectic to be a study of ordinary language that aims to clarify our current linguistic practice based on common conceptions. It is through dialectic that we come to connect our current linguistic practice, consisting in calling a certain condition ‘disease’, with a description which can in principle be shared by all those who employ the term ‘disease’ correctly. And through dialectic it is also possible for us to detect those features in ordinary language that are potentially misleading (i.e., ambiguity). The interpretation of ordinary language is thus the first step in scientific inquiry.

Mark Kaplan says that ordinary language philosophy played a role in John Langshaw Austin's philosophy:

The most remarkable thing about how Austin sought to counter these arguments is the extent to which he appealed to what we would ordinarily say and do—the extent to which Austin appears to have presupposed its being a condition of adequacy, on what we say by way of doing epistemology, that it accord faithfully with what we would say in ordinary circumstances. This commitment to pursuing epistemology (and philosophy in general) in a way that respects some such condition of adequacy—this commitment to what came to be called “ordinary language philosophy” (a term with which Austin was not entirely happy (Austin 1979b: 182))—is, depending on one’s point of view, either one of the strengths of his work, or what most undermines it.

Michael Bradie wrote that evolutionary epistemology rules out epistemologies based on ordinary language analysis:

For Campbell (1974a: 413), evolutionary picture of human development minimally takes cognizance of and is compatible with “man’s status as a product of biological and social evolution.” Campbell characterizes his approach to epistemology as “descriptive” rather than “ana- lytic” or prescriptive. A descriptive epistemology is “descriptive of man as knower.” Descriptive epistemologies, minimally, put constraints on prescriptive epistemologies. So, Campbell argues, an evolutionary picture of human development rules out (1) the view that truth is divinely revealed to humans; (2) direct realism, which assumes that human beings have veridical perception of the world; and, (3) epistemologies based on ordinary language analysis.

But, Henk Visser points out that philosophers such as Wittgenstein were aware of the distinction between ordinary language and scientific language:

In fact, there is no denying that [Wittgenstein] was capable of distinguishing between sensory and physical objects when discussing physics and that he sometimes did so. For example, he writes: "the propositions of physics usually deal with other objects than those of our ordinary language."

Visser adds next:

The joker in this claim is what Wittgenstein means by "ordinary language", since most mind-matter dualists who hold an indirect epistemology are likely to identify most of the objects of physics with the objects referred to in what they call "ordinary language" whereas this is not the case with Machian-type neutral monists.

I find it interesting, a way to address the mind-body problem, as many say.

Laurence Bonjour wrote:

A second, quite different attempt to defend the rationality of induction while still conceding the correctness of Hume’s basic argument has been advanced by adherents of the approach to philosophy known as “ordinary language philosophy.” The basic claim of this once popular philosophical approach is that the traditional problems of philosophy, including the problem of induc- tion and the other main problems of epistemology, are “pseudo-problems” that arise from misuse of language or inadequate attention to ordinary lin- guistic usage. Such supposed problems, it is claimed, need to be “dissolved” rather than solved: they evaporate under careful scrutiny.

However, in the same book, he adds:

As one critic has nicely put the point, the ordinary language defense of induction seems to amount to no more than this: “If you use inductive procedures you can call yourself ‘reasonable’ [by common-sense standards]—and isn’t that nice!”

Andrew Cullison outlines "some of the methods that contemporary epistemologists typically employ":

[O]ne central task in epistemology is to try and understand the nature of various epistemic properties (or relations) such as knowledge, justification, warrant, reasonable, and rational. A common method to do this is to begin with obvious cases of knowledge (or justification, or reasonable belief) and perhaps some obvious cases where knowledge is absent or lacking. We then try to abstract some general features that the obvious cases have in common.

and

Another method that is sometimes relied on in epistemology is to examine ordinary language uses of the term “knows” and its cognates, and construct theories that best capture patterns of linguistic use of those terms.

and what he calls the « standard method » :

A third method in epistemology involves developing theories that explain intuitions that we have about the connection between knowledge and other concepts or properties. Conversely we might rule epistemic theories out because they entailed that there was no connection between some epistemic property and some other property (when intuitively there is such a connection).

Alvin I. Goldman wrote:

What kinds of doxastic categories are appropriate for the human mind, and hence for human epistemology? This is a question that cannot be answered a priori; nor should it be answered by uncritical acceptance of the catego­ ries of ordinary language. It should be answered only with the help of cog­ nitive science.

Jonathan Kvanvig wrote:

To the great dissatisfaction of some, however, I won’t engage in extended discussion about exactly what the standards of proper theory construction are in philosophy, since my stated goal concerns the nature and value of understanding rather than philosophical metatheory. I bring the issue up only to prevent simplistic appeals to ordinary intuitions about the conditions under which ordinary language will allow the predication of understanding in a given case. The proper response to such purported refutations should be the same as the response we give to those who claim that knowledge doesn’t entail true belief on the basis of my daughter’s exclamation after the 2004 election: ‘I just knew Kerry would win!’ The proper response is that when doing epistemology we are focusing on a particularly significant intellectual accomplishment, one which ordinary language makes visible to us on occasion and through a glass darkly at least. Beyond that, ordinary language is the ladder we kick away having once climbed, to put the point enigmatically and hyperbolically.

Nat Hansen wrote:

In an ordinary bird-watching situation, no one would count the fact that the person who claims to know that there’s a goldfinch in the garden hasn’t ruled out the alternative that what she takes to be a bird is in fact a stuffed goldfinch (or the alternative that she is dreaming that there is a goldfinch in the garden) as disqualifying her as knowing that there’s a goldfinch in the garden. Do Austin’s observations about how we ordinarily use ‘knows’ pose a challenge to the skep- tical argument?

and later adds:

In his criticism of the direct move from the ordinary use of ‘knows’ to the meaning of ‘knows’, Stroud grants the data that Austin cites about ordinary use. But another objection to classic or- dinary language philosophy disputes Premise 1 in the constructive project, by challenging the legitimacy of the data the project is based on. Mates (1964) (originally published in 1958) argues that ordinary language philosophers employ unreliable methods when collecting data about how we ordinarily use expressions, and he cites the fact that there isn’t agreement about how the word ‘voluntary’ is ordinarily used even among advocates of ordinary language philosophy as evidence that the facts about ordinary use are murkier than classic ordinary language philosophers assume.
Buckwalter (2010) and Feltz and Zarpentine (2010) are contemporary examples of a Mates- style challenge to the contextualist’s constructive ordinary language project in epistemology.9

Markus Lammenranta discusses the limitation of ordinary knowledge analysis:

We need some pretheoretic understanding of the target concept or property if we are to evaluate the different theories. It is often assumed that we already possess such an understanding because we have all learnt the language to which the term 'justification' belongs. That is why we have intuitions about the applicability of the concept that we can use to test the theories. However, it is far from clear that there is any ordinary concept of epistemic justification. The term 'epistemically justified' does not have such a customary use in ordinary language as the term 'to know', as William Alston (1989, p. 5) has pointed out. And even if there were such a concept, many epistemologists would not seem to be interested in it. 'Justification' is a term of art in epistemology.

It is also understood that ordinary language analysis is not sufficient. For example,

Notes

Knowledge vs understanding

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for Understanding says:

The topic of understanding was lost and then “recovered” in contemporary discussions in epistemology and the philosophy of science.[...]
The ancient Greek word episteme is at the root of our contemporary word “epistemology”, and among philosophers it has been common to translate episteme simply as “knowledge” (see, e.g., Parry 2003 [2020]). For the last several decades, however, a case has been made that “understanding” is a better translation of episteme.

Christoph Baumberger wrote:

understanding-why and objectual understanding are not reducible to one another and neither identical with nor a species of the corresponding or any other type of knowledge. My discussion reveals important characteristics of these two types of understanding and has consequences for propositional understanding.

Dutant's new story about knowledge

Dutant (2015) wrote:

[In the new story replacing the justified true belief story], knowledge consists in having a belief that bears a discernible mark of truth. [...] [The mark] is discernible if [...] a sufficiently attentive subject believes that a belief has it if and only if it has it. Requiring a mark of truth makes the view infallibilist. Requiring it to be discernible makes the view internalist. I call the view Classical Infallibilism.

It is strange that discernibility is not required in his definition of infallibility, but apparently he needs it. Anyway, it is just a definition and what I feel should be called infallibility, he calls it classical infallibility. Classical Infallibilists do not have trouble classifying Gettier cases as cases in which one does not know, because, in the Gettier cases, what is discerned as truth does not actually guarantees truth. However, it has a problem in finding something that qualifies as truth. Dutant continues:

Early on, Classical Infallibilists divided into two camps: Dogmatists, who thought that many of our beliefs bear discernible marks of truth, and Sceptics, who thought that almost none does. The two were in stalemate for centuries.

We will come back to this later. First, we must determine what he meant by "Early on" and get more context. Dutant continues:

In modern times, however, Dogmatism became increasingly untenable. That revived Probabilist Scepticism, a brand of Scepticism according to which even though we do not know much, we are justified in believing many things. But most strikingly, that spurred Idealism, a brand of Dogmatism that hopes to restore the idea that our beliefs bear discernible marks of truth by adopting a revisionary metaphysics.

Most likely, the Probabilist Scepticism of Dutant corresponds to the scepticism of Hume (unless in his definition, Hume was a pure sceptic, because beliefs were not knowledge—Hume did not accept weakened markers of truth for knowledge) and his idealism corresponds to the idealism of Berkeley and Kant at the end of the Enlightenment era. This would mean that he refers to a transition that happened with the birth of idealism at the end of the Enlightenment, a brand of dogmatism because Kant a priori has a mark of truth that is not there in scepticism. So the "stalemate for centuries" ended when the Enlightenment era ended. Dutant continues:

In mid-twentieth century analytic philosophy Idealism fell apart and Scepticism was barred by common sense philosophy and ordinary language philosophy.

It's not clear, why he calls this other era analytic philosophy Idealism. I don't think Kant was an analytic philosopher. Perhaps, he simply refers to an era after Kant where logic played a role in philosophy within the idealism perspective. It might be related to the turn to transcendental-idealism of Edmond Husserl in 1913 and it felt apart quickly in the 50s. Actually, it could also be all the logical approach of Bolzano and later of the Brentano school.

Let's go back to the division scepticism/dogmatism. It corresponds to the amount of truth markers allowed: scepticism allow little while dogmatism allow more. A question is how this division relates to the empiricism/rationalism division, which is more often, I believe, cited when we consider the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods. Empiricism is not the same as scepticism, because one has to do with empirical experience and the other with not accepting truth markers.

However, it is difficult to be an empiricist and not sceptical. The idea of empiricism is to reject dogma. It might be full of dogma, but it's the idea nevertheless. Dogma are the only way to consider that knowledge is marked with truth. It's not something that an empiricist would want to say, but in practice the empiricist must face this reality nevertheless and that tends to make the empiricist a sceptic. Well, later we will see that the main claim of Dutant is that Infallibilism leads to Scepticism. So, if this is true, then empiricism or whatever within Classical Infallibilism must certainly lead to scepticism.

Conversely, if you are a sceptic, by definition you are not a dogmatic, so it is reasonable to say that you cannot be a rationalist, because the latter requires premises and premises tend to have dogmatic truth markers, but that makes you an empiricist by definition. So, under the assumptions used in the previous reasoning, the two divisions are the same. Well, one strong assumption is that premises tend to have dogmatic truth markers. On the contrary, critical rationalism says the opposite, but still it shows a strong connection between these two divisions.

In the transition that ended the stalemate, Dutant argues that both, the dogmatic (usually rationalist) side and the sceptic (usually empiricist) side, of Classical Infallibilism were criticized, but that was not a rejection of Classical Infallibilism—the notion of discernable truth markers was kept. First dogmatism was criticized because it had too much dogmatic truth markers. That revived Probabilist Scepticism on the other side. This is Hume scepticism, if we understood well. Scepticism was criticized, because somehow these dogmatic truth markers are needed to have (justified) knowledge. That revived idealism, a brand of dogmatism on the other side. This is the Idealism of Kant, if we understood well.

The rejection of Classical Infallibilism, as mentioned before, happened later in the mid-twentieth century. I guess criticism on both sides became too strong and the notion of discernable truth markers had to be abandoned. Dutant explains that which replacement for Classical Infallibilism was used depended on which of its two requirements: discernibility or Infallibility was abandoned. (Ok here we see that Dutant needed a name for the requirement that we have a (dogmatic) truth marker. He called it infallibility.) Some rejected the infallibility requirement and replaced it with a use of weakened truth markers, but others rejected the discernibility requirement. This is the subtle point in Dutant's story: we can either weaken the truth markers (lose infallibility) or say that they are not weakened (keep infallibility), but we cannot discern them well. About those who use weakened truth markers, Dutant wrote:

Like Probabilistic Sceptics, they held that a mere indication of truth justifies belief—where a mere indication of truth is a property that somehow indicates the truth of a belief without entailing it. What they added was that such an indication, in conjunction with truth, would be sufficient for knowledge. That is the familiar Justified True Belief analysis that Gettier refuted. That is also the source of the Internalist views that insist on a discernible condition on justified belief or knowledge.

Well, it's not clear to me that Probabilistic Sceptics such as Hume did not consider (weakly) justified belief as knowledge. I am not even sure that they would care about such a level of formalization. There might be an anachronism here. It seems very much that this mid-twentieth transition seen by Durant is very much dependent upon what definitions were used, but definitions should not be that important. There is no real difference, except this formal definition, between the modern and the mid-twentieth sceptics. The notion of an internalist view makes sense. A discernment is an internal concept, in a way. About those who reject discernibility, but keep Infallibilism, Durant wrote:

Others rejected the discernibility requirement instead. They maintained the idea that knowledge requires a mark of truth but they did not require it to be discernible. That is the source of Externalist views in epistemology. The demise of Classical Infallibilism as a theory of knowledge was quick and complete: once they gave it up analytic epistemologists never looked back. Nevertheless it seems to linger on in the way some epistemologists think of evidence.

Well, this group is not very clear to me. What does it mean to accept a marker of truth that cannot be discerned. The very notion of a "marker" that cannot be discerned is strange. But Durant refers to them as the analytic philosophers that rejected the discernibility requirement. I suspect that by an acceptance of a "marker of truth" with no discernibility, Durant refers to the acceptance of a notion of truth in logic. It is interesting, in particular, that Popper avoided the notion of truth before he was convinced by the logician Tarski that it was a valid concept.

Also, it will be useful to understand the relation between the division internalist/externalist here and the general notion of internalist versus externalist in philosophy. The internalist view says that we cannot explain the world without considering desires and beliefs. The externalist view says that we don't need that. So, it makes sense to say that a vision of knowledge where belief in a marker of truth is a requirement is classified as internalist.

Short story of the Justified True Belief account

Here is how Durant describes the short story of the Justified true belief definition of knowledge:

Woozley (1949,181-184), Malcolm (1952, 179–80) and Ayer (1956, 21) all took the [previous] infallible mental state view to have sceptical consequences. That was deemed unacceptable and prompted Malcolm, Ayer and Chisholm to defend the idea that fallible justification and truth were sufficient for knowledge. Gettier (1963, 121n) was perhaps the first to note that a formally similar account appeared in Plato. Soon some called the Justified True Belief analysis “traditional” and by 1967 (with Anthony Quinton) the Legend coalesced.

I guess that the infallible mental state refers to knowledge with a discernible marker of truth. So, apparently the falling apart in the mid-twentieth century of the analytic philosophy Idealism (with its markers of truth) refers to the work of Woozley, Malcom and Ayer. In principle, the replacement for Classical Infallibilism depends on which of its two requirements: discernibility or Infallibility was abandoned. In this case, it seems that Malcom, etc. opted for the abandon of Infallibility. Also, the JTB view on knowledge seems to be the internalist view, because we keep discernability.

The natural question is what is the other view of knowledge that correspond to the abandon of discernability? It will be interesting to know that. What is the externalist view today, if it is still alive? Well, it seems to be the analytic view, but perhaps not any kind of analytic, but the analytic that reject psychologism and the view of knowledge as belief. Who are the founder of the analytic view, just as Malcolm, Ayer and Chisholm are the founder of the JTB view.

Modifications of Infallibilism and the main claim: Infallibilism leads to Scepticism.

Dutant needs to modify the simple definition of infallibilism given earlier. One of them is to support his main claim: Infallibilism leads to Scepticism. That is not a surprising claim. I might not have much to say about it.

History of Classical Infallibilism

Dutant has a section on Classical Infallibilism in Hellenistic Epistemology and another, section 4, on Classical Infallibilism in Western Philosophy, which has subsections: 4.1. Medieval epistemology, 4.2. Easy cases: Descartes and Locke, 4.3. Open cases: Plato and Kant, 4.4. Idealist Dogmatism (eighteenth to mid-twentieth century), 4.5. Probabilist Scepticism (Oops he gives Popper and Peirce as examples, but Popper simply accepted Hume's scepticism. Perhaps the distinction is that Hume would have rejected total scepticism), 4.6. Induction and Infallibilism

Dutant wrote in section 4.5:

Throughout history we find philosophers who acknowledge the lack of discernible marks of truth while overtly rejecting Scepticism. They are not counterexamples to the New Story. They are Probabilist Sceptics.

Well, it's true that with a lower criteria, it's hard to be (formally) a sceptic, because, in a way, the scepticism is hidden in the criteria for knowledge and cannot be stated formally any more. It still a lot around definitions. Yes, they are Probabilist Sceptics, because the markers of truth can be weakened, not really markers of truth formally.

The birth of analytic philosophy

We commonly define epistemology as the theory of knowledge. Because it asks what is knowledge, it seems that epistemology could become the study of anything, i.e., the study of whatever it is decided that knowledge is. In comparison, physics is the theory of the material world, but this material world is defined by the current technology that allows us to observe it. To get to the same status, we would have to define knowledge in terms of the technology that allows us to observe it, but do we observe knowledge? Do we have a technology that has for object knowledge? We can define such a technology and indirectly define knowledge, but will it be the "right" technology to define the knowledge that really epistemology should study? It all depends on the technology. Herbert B. Enderton in its classical textbook A Mathematical Introduction to Logic says that mathematical logic is a "mathematical model of deductive thought". So, here we have a model of some aspect of knowledge, because deduction is part of the dynamic of knowledge. There is a kind of technology in which this model can be interpreted, just as in physics we interpret mathematical models in terms of physical technologies. This was at the basis of analytical philosophy. The deductive part was not sufficient. So, the idea was to find a logic for the inductive part. It's not surprising that analytical philosophy emerged in the early 20th century after mathematical logic became popular through the work of Whitehead, Russell and others. The main founders of analytic philosophy were Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, both experts in mathematical logic. There is also this view:

16. Philosophical schools in Britain and the USA influenced by the Vienna Circle are usually referred to as Analytical Philosophy. Analytical philosophers were, for example, Charlie Dunbar Broad, Richard Mervyn Hare and Charles Leslie Stevenson (Hans Joachim Stérig, Kleine Weltgeschichte der Philosophie, Vol. 2 1980), p. 332.

— Michael Burkard, Conflicting Philosophies and International Trade Law

From Bolzano Wissenschaftslehre (1837) to the Vienna circle (1922)

First, let see how Bolzano himself differentiates his view of logic with his contemporaries' view:

that a very essential difference between my plan and that of others consists first and foremost in the fact that I endeavour to speak of presentations, sentences, and truths in themselves, whereas in all textbooks of logic thus far (as many as I at least know) all these objects are treated only as (real or possible) appearances in the mind of a thinking entity, only as modes of thinking.

— Bolzano, in Rollinger 1999, Chap 2.2

Now, let see Robin D. Rollinger description of Bolzano's position on logic (as viewed in the mid-ninetieth century):

Now truth, according to Bolzano, can be ascribed either to sentences in themselves or to judgments (which are of course included among the sentences in thought). Any given sentence in itself must moreover be either true or false/ the true ones being referred to as "truths in themselves". Bolzano's defense of this notion of truth is pivotal in his rejection of the view that logic is concerned with "modes of thinking". In response to those who regard the laws of logic, e.g., the law of contradiction, as laws about the conditions under which the thoughts of any rational being can be true, he raises the question how we know these conditions must obtain for any rational being.

Bolzano answers his own question:

that we know (or believe to know) this only because we see (or in any case believe to see) that this law is a condition which holds for truths in themselves. Thus, we claim, for instance, that the law of contradiction is a universal law of thought and consequently belongs to the pure part of logic, only because and insofar as we presuppose that this law contains a truth in itself and therefore a condition with which all other truths must accord. If we know that something is a universally valid law of thought only from the fact we have known before that it is a truth and a conditional sentence for other truths, then it is obviously a shift away from the correct viewpoint if one pretends to deal with the general laws of thought where one is at bottom establishing the universal laws of truth itself.

Denis Fisette wrote: "This empiricist orientation, by which Zimmerman characterizes the philosophical position common to all of the Philosophical Society’s founding members, is indeed the common denominator of the history of the Philosophical Society up to the Vienna Circle. [...] This has also been noticed by Neurath in the historical portion of his book, in which logical empiricism appears to be the culmination of these empiricist orientations expressed within the history of Austrian philosophy since Bolzano. [...] In 1914, the Philosophical Society established the Bolzano Commission, whose mandate was to prepare the edition of Bolzano’s complete works, including the manuscripts discovered in Zimmerman’s archives. But only Bolzano’s Paradoxes of the Infinite and the first two volumes of his Wissenschaftslehre were published by the Society." Fisette then quote Neurath (emphasis is mine):

Brentano and his students time and again showed their understanding of men like Bolzano (Wissenschaftslehre, 1837) and others who were working toward a rigorous new foundation of logic. In particular Alois Höfler (1853-1922) put this side of Brentano’s philosophy in the foreground before a forum in which, through Mach’s and Boltzmann’s influence, the adherents of the scientific world conception were strongly represented. In the Philosophical Society at the University of Vienna numerous discussions took place under Höfler’s direction, concerning questions of the foundation of physics and allied epistemological and logical problems. The Philosophical Society published Prefaces and Introductions to Classical Works on Mechanics (1899), as well as the individual papers of Bolzano (edited by Höfler and Hahn, 1914 and 1921). In Brentano’s Viennese circle there was the young Alexius von Meinong (1870-82, later professor in Graz), whose theory of objects (1907) has certainly some affinity to modern theories of concepts and whose pupil Ernst Mally (Graz) also worked in the field of logistics. The early writings of Hans Pichler (1909) also belong to these circles.

— Neurath, Manifesto, 1929, p. 303

In Vienna, the logical tendency of the Brentano School was professed by a man who, by launching discussions on the foundations of physics, triggered the beginnings of the Vienna Circle at the onset of the 20 th century: Alois Höfler, Professor of Pedagogy at the University of Vienna. He was, for a long time, responsible for the publications of the “Philosophical Society of the University of Vienna”; these publications reveal a dedication in confronting the same problems to which the Vienna School would later dedicate itself.

— Neurath, Le développement du Cercle de Vienne et l’avenir de l’empirisme logique, 1935

Psychologism in epistemology

David Pitt wrote:

But there is another, more sophisticated version of the view, to which Frege’s objections are not so clearly relevant. One may propose that the logical objects in question be identified, not with psychological tokens, but with psychological types. Call this sort of view “type-psychologism.” If (as I will assume) types are themselves mind-independent abstract objects, then they are not subjective but objective, and it is not the case that relations holding among their tokens are ipso facto to be construed as formal relations holding among the types themselves. In

Laurence Bonjour rejects psychologism in epistemology, not in the following sense that there is no psychology in epistemology, but in the sense that it is already a part of traditional epistemology. Specifically, he considers that the role of what he calls minimal psychologism, conceptual psychologism and meliorative psychologism can hardly be denied by epistemologists, but yet he says these do not seem "to be in any way incompatible with the main thrust of the traditional Cartesian approach to epistemology or to provide any real support for the idea that traditional epistemology should be abandoned."

Matteo Santarelli says:

The psychologism vs. anti-psychologism debate is comprised of two contrasting epistemological and philosophical standpoints. From an anti-psychologist standpoint, psychologism consists of confusion between the domain of logic and the domain of psychology, which should properly remain separated. The resulting confusion is considered to have damaging epistemological consequences.

Giada Fratantonio wrote:

To begin with, note that Internalism and Externalism are rather silent on what evidence is. Both views are compatible with psychologism, the thesis that evidence consists of mental states, as well as with propositionalism, the view that evidence consists of propositions.

Mitova 2014 is mentioned by Fratantonio as an expample of Externalism that embraces psychologism. Perhaps the key sentences in Mitova are:

I then show that truthy psychologism accommodates all of the roles that epistemologists have expected the concept of evidence to play (§7). Thus, truthy psychologism provides a viable alternative to existing views on the ontology of evidence: it does justice to the anti-psychologist’s intuition that the evidence connects us appropriately to the world, without getting bogged down with his less salutary commitments; and it allows us to accommodate all the roles canvassed for evidence

McCain wrote:

Answers to the question of what evidence or good reasons are fall into two main categories: psychologism and anti- psychologism. The former holds that evidence consists of psychological items, while the latter holds that evidence consist of non-psychological items. The most prominent form of psychologism holds that evidence consists solely of non-factive mental states or events.

Relative truth

Roman Murawski and Jan Woleński wrote:

Twardowski, following Bolzano and Brentano, rejected the view that there exist relative truths, though he was interested in categorizing the reasons some had for accepting some truths as relative. One such reason, according to Twardowki’s survey, stems from elliptical formulations of some judgments through the use of occasional words, like ‘now’, ‘here’, ‘I’, etc.—for example the apparent relativity of the truth of ‘‘It is raining today’’ to a time and a place. Other relativist arguments, he notes, point out the relativity of various evaluations (for example, of ‘bathing is healthy’) to some salient person, or appeal to the view that empirical hypotheses are neither true or false, but always only probable. Twardowski held that all these arguments are erroneous. [...] In particular, on his view one should sharply distinguish sentences from complete propositions. [...] Hence, though some sentences are relatively true or false, only complete propositions are absolutely true or false. Twardowski also pointed out that the relativity of truth is at odds with principles of excluded middle and non-contradiction.

He continues:

In general, he had doubts as to whether typical wordings of the correspondence theory (the theory of ‘transcend- ent correspondence’ as he called it) were satisfactory. He accused them of being based on unclear metaphysical assumptions concerning what propositions were. Although he agreed that correspondence theories do not offer criteria of truth which would allow one to recognize which judgments were true, he did not consider this suffi- cient ground for objection. Twardowski also criticized various non-classical defin- itions of truth and in particular he argued against pragmatism and coherentism on the grounds that they violated the metalogical principles of excluded middle and contradiction.

Early criticism of psychologism

Wolfgang Huemer wrote (see https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265563675): "Husserl characterizes logical psychologism as a position according to which the normative rules of logic are based on descriptive laws of empirical psychology."

He then explains that Husserl's view on psychologism was influenced by Fredge: "In 1894, Frege harshly criticized Husserl in his review of Philosophy of Arithmetic. 'In reading this work,' Frege writes, 'I was able to gauge the devastation caused by the influx of psychology into logic' (Frege, 1894/1972, 337). It seems that this critique, even though it was quite harsh, had considerable influence on Husserl, for he said more than three decades later in a conversation with Boyce Gibson that '[i]t hit the nail on the head'. "

He also explains that Husserl did not at first understood Bolzano. Husserl stated in 1939 that when he first read Bolzano’s Wissenschaftslehre he "mistook, however, his original thoughts on presentations, propositions, truths `in themselves’ as metaphysical absurdities". Husserl suggests that Bolzano's philosophy was not well known. Herbert Spiegelberg wrote: “Andrew Osborn visited Husserl 1935 in the Black Forest to ask him about Frege’s influence on the abandonment of the psychological approach of the Philosophie der Arithmetik. Husserl concurred, but also mentioned his chance discovery of Bolzano’s work in a second-hand book store.”

In https://www-jstor-org.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/stable/pdf/2107768.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A668fca51c021946de3494fdc6717755b Robert Hanna mentions a typical expression of Frege's attack in 1918-19 on the heresy of "logical psychologism":

"Not everything is an idea. Otherwise psychology would contain all the sciences within it, or at least it would be the supreme judge over all the sciences. Otherwise psychology would rule even over logic and mathematics. But nothing would be a greater misunderstanding of mathematics than making subordinate to psychology. Neither logic nor mathematics has the task of investigating minds and contents of consciousness owned by individual men."

Robert Hanna says that Frege's critique of psychologism goes at least as far back as The Foundations. of Arithmetic, second revised ed., trans. J. L. Austin (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1980), pp. v-vii, 33-38; first published in 1884.

Notes

Timeline of philosophers, inventors and scientists

I started to create this table to have a view of the research context of the philosophers, including its scientific part. However, I got intrigued by the three worlds philosophy of Bernard Bolzano as early as 1837. So, the table as a bias around Bolzano and its influence. It is also strongly influenced by the duality between rationalism and empiricism (as seen by Kant). Rationalism (in the form of logic is attacked by Hume) and this creates psychological empiricism. Kant says he proposes a synthesis with his view that the mind constructs the world based on a priori + things in themselves, but can never access things in themselves. Hegel (not mentioned) gets rid of things in themselves. The next phase, introduced by Peirce, is pragmatism which has two components: knowledge is problem oriented and fallibilism. In Peirce, these two components can not be separated. I am not sure what is analytic philosophy, which seems another phase. It's described in Analytic philosophy as a philosophy that put the emphasis on language and make use of mathematical logic and mathematics and to a lesser degree natural science. This is in opposition to continental philosophy.

Philosophers, inventors and scientists. From Copernicus to contemporaries.

Name	Born-Died	Advisor(s)	Philosophical contribution(s)	Philosophy	Era
Nicolaus Copernicus	1473-1543	Domenico Maria Novara da Ferrara	Heliocentric model (1543)		Renaissance
Giordano Bruno	1548-1600		Popularized and extended Copernicus model (1584)		Renaissance
Francis Bacon	1561-1626		Valerius Terminus: Of the Interpretation of Nature (1603)	Empiricist (Knowledge comes from observations)	Renaissance
Galileo Galilei	1564-1642		Galilean telescope (1609)		Renaissance
Johannes Kepler	1571-1630	Michael Maestlin	Astronomia nova (1609)		Renaissance
René Descartes	1596-1650		Discourse on the method (1637)	Rationalist (Must doubt our senses) Dualist (Pineal gland junction)	Renaissance-Enlightenment
Thomas Hobbes	1588-1679		Leviathan (1651)	Empiricist	Renaissance-Enlightenment
Baruch Spinoza	1632-1677		The Ethics (published 1677)	Rationalist	Renaissance-Enlightenment
John Locke	1632-1704		An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)	Empiricist	Renaissance-Enlightenment
Isaac Newton	1642-1727	Isaac Barrow	Principia (1687)		Enlightenment
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz	1646-1716	Erhard Weigel,Jakob Thomasius,Christiaan Huygens	Discours de métaphysique (1686) & La Monadologie (1714)	Rationalist	Enlightenment
George Berkeley	1685-1753		An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709)	Idealist-Empiricist	Enlightenment
David Hume	1711-1776		A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)	Empiricist	Enlightenment
Immanuel Kant	1724-1804	Martin Knutzen	Critique of pure raison (1781)	Transcendental Idealist (midway between empiricist and rationalist-knowledge of world is constructed)	Enlightenment-Late modern
Antoine Lavoisier	1743-1794	Guillaume-François Rouelle	Recognized oxygen (1778)		Enlightenment-Late modern
Bernard Bolzano	1781-1848	Franz Josef Gerstner	Theory of Science [which uses a three worlds view] (1837)	Critic Kant's vagueness	Enlightenment-Late modern
Michael Faraday	1791-1867		Law of induction (1831) & Faraday cage (1836)		Enligthenment-Late modern
William Whewell	1794-1866	John Gough	Coined the term scientist (1833) & the third Bridgewater Treatise, Astronomy and General Physics considered with reference to Natural Theology (1833) & The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded Upon Their History (1840)	Idealist (midway between empiricist and rationalist)	Enlightenment-Late modern
Robert von Zimmermann	1824-1898	Bernard Bolzano	Supporter of the University of Vienna Philosophical society (1888)
James Clerk Maxwell	1831-1879		On Faraday's lines of force (1855)		Late modern
Charles Sanders Peirce	1839-1914		Founder of pragmatism (1870)	Pragmatist - Empiricist (knowledge relative to problems + fallibilism)	Late modern
William James	1842-1910		The Will to Believe (1896) Pragmatism: A new name for some old ways of thinking (1907)	Pragmatist - Radical empiricist (relations between things in experience + accept religious beliefs)	Late modern
Alois Höfler	1853-1922		Brought Bernard Bolzano's view to the University of Vienna Philosophical Society and indirectly to the Vienna Circle		Late modern-Contemporary
			University of Vienna Philosophical Society (1888–1938)
Edmund Husserl	1859-1938	Leo Königsberger	Philosophy of mathematics (1891) & Prolegomana; Logical Investigations, Vol. 1 (1900)
Alfred North Whitehead	1861-1947		Principia Mathematica (with Russell) (1910-13)	Process philosophy	Late modern-Contemporary
Bertrand Russell	1872-1970	Alfred North Whitehead	The Problems of Philosophy (1912)	Analytic-Logical atomism (radical empiricism)	Late modern-Contemporary
George Edward Moore	1873-1956	James Ward	Common sense philosophy (1925)	Analytic	Late modern-Contemporary
Albert Einstein	1879-1955		Special Relativity (1905) & General Relativity (1916)		Late modern-Contemporary
Niels Bohr	1885-1962		Bohr model of atoms (1913)		Late modern-Contemporary
			First world war (1914-1918)
			Vienna Circle (1924-1936)
Ludwig Wittgenstein	1889-1951	Bertrand Russell	Tractatus (1918-22) & Philosophical Investigations (1931, published 1953)	Analytic	Contemporary
			Second World War (1939-1945)
Willard Van Orman Quine	1908-2000	Alfred North Whitehead	On What There Is (1948) & Dogmas of Empiricism (1951)	Analytic	Contemporary
Hilary Putnam	1926-2016	Hans Reichenbach	Reason, Truth and History (1981)	Analytic	Contemporary

Timeline of philosophers with a position on Justified True Belief definition of knowledge

I found the article The analysis of knowledge in SEP useful. It says that the existence of JTB as a classic notion of knowledge is a legend created by its attackers.

Philosophers with a position on Justified True Belief definition of knowledge.

Name	First relevant contribution	Date	Possibly swapping contributions	Position	Formation/Specific expertise	Advisor(s)
Charles Pailthorp	Knowledge As Justified, True Belief	1969			Professor of Philosophy at Evergreen State College
Irving Thalberg	Justification is not transmissible through valid deduction	1973		Not deductively transmissible	Professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago	Donald Davidson
Keith Lehrer	Coherence theory of justification in epistemology	1990			Ph.D. in philosophy from Brown University	Richard Taylor and Roderick Chisholm
Dale Jacquette	Is nondefectively justified true belief knowledge?	1996		Epistemically evidentially relevant	American analytic philosopher
Jennifer Nagel	Epistemic intuitions	2007	Lay denial of knowledge for justified true beliefs (2013)	Denial study	Epistemology, philosophy of mind, and metacognition. Descartes and Locke. Professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto.	John McDowell
John Turri	Is knowledge justified true belief?	2010			Experimental philosophy and cognitive science at Waterloo	Ernest Sosa
Julien Dutant	The legend of the justified true belief analysis	2015		(Must read-cited a lot)	PhD in philosophy at the University of Paris in 2010.	Pascal Engel
Rohit Jivanlal Parikh	Justified True Belief: Plato, Gettier, and Turing	2017		Plato deep rejection, Relative to agent.	American mathematician, logician (traditional logic), and philosopher
Adriana Renero	Coauthor with Rohit Jivanlal Parikh				Postdoc at the NYU Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness and Research Scholar in the Philosophy of Mind at the Saul Kripke Center
Job de Grefte	Epistemic justification and epistemic luck	2018		Not by luck	Epistemology with focus on the Internalism/Externalism debate

Epistemic logic and Gettier

Prof. Robert Stalnaker wrote in his lecture notes for Modal Logic in Fall 2009 : "Epistemic logic began in 1962 with Jaakko Hintikka's classic book "Knowledge and Belief". The basic idea has been taken up in non-philosophical applications such as theoretical computer science, where it turns out to deliver a way to understand how a distributed system works at a certain level of abstraction. [...] When I was in grad school, the project of patching the justified true belief analysis of knowledge was fashionable, because it was so well defined as to what you have to do. [...] Edmund Gettier's famous three-page paper – in which he challenges the justified true belief analysis of knowledge with counterexamples – was very close in time to Hintikka's work in formal semantics. Kripke developed modal logic and Hintikka was the one who applied framework to knowledge. "

The view of Nicholas Rescher is also interesting. He accepts JTB though he knows about counter-examples:

By way of philosophical methodology Rescher adopts a view he calls philosophical standardism. He thinks, for example, that human knowledge is fundamentally and standardly a matter of justified true belief. Prevalent counterexamples to the classical definition of knowledge as justified true belief are maximally distortive of the fact that philosophical explanations are based on limited generalizations that are subject to revision and we seek what is normally and typically the case rather than what is unexceptionally and necessarily the case (Rescher 1994, 2003).

— Robert Almeder (2005), "Rescher, Nicholas" in encyclopedia.com, also in DONALD M. BORCHERT, Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Stalnaker wrote (also in his lecture notes):

Let me first say that there is a extreme idealization when you use the modal logic framework to characterize knowledge. In a normal modal logic, if something is true in all possible worlds, then it is also necessary. Applying this to knowledge, it means that if something is logically true, then it is known, i.e. true in all epistemically accessible worlds. Also, the class of necessities is closed under deductive consequence. This means that the set of propositions that you know is closed under consequence. But that seems absurd.

Review of chapter 1 of A. J. Ayer's The Problem of Knowledge (1957)

Ayer wrote: "This preoccupation with the way things are, or are to be, described is often represented as an enquiry into their essential nature. Thus philosophers are given to asking such questions as What is mind? What sort of a relation is causality? What is the nature of belief? What is truth? The difficulty is then to see how such questions are to be taken. [...] This distinction between the use of an expression and the analysis of its meaning is not easy to grasp. Let us try to make it clear by taking an example. Consider the case of knowledge. A glance at the dictionary will show that the verb ‘to know’ is used in a variety of ways. [...] We may discover the sense of the philosopher’s question by seeing what further questions it incorporates, and what sorts of statement the attempt to answer it leads him to make. Thus, he may enquire whether the different cases in which we speak of knowing have any one thing in common; [...] He may maintain that there is, on the subjective side, no difference in kind between knowing and believing, or, alternatively, that knowing is a special sort of mental act. [...] is there anything thinkable that is beyond the reach of human knowledge? [...] And in that case does it follow that what is known is necessarily true, or in some other way indubitable?" (Here "necessarily true" is not the same as "(simply) true". He will say later that it must be true, but not necessarily true.) He continues: "Surely some of our claims to knowledge must be capable of being justified. But in what ways can we justify them? In what would the processes of justifying them consist?"

Common features of knowledge

In this section, Ayer seems to conclude that to "know-how" does not imply that what is known must be the case: "But can it reasonably be held that knowledge is always knowledge that something is the case? If knowing that something is the case is taken to involve the making of a conscious judgement, then plainly it cannot. [...] we must allow that what we call knowing facts may sometimes just be a matter of being disposed to behave in certain appropriate ways; [...] There is a sense in which knowing something, in this usage of the term, is always a matter of knowing what it is ; and in this sense it can perhaps be represented as knowing a fact, as knowing that something is so. [...] But once again, if we are prepared to say that knowing facts need not consist in anything more than a disposition to behave in certain ways, we can construe knowing how to do things as being, in its fashion, a matter of knowing facts. Only by this time we shall have so extended our use of the expression ‘knowing facts’ or ‘knowing that something is the case’ that it may well become misleading."

Does knowing consist in being in a special state of mind?

Here Ayer confines himself to the case know-that and seems to have concluded that to know-that, whatever is that must be true : "Suppose that we confine our attention to the cases in which knowing something is straightforwardly a matter of knowing something to be true, the cases where it is natural in English to use the expression ‘knowing that’, or one of its grammatical variants. Is it a necessary condition for having this sort of knowledge, not only that what one is said to know should in fact be true, but also that one should be in some special state of mind, or that one should be performing some special mental act? [...] the verb ‘to know’ is used to signify a disposition or, as Ryle puts it, that it is a ‘capacity’ verb.! To have knowledge is to have the power to give a successful performance, not actually to be giving one. [...] It is indeed true that one is not reasonably said to know a fact unless one is completely sure of it." At this stage, Ayer seems to have concluded that, in addition, to know-that one must be sure about that. I guess this is the belief part. Only the justified part is missing. But, before, Ayer adds some details about "being sure": "It is not certain that to have a feeling of conviction is even a sufficient condition for being sure ; for it would seem that a conscious feeling of complete conviction may co-exist with an unconscious feeling of doubt. [...] The fact is, as Professor Austin has pointed out, that the expression ‘I know’ commonly has what he calls a ‘performative’ rather than a descriptive use. To say that I know that something is the case, though it does imply that I am sure of it, is not so much to report my state of mind as to vouch for the truth of whatever it may be."

Discussion of method : philosophy and language

At this point, Ayer clarifies that his method is to consider linguistic usage, but not in a social manner : "Thus the proof that knowing, in the sense of ‘knowing that’, is always knowledge of some truth is that it would not otherwise be reckoned as knowledge. [...] For it would not matter if the popular practice were different from what we took it to be, so long as we were clear about the uses that we ourselves were ascribing to the word in question."

Knowing as having the right to be sure

Ayer now introduces the justification requirement by stating that something is missing: "it is possible to be completely sure of something which is in fact true, but yet not to know it. [...] For instance, a superstitious person who had inadvertently walked under a ladder might be convinced as a result that he was about to suffer some misfortune; and he might in fact be right. But it would not be correct to say that he knew that this was going to be so. [...] But while it is not hard to find examples of true and fully confident beliefs which in some ways fail to meet the standards required for knowledge, it is not at all easy to determine exactly what these standards are. [...] I conclude then that the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowing that something is the case are first that what one is said to know be true, secondly that one be sure of it, and thirdly that one should have the right to be sure. This right may be earned in various ways; but even if one could give a complete description of them it would be a mistake to try to build it into the definition of knowledge, just as it would be a mistake to try to incorporate our actual standards of goodness into a definition of good."

Naturalistic Epistemology

Klemens Kappel wrote:

Irrespective of perceived weaknesses of Quine’s “Naturalized Epistemology,” many influential epistemologists endorse naturalistic views (Goldman 1986; Kitcher 1992; Kornblith 2002; Bishop and Trout 2005). Prominent critics of naturalistic epistemology are plentiful, and include Laurence BonJour, Richard Feldman, Michael Williams, Barry Stroud, Donald Davidson and Robert Brandom, just to mention a few (see Kornblith 2002: chapters 3–5).

— Klemens Kappel, NATURALISTIC EPISTEMOLOGY in The Routledge Companion to Epistemology

The article by Kappel was put in the section "Metaepistemological Issues" of the book. Bonjour, after pointing out the multiple meanings of the term, criticizes naturalized epistemology for its insistance on the role of psychology and its rejection of a priori justification. Feldman criticizes what he calls methodological naturalism as a replacement of « armchair epistemology », so he supports a form of armchair epistemology as way to criticize epistemic criteria through counter examples. Barry Stroud wrote:

“Naturalism” seems to me in this and other respects rather like “World Peace.” Almost everyone swears allegiance to it, and is willing to march under its banner. But disputes can still break out about what it is appropriate or acceptable to do in the name of that slogan. And like world peace, once you start specifying concretely exactly what it involves and how to achieve it, it becomes increasingly difficult to reach and to sustain a consistent and exclusive “naturalism.”

The multiple meanings of naturalized epistemology is mentioned by others. The two other mentioned prominent critics of naturalized epistemology, Donald Davidson and Robert Brandom, will be discussed later, if time allows.

Hylton, Peter and Gary Kemp wrote:

Many philosophers would no doubt accept that the methods and techniques of science are the best way to find out about the world. (With or without the points just noted about the word “science”.) The distinctiveness of Quine’s naturalism begins to emerge if we ask what justifies this naturalistic claim: what reason do we have to believe that the methods and techniques of science are the best way to find out about the world? Quine would insist that this claim too must be based on natural science. (If this is circular, he simply accepts the circularity.) This is the revolutionary step: naturalism self-applied. There is no foundation for Quine’s naturalism: it is not based on anything else.
...

This criticism of the scientific and philosophical use of certain ordinary terms goes along with rejection of philosophical questions which make essential use of those terms. For example, many philosophers hold that there are important philosophical problems concerning knowledge: Do we really know anything at all? What exactly are the conditions on knowledge? (This latter question has seemed especially pressing since Gettier, 1963.) Quine, by contrast, finds the word “knowledge” vague, and consequently rejects it for serious use, saying that the word is ‘‘useful and unobjectionable in the vernacular where we acquiesce in vagueness, but unsuited to technical use because of lacking a precise boundary’’ (1984, 295). Accordingly, many such questions formulated using the term may simply be dismissed, even if it remains eminently useful for making rough sorts of claim, when we say as above that scientific knowledge is not different in kind from our ordinary knowledge.
...
Epistemology, as he sees it, is here “confronting a challenge to natural science that arises from within natural science.” What is the challenge? It starts with what Quine takes to be “a finding of natural science itself… that our information about the world comes only through impacts on our sensory receptors” (1990a, 19). The sceptical challenge is then: “How… could one hope to find out about that external world from such meager traces? In short, if our science were true, how could we know it?”
...
In the words of the title of Quine’s last monograph: how do we get from stimulus to science?

This question is central for Quine’s scientific naturalism in general.

— Hylton, Peter and Gary Kemp, SEP entry on Quine

Chienkuo Mi wrote:

Some people think that using scientific methods to study the foundations of science will lead us into an endless circle, but Quine believes that once we have abandoned our dream of reducing science to sense data directly, it will be easy to see that our understanding of science itself is of a natural sequence of events occurring in the natural world, and so can of course itself become an object of scientific research. The object of research in epistemology (viewed as a branch of science) is then precisely the understanding of this natural science (viewed as a sequence of events occurring in the natural world) itself, this is the reason that epistemology and science are reciprocally contained.

Chienkuo Mi, in the same chapter, seems to give a solution by Quine to the problem of the growth of knowledge based on an empirical study of language learning. Well, it is not a solution to the fundamental question, but at the least we study the growth of knowledge.

Quine in Epistemology Naturalized wrote:

But why all this creative reconstruction, all this make-believe? The stimulation of his sensory receptors is all the evidence anybody has had to go on, ultimately, in arriving at his picture of the world. Why not just see how this construction really proceeds? Why not settle for psychology? Such a surrender of the epistemological burden to psychology is a move that was disallowed in earlier times as circular reasoning. If the epistemologist's goal is validation of the grounds of empirical science, he defeats his purpose by using psychology or other empirical science in the validation. However, such scruples against circularity have little point once we have stopped dreaming of deducing science from observations. If we are out simply to understand the link between observation and science, we are well advised to use any available information, including that provided by the very science whose link with observation we are seeking to understand.

Jeff Malpas wrote:

Quine’s contention is that epistemology – the branch of philosophy that deals with questions about the nature and basis of claims to know – is best looked upon ... as an enterprise within natural science. The traditional epistemological problem of finding some certain base for knowledge is thus largely abandoned by Quine. Instead he argues for a conception of epistemology as a much more modest scientific project concerned with charting the relationship between the empirical evidence we receive through our senses and the beliefs that we form on the basis of that evidence. He wrote that:

Epistemology, or something like it, simply falls into place as a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science. It studies a natural phenomenon, viz., a physical human subject. This human subject is accorded a certain experimentally controlled input – certain patterns of irradiation in assorted frequencies, for instance – and in the fullness of time the subject delivers as output a description of the three-dimensional external world and its history. The relation between the meager input and the torrential output is a relation that we are prompted to study for somewhat the same reasons that always prompted epistemology; namely, in order to see how evidence relates to theory, and in what ways one’s theoryof nature transcends any available evidence.

and

It is certainly clear that, for Quine, translation recapitulates epistemology. Translation is seen as essentially concerned with uncovering the connections between surface stimulations (the ‘meager input’) and verbal and non-verbal behavior (the ‘torrential output’) – the same connections that the naturalized epistemologist seeks to unravel.9 Of course, that this is the essential concern of translation is something often obscured, in practice by the translator’s reliance on her prior linguistic knowledge, that is, by her prior acquaintance with her own, and other, languages. For this reason, Quine’s consideration of translation is restricted to cases of what he calls ‘radical’ translation, where no such prior knowledge can be relied upon

Richard F. Kitchener explains that Russell was a supporter of naturalistic epistemology. He wrote: "What I am claiming is that there can be found running throughout much of Russell's work (especially after 1919, when he took a psychologistic turn), an account of the nature of knowledge and epistemology that is naturalistic in spirit, in fact, psychologistic in spirit, an account that anticipated several of the features to be found in Quine's later and canonical program of NE [naturalistic epistemology]. [...] Now, throughout his long career, Russell was fairly consistently committed to a certain version of scientism-towards looking to science for answers to questions about the nature of the world, the nature of the mind, and the nature of knowledge (a view we can call metaphysical scientism). Russell was not opposed to [this possibly scientifically limited] metaphysical speculations about reality. [...] There was for Russell no possibility of philosophy as a 'first philosophy' since there is no philosophical standpoint higher than science from which to make epistemic pronouncements [...] no such thing as philosophical truth (as distinct from scientific truth). "

However, Kitchener also suggests that Russell accepted that philosophy as a science could make its own hypotheses yet to be verified by science. Kitchener wrote: "Philosophy, therefore, is generalized science. In other places, [Russell] suggested that the task of philosophy might be to suggest hypotheses that could then be empirically validated." This would explain what Kitchener meant by his previous sentence "Russell was not opposed to metaphysical speculations about reality.".

Kitchener also says that Russell was a founder of analytic philosophy: "Philosophers typically classify Russell not only as an analytic philosopher but as one of the founders of analytic philosophy and for good reasons, for one thing he always insisted upon was that his method of philosophizing (and the one others should follow) was the method of analysis. This method of analysis is a version of the older version of the method of analysis/synthesis (MAS). [...] Although the downward part of the analysis-synthesis method is well-known and represents a well-worn mode of thought, the upward step of analysis is less familiar. How do we perform an inductive inference and arrive at a geometrical axiom? How do we infer the cause of something? How do we decompose an entity into its parts? How, in short, do we come up with these initial hypotheses? Aristotle invoked a process of intuition-intuitive induction (epagoge)-and lodged it in nous."

It should be recalled that Gettier wrote his article that popularized Justified True Belief in 1963. Naturalistic epistemology was seriously considered by Quine in 1969. It was a way to recover from Hume's sceptical argument. He wrote: "The stimulation of his sensory receptors is all the evidence anybody has had to go on, s could be used. Quine ends the chapter with "And a more emphatically epistemological topic that evolution helps to clarify is induction, now that we are allowing epistemology the resources of natural science." So, for Quine, evolutionary epistemology can be seen as a part of naturalistic epistemology. Well, there are people (should find references) that see evolutionary epistemology as a disguised form of metaphysical position. This is compatible with Popper's view that the theory of evolution is a metaphysical program. For many, it is seen as the most important part of naturalistic epistemology. Quine did not mention belief in this chapter. The term "belief" occurs in other chapters, but not "true belief", not even "justified" alone, certainly not "justified true belief".

However, Quine wrote in his 1978 (first edition in 1970) book Web of Belief : "In some aberrant uses that pretend to be especially deep, the words 'knowledge' and 'truth' become tinged with a mystical aura. There need be no mystery about either one of them. Truth is a property of sentences; it is the trait shared equally by all that would be rightly affirmed. And knowledge, in its clearest sense, is what we have of those truths if our beliefs are solidly enough grounded." In the same book, the role of evolution is also mentioned: "Our readiness to draw the distinction in practice, in so many cases, is simply a mani­festation of our flair for projectible traits; and we surmised in Chapter VII that this flair is in part an inherited result of evolution."

The theistic view

Alvin Plantinga wrote:

Finally, in the last two chapters of Warrant and Proper Function I argue that naturalism in epistemology flourishes best within the context of supernaturalism in theology or metaphysics: the prospects for a naturalistic epistemology are intimately intertwined with a theistic view of the world. I therefore conclude that naturalistic epistemology is indeed viable; it offers the best chance for success; but only if set in the context of a broadly theistic view of the nature of human beings.

The view of Bas C. Van Fraassen

Bas C. Van Fraassen discusses and refutes two ways that were used to recover from "Hume's sceptical disaster" and present his own preferred way, the third way. The first way was to find general rules of inference and to justify them. He even refers to Hans Reichenbach saying that we have a method that will lead us to the truth if any rule will: "It can be shown that if it is possible at all to make predictions,the inductive inference is an instrumentto find them; and the inference is justified because its applicability represents a necessary condition of success", but he says that even that is refuted. The second way is naturalistic epistemology, an epistemology that makes use of what we "know" from science, without trying to justify this knowledge when it is used to justify an inference. He also refutes it. He refers to these two ways as "traditional epistemology". His preferred way is summarized in his conclusion: "We supply our own opinion, with nothing to ground it, and no method to give us an extra source of knowledge. Only the 'empty' techniques of logic and pure math are available either to refine and improve or expose the defects of this opinion. That is the human condition. But it is enough." This third way makes no use of beliefs. A sufficient criterion for rationality is consistency. He wrote: "[...] for this status of rationality-not good reasons, not a rationale, not support of any special sort, not a pedigree of inductive reasoning or confirmation, nothing is needed above and beyond coherence. [...] To this I would add that the concept of reasons for belief in traditional epistemology does not answer to the ordinary employment of such phrases on which it is ostensibly based. If I advance a view and you ask me for my reasons for holding it, I will try to select something that I think you also believe (or perhaps something that you, and not necessarily I believe) which will count as support for you. Thus conceived the concept of reason is limited to the context of dialogue, where it displays a certain relativity, and does not point to any kind of hierarchy in my own beliefs."

Perdomo wrote:

This question is also posed by the social empiricism of Miriam Solomon, who states that the main goal of science is empirical success, whereas the achievement of truth is only a subsidiary objective. But “truth,” in reality, is only an interpretation of empirical success, the interpretation in which realists believe.
Epistemologically speaking, the empiricism van Fraassen defends would uphold that the only belief implicit in the acceptance of a theory is that it be empirically adequate. Furthermore, it is implied rather than believed, since to accept a theory is to make a commitment to a programme of research, a commitment to the subsequent confrontation of new phenomena in the structure of this theory, a commitment to ensuring

Different kinds of naturalism

Hans-Johann Glock wrote:

Naturalism can take three different forms. Metaphilosophical naturalism claims that philosophy is a branch of, or continuous with, natural science; epistemological naturalism (scientism) insists that there is no genuine knowledge outside natural science; ontological naturalism denies that there is any realm other than the natural world of matter, energy, and spatiotemporal objects or events. Quine defines naturalism in metaphilosophical terms, as the abandonment of “first philosophy.” Proper “scientific philosophy” is “continuous with,” and in fact part of science (Quine 1970b: 2, 1981a: 72; Føllesdal and Quine 2008: 45–55).

Inmaculada Perdomo wrote:

It is therefore important to differentiate between metaphysical naturalism or the classic proposals of the naturalism of epistemology, and naturalism as metaperspective or the naturalism of the philosophy of science. However, this does not mean that naturalism is a movement with a defined meaning: “there are as many naturalisms as there are naturalists” (Ambrogi 1999, p. 12).3 Naturalists share an explicit rejection of foundationalist programmes, an interdisciplinary vocation and the empirical study of science, but the specific nuances endorsed by each individual author contribute to growing and increasingly unbridgeable gaps.

Note

Contemporary philosophy and the concept of representation

Steven Levine wrote:

To put it simply, Rorty and Davidson are united in their attempt to get beyond certain dichotomies – between scheme‐content, subject–object, and realism–antirealism – that structure not only twentieth century analytical philosophy but modern philosophy generally, and both attempt to do so by rejecting the concept of representation. If we jettison the concept of representation, they think, we jettison the concept that makes the dichotomies between scheme and content, subject and object, realism and antirealism meaningful.

Social epistemology

Martin Kusch wrote:

“Social epistemology” (SE) can be understood broadly or narrowly. On the broad understanding, the expression covers all systematic reflection on the social dimension or nature of cognitive achievements such as knowledge, true belief, justified belief, understanding, or wisdom. The sociology of knowledge, the social history of science, or the philosophy of the social sciences are among the key parts of SE thus construed. Many contributors to Pragmatism, Marxism, Critical Theory or Hermeneutics also qualify. On the narrow understanding, SE dates from the 1980s, is primarily a philosophical enterprise, and has its roots in Anglo-American epistemology, in feminist theory, as well as in the philosophy of science. The perspective of this chapter lies between the narrow and the broad renderings.

Epistemology always existed

Many present the view that epistemology is as old as philosophy itself. Here is one example among many.

If epistemology is understood extensively, it covers everything that focuses on knowledge or cognition: psychology, sociology, logic, history, physiology, pathology, axiology, metaphysics, and several other things. On the other hand, epistemology conceived more restrictively investigates the sources, values (cognitive), principles, and limits of knowledge. [...] The typical epistemological problems are like the following: What is knowledge?; Is knowledge based on senses or reason? Is certainty attainable? What is truth? Are there ultimate limits of knowledge? Although it is difficult to delimit sharply both ways of understanding epistemology, classical epistemological questions form a relatively stable tradition which can be sufficiently identified through history.

— Jan Woleῄski, Handbook of Epistemology, pp. 3-4

From natural philosophy to science and epistemology in the 19th century

William Whewell coined the term scientists in 1833. However, if we believe Sidgwick, H., science was still a branch of philosophy in 1772 up to the end of the 19th century (1876), because at that time he wrote:

For the use of the general term Philosophy to mean Physics, which continental writers have noticed as an English peculiarity, has been especially at home in Cambridge since the time of Newton . No doubt the qualified term " Natural Philosophy ” would always have been considered more proper and precise : but still " Philosophy ” without qualification would have been commonly understood to mean Natural Philosophy. We find, for example, that the enlightened Dr. Jebb , describing the examinations of the university as they existed in 1772, speaks of the “ transition from the elements of Mathematics to the four branches of philosophy, viz. Mechanics , Hydrostatics, Apparent Astromony and Optics.

— Henry Sidgwick, Philosophy at Cambridge. in MIND A QUARTERLY REVIEW OF PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY, Vol I. 1876

The description of the programme "From Natural Philosophy to Science" of the Center for the History of Philosophy and Science of Radboud University mention "Until the gradual emancipation of the modern scientific disciplines in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “natural philosophy” was the name that covered most of what we would nowadays call scientific activity." Of course, "most of what we [...] nowadays call scientific", Maxwell theory, General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics was not known until after the late 19th century. It is these advancements in science that prompted the emergence of science out of philosophy.

The last mentions of Natural Philosophy in the 19th century

Commemoration of Maxwell's equations at King's College.

James Clerk Maxwell. On the marriage record (1858), Maxwell is listed as Professor of Natural Philosophy in Marischal College, Aberdeen. Between 1860 and 1871, at his family home Glenlair and at King’s College London, where he was Professor of Natural Philosophy, James Clerk Maxwell conceived and developed his unified theory of electricity, magnetism and light.

The name 'natural science' instead of 'natural philosophy' appear in a report issued at Cambridge in 1868 (emphasis mine): "But [Cambridge] University possessed no means of teaching those subjects, and a Syndicate or Committee was appointed, November 25th, 1868, to consider the best means of giving instruction to students in Physics, especially in Heat, Electricity and Magnetism, and the methods of providing apparatus for this purpose. [...] The Syndicate reported February 27th, 1869. [...] pointing out that [...] 'no reason can be assigned why other great branches of Natural Science should not become equally objects of attention, or why Cambridge should not become a great school of physical and experimental, as it is already of mathematical and classical, instruction.'"

Epistemology as a modern discipline

In his article Epistemology of the journal Historical Materialism, Wal Suchting wrote  :

Epistemology is a neologism derived from the Greek epistéme [knowledge]. ‘It translates the German concept Wissenschaftslehre, which was used by Fichte and Bolzano for different projects before it was taken up again by Husserl’ (Fichant 1975, 118). J.F. Ferrier coined the word on the model of ‘ontology’, to designate that branch of philosophy – affirmed to be the latter’s ‘true beginning’ – which answers the general question ‘What is Knowledge?’ (1856, 48 et sq.).

— Wal Suchting, also in this web page

So, Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848) did some work on epistemology, but it was before Ferrier coined the English name in 1856. We need to look at his work in Theory of Science (1837) as described in https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bolzano/#EpiSci to see in which way it was epistemology.

In https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2018.1525798, the work that was done on epistemology by Husserl (1859-1938) around 1906-07 is mentioned: "Husserl scholars and phenomenologists in general often do not give sufficient weight to epistemology. To some extent, it is simply overlooked that Husserl’s phenomenology at its most fundamental level is an epistemological endeavour. Husserl, however, is quite clear on this. While it may be true that Husserl does not often explicitly address the systematic role of epistemology, when he does so, he unambiguously states that phenomenology at its most basic level is epistemology. To be more precise, phenomenology at its basic level has to be epistemology. This is because 'epistemology is the discipline that is supposed to make all scientific knowledge reach final evaluation of its definite knowledge content, to make all scientific knowledge reach ultimate foundation and final completion.' In this sense 'all of philosophy depends on epistemology.'"

In https://iep.utm.edu/ferrier/: "Ferrier was also the first philosopher in English to refer to the philosophy of knowledge as Epistemology." We also have in https://www.britannica.com/biography/James-Frederick-Ferrier "Ferrier's Hegelian epistemology (a word that he introduced into English) and ontology are based on the concept of the unity of the act of knowledge, which combines the knowing subject and the object known." John Carriero explains Ferrier's view on epistemology: "The Institutes of Metaphysics [published in 1854-56] was Ferrier's most ambitious contribution to philosophy. The work contains four parts-the Introduction, the Epistemology, the Agnoiology and the Ontology. The Introduction defines the aims of philosophy and the method to be used in the work. Philosophy is a body of reasoned truth, which excludes mathematics and natural philosophy from its scope. It ought to be true and it ought to be reasoned, but it is more important that it should be reasoned than that it should be true. [...] Ferrier divides philosophy into three parts [Ontology, Epistemology and Agnoiology]. Ontology is first in the order of nature, but last in the order of inquiry. It asks the question 'What is?' or 'What is true?' Epistemology asks the question 'What is knowledge?' Agnoiology asks the question 'What is ignorance?'" So, we see that at the time epistemology comes in, science or natural philosophy is separated from phulosophy. Carriero continues: "In actual fact, two thirds of the Institutes are devoted to epistemology. In discussing this subject, he maintains that the question 'What is knowledge?' does not mean, as Theaetetus supposed, 'What are the different kinds of knowledge?', but 'What is the one feature that is common and peculiar to all varieties of knowledge ?'" Every proposition in the body of the work is supposed to be demonstrated either from first principles or from the preceding propositions, and each is contrasted with a false counter-proposition, which is asserted in one form or another by popular opinion or psychology, which he now conceives as the arch-enemy of philosophic truth. It is to be feared that the demonstrations are often based on equivocations, and that the meanings of the different propositions are often indistinguishable one from another, as he sometimes openly admits."

However, it seems that it's later that a new kind of epistemology was created: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235223112_The_Renaissance_of_Epistemology_1914-1945/citations

Review of Martinich and Stroll's Epistemology in Britannica

Martinich and Stroll wrote an article in Britannica on epistemology. Here are some summary points :

• Regarding Justified True Belief. The article endorses the view that Plato had the JTB perspective on knowledge and that it was generally accepted until Gettier's paper in 1963: (See #Statements that knowledge is justified true belief)
• Its long list of authors (not counting ancient Greeks) does not includes those supporting evolutionary epistemology such as Karl Popper, Konrad Lorenz, and Jean Piaget.
• Epistemology as a discipline. "Why should there be a discipline such as epistemology? Aristotle (384–322 BCE ) provided the answer when he said that philosophy begins in a kind of wonder or puzzlement." (This title ... as a discipline ... gives hope that we will learn about the branch of knowledge in higher education, not the concept: when books started to be written specifically in that branch, when universities started to have programs in epistemology, etc. Unfortunately, the section is about the concept of knowledge in philosophy, which of course is as old as philosophy itself. The section says nothing about epistemology as a discipline.)
• The nature of knowledge. "[O]ne of the basic questions of epistemology concerns the nature of knowledge."
• "As Gilbert Ryle (1900–76) pointed out, there are important differences between know that and know how."
• "The expression know what is similar to know how in that respect, insofar as one can know what a clarinet sounds like without being able to say what one knows."
• "For the most part, epistemology from the ancient Greeks to the present has focused on knowing that. Such knowledge, often referred to as propositional knowledge, raises a number of peculiar epistemological problems, among which is the much-debated issue of what kind of thing one knows when one knows that something is the case. [...] The list of candidates has included beliefs, propositions, statements, sentences, and utterances of sentences."
• "[T]wo points should be noted here. First, the issue is closely related to the problem of universals—i.e., the problem of whether qualities or properties, such as redness, are abstract objects, mental concepts, or simply names. Second, it is agreed by all sides that one cannot have 'knowledge that' of something that is not true. A necessary condition of 'A knows that p', therefore, is p."
• In what follows, the first three distinctions are categories of knowledge: there is only one thing, knowledge, and each distinction presents two view on knowledge. The fourth distinction does the same but for epistemology itself. The fifth is the distinction between knowledge and certainty.
• Distinctions(1)—Mental and nonmental conceptions of knowledge. "According to Plato (c. 428–c.348 BCE ), for example, knowing [episteme?] is a mental state akin to, but different from, believing [doxa?]. Contemporary versions of the theory assert that knowing is a member of a group of mental states that can be arranged in a series according to increasing certitude. At one end of the series would be guessing and conjecturing, for example, which possess the least amount of certitude; in the middle would be thinking, believing, and feeling sure; and at the end would be knowing, the most certain of all such states. Knowledge, in all such views, is a form of consciousness. Accordingly, it is common for proponents of such views to hold that if A knows that p, A must be conscious of what A knows. That is, if A knows that p, A knows that A knows that p."
• "Beginning in the 20th century, many philosophers rejected the notion that knowledge is a mental state. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), for example, said in On Certainty, published posthumously in 1969, that “ ‘Knowledge’ and certainty belong to different categories."
• "Such philosophers then observe that it is possible to know that something is the case without being aware that one knows it [and we are usually aware of a mental state such as pain]."
• "Some philosophers [...] claim that one can ascribe knowledge to someone, or to oneself, only when certain complex conditions are satisfied, among them certain behavioral conditions."
• "A well-known example of such a view was advanced by J.L. Austin (1911–60) in his 1946 paper 'Other Minds.' Austin claimed that when one says 'I know,' one is indicating that one has the proper credentials and reasons to assert [when needed] that such and such is the case."
• Distinctions(2)—Occasional and dispositional knowledge. "A distinction closely related to the [mental vs nonmental distinction] is that between “occurrent” and “dispositional” knowledge." (It's not clear what is mental and not occurent and what is occurent and not mental. So, it seems to be the same distinction. This impression is perhaps due to the way mental vs non mental is discussed. One could have argued that mental means associated to an individual, whereas non mental means knowledge that hold independently of an individual and thus without any individual mind or mental.)
• Distinctions(3)—A priori and a posteriori knowledge. "The distinction [between a priori vs a posteriori] plays an especially important role in the work of David Hume (1711–76) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). [...] Knowledge [...] is a posteriori in the sense that it can be obtained only through certain kinds of experience."
• "The differences between sentences that express a priori knowledge and those that express a posteriori knowledge are sometimes described in terms of four additional distinctions: necessary versus contingent, analytic versus synthetic, tautological versus significant, and logical versus factual."
• Necessary means that the proposition is logically true, i.e., true in all interpretations. Otherwise, it is contingent, i.e., true in some interpretations only. Analytic is a special case of necessary: the proposition is true by definition of the subject, more precisely, the predicate applied to the subject is included in the definition. Tautological is even more specific. Logical is the same as necessary if the applied logic is complete and sound. If it is sound, which is always the case, then logical implies necessary.
• "These distinctions are normally spoken of as applying to “propositions,” which may be thought of as the contents, or meanings, of sentences that can be either true or false." (This is the usual approach inspired by logic: the meaning is given in terms of interpretation and two sentences that have the same true interpretations have the same meaning.)
• Necessary a posteriori propositions. "In [...] Naming and Necessity (1972), the American philosopher Saul Kripke argued that, contrary to traditional assumptions, not all necessary propositions are known a priori; some are knowable only a posteriori." (This is related to the laddered structures of laws: what are the observations related by a law depend on other laws.)
• Distinctions(4)—Description and justification. "Throughout its very long history, epistemology has pursued two different sorts of task: description and justification." (In some sentences, the article associates justificatory with normative. In this case, it becomes the distinction between descriptive—we describe what scientists do—and normative—we tell scientists what they should do to reach the objective, i.e., truth. It's as if the distinction is between justification and no justification and the latter is called descriptive.)
• "An example of a descriptive epistemological system is the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). Husserl’s aim was to give an exact description of the phenomenon of intentionality, or the feature of conscious mental states by virtue of which they are always “about,” or “directed toward,” some object. [...] Wittgenstein stated that 'explanation must be replaced by description,' and much of his later work was devoted to carrying out that task. Other examples of descriptive epistemology can be found in the work of G.E. Moore (1873–1958), H.H. Price (1899–1984), and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), each of whom considered whether there are ways of apprehending the world that do not depend on any form of inference and, if so, what that apprehension consists of (see below Perception and knowledge). Closely related to that work were attempts by various philosophers, including Moritz Schlick (1882–1936), Otto Neurath (1882–1945), and A.J. Ayer (1910–89), to identify “protocol sentences”—i.e., statements that describe what is immediately given in experience without inference."
• "The normative approach quickly takes one into the central domains of epistemology, raising questions such as: “Is knowledge identical with justified true belief?,” “Is the difference between knowledge and belief merely a matter of probability?,” and “What is justification?”"
• Distinctions(5)—Knowledge and certainty. "Moore observed that [...] a sentence such as 'I knew for certain that he would come, but he didn’t,' for example, is self-contradictory, whereas 'I felt certain he would come, but he didn’t' is not. On the basis of such considerations, Moore contended that 'a thing can’t be certain unless it is [true, thus] known.' It is that fact that distinguishes the concepts of certainty and truth: 'A thing that nobody knows may quite well be true but cannot possibly be certain.' Moore concluded that a necessary condition for the truth of 'It is certain that p' is that somebody should know that p. Moore is therefore among the philosophers who answer in the negative the question of whether it is possible for p to be certain without being known. [... more arguments ... ] Moore is thus among the philosophers who would answer in the affirmative the question of whether it is possible for p to be known without being certain." (So, Moore argued using linguistic usage that "being certain" implies "somebody knows", but the converse is false. But, I am not sure what we do with this. )
• "Other philosophers have disagreed, arguing that if a person’s knowledge that p is occurrent rather than merely dispositional, it implies certainty that p." (It does not seem a valid opposition, because it can still be the case 'somebody knows' does not imply 'certainty', even if 'somebody knows in a occurrent manner' implies 'certainty'.)
• "The most radical position on such matters was the one taken by Wittgenstein in On Certainty. Wittgenstein held that knowledge is radically different from certitude and that neither concept entails the other. It is thus possible to be in a state of knowledge without being certain and to be certain without having knowledge." (However, the article does not explain the notion of truth in Wittgenstein late philosophy.)
• The origins of knowledge. "It is highly significant that Plato should use mathematical (specifically, geometrical) examples to show that knowledge does not originate in sense experience; indeed, it is a sign of his perspicacity."
• Innate and acquired knowledge. "The problem of the origins of knowledge has engendered two historically important kinds of debate. One of them concerns the question of whether knowledge is innate—i.e., present in the mind, in some sense, from birth—or acquired through experience. The matter has been important not only in philosophy but also, since the mid-20th century, in linguistics and psychology."
• Rationalism and empiricism. "The second debate related to the problem of the origins of knowledge is that between rationalism and empiricism. [...] One thus might define rationalism as the theory that there is an isomorphism (a mirroring relationship) between reason and reality that makes it possible for the former to apprehend the latter just as it is. Rationalists contend that if such a correspondence were lacking, it would be impossible for human beings to understand the world. [...] Rationalists hold that human beings have knowledge that is prior to experience and yet significant. Empiricists deny that that is possible."
• "Empiricists must explain how abstract ideas, such as the concept of a perfect triangle, can be reduced to elements apprehended by the senses when no perfect triangles are found in nature. They must also give an account of how general concepts are possible. It is obvious that one does not experience “humankind” through the senses, yet such concepts are meaningful, and propositions containing them are known to be true. [...] According to the rationalist, the only way to account for the child’s selection of the correct concept is to suppose that at least part of it is innate."
• Skepticism. "For every argument there seems to be a counterargument, and for every position a counterposition. To a considerable extent, skepticism is born of such reflection." (Actually, I don't see any argument in support of logical justification of laws, except that people would like that it exists, but there is good arguments against it. The authors might not have Hume's scepticism in mind.)
• "Ironically, skepticism itself is a kind of philosophy, and the question has been raised whether it manages to escape its own criticisms." (This illustrates that they consider a general scepticism, not only scepticism towards justification of laws.)
• "But however it is understood, skepticism represents a challenge to the claim that human beings possess or can acquire knowledge." (This is true if we say that knowledge requires logical justification, but why should it require logical justification? In practice, we accept theories, because we experience their usefulness in terms of technologies and procedures, not because of logical proofs.)
• "In giving even that minimal characterization, it is important to emphasize that skeptics and nonskeptics alike accept the same definition of knowledge, one that implies two things: (1) if A knows that p, then p is true, and (2) if A knows that p, then A cannot be mistaken (i.e., it is logically impossible that A is wrong." (Not sure about that. It depends what kind of truth we are talking about. If we are talking about truth based on the experience that the theory is useful, then yes, but it certainly not yes if truth means justified in a proof.)
• "One variety of radical skepticism claims that there is no such thing as knowledge of an external world. According to that view, it is at least logically possible that one is merely a brain in a vat and that one’s sense experiences of apparently real objects (e.g., the sight of a tree) are produced by carefully engineered electrical stimulations." (But, of course, this would easily be refuted, because it is a weird assumption and we must pick the most reasonable assumptions. Also, it is not a scepticism towards justification of laws, but directly towards the observations and the laws themselves.)

The history of epistemology

This is the longest section of the article. In this section, it is said that knowledge was defined as justified true belief by Plato. It starts without any notion of justified true belief though:

Plato accepted the Parmenidean constraint that knowledge must be unchanging. One consequence of that view, as Plato pointed out in the Theaetetus, is that sense experience cannot be a source of knowledge, because the objects apprehended through it are subject to change. To the extent that humans have knowledge, they attain it by transcending sense experience in order to discover unchanging objects through the exercise of reason.

Plato uses the allegory of the cave to explain the relation between experiences of the senses and knowledge. The article continues with "reason is used to discover unchanging forms through the method of dialectic, which Plato inherited from his teacher Socrates." There is no notion of justified true belief at this stage of the argument. But, the question is asked "how should knowledge in general be defined?" The article then says "In the Theaetetus Plato argues that, at a minimum, knowledge involves true belief." The article further argues that knowledge must be justified and attributes the argument to Plato in the Theaetetus. Then it states "Although there has been much disagreement about the nature of justification, the Platonic definition of knowledge was widely accepted until the mid-20th century, when [...] Gettier produced a startling counterexample." (Note: In my view, if there has been disagreement about justification, then most likely there has been disagreement about what is truth as well. So, there has been disagreement about what is knowledge. So, there must has been disagreement about what is the widely accepted Plato's definition.) Next, the article attributes to Aristotle an argument that knowledge must be identical to its object, based on the premise that knowledge must be true belief. So, it seems that knowledge being a true belief would have been self evident for Aristotle. Then the article presents in more details Aristotle's view: "Aristotle says that the intellect, like everything else, must have two parts: something analogous to matter and something analogousto form. The first is the passive intellect, the second the active intellect, of which Aristotle speaks tersely."

Intellect in this sense is separable, impassible, unmixed, since it is in its essential nature activity....When intellect is set free from its present conditions, it appears as just what it is and nothing more: it alone is immortal and eternal,...and without it nothing thinks.

— Aristotle

The article then presents the different forms of scepticism that followed Aristotle. The scepticism of the Pyrrhonist is (it seems to me) very similar to Hume's scepticism. It basically says that a general rule for justification would require its own justification and this would lead to infinite regress. Interestingly, the article says that it is not "strictly an epistemology, since it has no theory of knowledge and is content to undermine the dogmatic epistemologies of others, especially Stoicism and Epicureanism." Perhaps the point being made here is that it offers no theory of justified true belief and thus no theory of knowledge: a theory that says knowledge is fallible is like no theory of knowledge. The articles says "Pyrrho himself was said to have had ethical motives for attacking dogmatists: being reconciled to not knowing anything, Pyrrho thought, induced serenity (ataraxia)." Then the discussion turns around a rejection of scepticism and an understanding of knowledge in terms of God by St. Augustine. Much of the following discussion in the article is about the possible roles, if any, of God in knowledge, roles that are compatible with science (i.e., natural philosophy). The distinction between knowledge (in the mind) and the object that is known is often central in the discussion, especially because knowledge must be "true". Next, the duality empiricism vs rationalism of the modern era is discussed. Finally, the article discusses contemporary philosophy: "Contemporary philosophy begins in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Much of what sets it off from modern philosophy is its explicit criticism of the modern tradition and sometimes its apparent indifference to it." The article makes an important distinction between "Continental philosophy, which is the philosophical style of western European philosophers, and analytic philosophy (also called Anglo-American philosophy), which includes the work of many European philosophers who immigrated to Britain, the United States, and Australia shortly before World War II." It seems that epistemology emerges as a discipline at that time, but this is not a point made in the article.

Episteme (scientific knowledge) and Noûs (inaccessible true knowledge)

Some authors say or suggest that in ancient Greek philosophy "episteme" meant scientific knowledge while other authors says that it meant true knowledge that could not be accessed. For example:

D. W. Hamlyn wrote: "Aristotle frequently says that we think that we have scientific knowledge (episteme) when we know the cause or reason why. [...] There is however an immediate problem how the first premises or first principles of an argument which amounts to demonstration can be known. [...] Aristotle provides this explanation in the last chapter of the Posterior Analytics, and there maintains that we come as a result of experience to an awareness or intuition of the first principles, so that we know them not by episteme but by nous."

Nicholas Rescher wrote "Pragmatism as a philosophical doctrine traces back to the Academic sceptics in classical antiquity. Denying the possibility of achieving authentic knowledge ( epistêmê ) regarding the real truth, they taught that we must make do with plausible information ( to pithanon ) adequate to the needs of practice. However, pragmatism as a determinate philosophical doctrine descends from the work of Charles Sanders Peirce."

Beardsley wrote: "Knowledge (episteme), as distinct from mere opinion (doxa), is a grasp of the eternal forms; and Plato clearly denies it to the arts, as imitations of imi­tations (Republic 598 - 601). So the poet is placed on the sixth level of knowledge in the Phaedrus (248D), and Ion is said to interpret Homer not by 'art or knowledge' (532c) but in an irrational way (cf. Apology 22), for he does not know what he is saying or why he might be right or wrong."

Michael V. Wedin wrote: "Posterior Analytics extends syllogistic to science and scientific explanation. A science is a deductively ordered body of knowledge about a definite genus or domain of nature. Scientific knowledge (episteme) consists not in knowing that, e.g., there is thunder in the clouds, but rather in knowing why there is thunder."

David N. Sedley wrote: "Stoic epistemology defends the existence of cognitive certainty against the attacks of the New Academy. Belief is described as assent (synkatathesis) to an impression (phantasia), i.e. taking as true the propositional content of some perceptual or reflective impression. Certainty comes through the “cognitive impression” (phantasia kataleptike), a self-certifying perceptual representation of external fact, claimed to be commonplace. Out of sets of such impressions we acquire generic conceptions (prolepseis) and become rational. The highest intellectual state, knowledge (episteme), in which all cognitions become mutually supporting and hence “unshakable by reason,” is the prerogative of the wise. Everyone else is in a state of mere opinion (doxa) or of ignorance." This quote is ambiguous as to whether it means scientific knowledge.

Donald Morrison wrote: "Simplicius clearly believes that tekmeriodic proof is not only a way for someone who already knows the principles of physics to teach them to others; it is also the natural way for physicists to discover the principles of physics themselves. Simplicius, like Eustratius in his commentary on the Posterior Analytics, stresses that tekmeriodic proof gives one a grasp (gnôsis) of the principles, without giving one scientific knowledge (episteme) of them. By contrast, Philoponus calls apodeictic and tekmeriodic proofs both epistêmonikê gnôsis."

Eckhard Kessler wrote: "There are at least two treatises which document the selective use of the text made by the philosophers of the school. The first is that of Archangelus Mercenarius,80 who uses Aristotle’s statement that only parts of the soul, and not the soul in its totality, are the subject of the natural philosopher as an argument in the discussion on the immortality of the soul. The second is that by Cesare Cremonini, who in De paedia, an introductory treatise to his commentary on the Physics, refers to Aristotle’s remarks in the beginning of the De partibus on the role of paideia and episteme in the sciences."

Larry Laudan wrote: "As far back as the time of Parmenides, Western philosophers thought it important to distinguish knowledge (episteme) from mere opinion (doxa), reality from appearance, truth from error. By the time of Aristotle, these epistemic concerns came to be focused on the question of the nature of scientific knowledge. In his highly influential Posterior Analytics, Aristotle described at length what was involved in having scientific knowledge of something. To be scientific, he said, one must deal with causes, one must use logical demonstrations, and one must identify the universals which 'inhere' in the particulars of sense. But above all, to have science one must have apodictic certainty. It is this last feature which, for Aristotle, most clearly distinguished the scientific way of knowing."

See also Menn 2005 citation on Aristotle below.

Scott Carson wrote: "Aristotle’s treatment of phronêsis (Nicomachean Ethics VI.5 1140a24–b30; cf. 1141b8–1143a5) is similar in many respects to Plato’s, but in his account the knowledge that we obtain of virtue is not the equivalent of scientific (demonstrative) knowledge (episteme): unlike episteme, which is concerned with necessary truths, phronêsis is always concerned with contingent truths."

Scott Carson also wrote: "By the time Plato wrote the Theaetetus, he had clearly settled on an antisophistic conception of knowledge and expertise that takes the life and methodology of Socrates as its model, though even in that arguably late dialogue there is no clear line of demarcation drawn between sophia and episteme (knowledge). Since, for Plato, all knowledge, whether of mathematical objects or normative concepts such as the virtues, involves cognitive grasp of purely formal entities, there is less demand in his epistemology for a clear and concise differentiation between the two types of mental states and their proper objects. Aristotle, by contrast, drew rather sharp distinctions not only between episteme and sophia, but also among those rational faculties and phronêsis (practical wisdom), techne (art, skill), and nous (intelligence, understanding). [...] Thus sophia is associated with both techne and episteme, but it marks off a superlative kind of knowledge in which the knower not only fully understands the consequences of the principles of his craft but also fully understands the natures of the principles themselves. There is thus a sense in which sophia encompasses both the necessary truths that follow from demonstrations (the domain of episteme) and the necessary truths that are the first principles of the demonstrative sciences (the domain of nous)."

Allan B. Wolter wrote: "On the other hand, the genuine interest in the logical structure of “science” (episteme), as Aristotle understood the term, led to an inevitable comparison of systematic theology with the requirements of a science such as Euclid’s geometry. [...] Avicenna agreed with Averroes that Aristotle’s metaphysics was meant to be more than a collection of opinions (doxa) and had the character of a science (episteme) or body of demonstrated truths, where “demonstration” is understood in the sense of the Posterior Analytics."

Benjamin Pryor wrote: "Order of Things [...] proceeds by way of an account of two profound breaks in the coherence of knowledge about man and of the way those breaks affect modern knowledge and give it resources with which to freely think new possibilities. The first break occurred between [two views on episteme:] the Renaissance and the classical epistemes. Foucault uses the word episteme to designate the regularities that account for the coherence of knowledge in a given period. The Renaissance episteme was coherent—one could speak truly about nature and link one’s speech to the world—because of its dependence on resemblance and similitude for the organization of what counted as knowledge and true perception. But this understanding of the relationship between language and the world, between the signifier and the signified, is ultimately broken—similitude becomes deceptive."

Roberto Torretti wrote: "It is usually taken for granted that the book is patterned after Aristotle’s conception of a true science (episteme). This must consist of a collection of universal statements (theorems) obtained by deductive inference from self-evident premises (axioms) and definitions using a few self-explanatory terms (primitives)."

Anthony Quinton wrote: "However, a certain disquiet about the inductivist flavor of the positive support that his theory allows a hypothesis to derive from the failure of attempted refutations is expressed in Popper’s leanings toward a rather skeptical view of the status of unrefuted hypotheses: “Science is not a system of certain, or well-established, statements.... Our science is not knowledge (episteme): it can never claim to have attained truth, or even a substitute for it, such as probability.... We do not know: we can only guess.” (The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Ch. 10, Sec. 85, p. 278)."

Malcolm Schofield wrote: "The need for a concept of secure rational understanding—epistêmê—on the Platonic model is not denied."

Patrick A. Heelan wrote : "Heisenberg defines noumenal reality as the object of an intellectual intuition (episteme) which, however, is a kind of knowledge we do not possess."

Zeev Perelmuter wrote : "It is generally agreed that the solution is to be found in the enigmatic last chapter of the An. Post., a solution that explains how we get to know first principles despite their being non-demonstrable. Aristotle says that nous is the cognitive state responsible for getting to know archai (100b5-12, cf. 99b 17-19) and describes the process of their acquisition (99b26-100al4). But here we face a difficulty. The process described is not about getting to know immediate premisses of demonstrations; it is that of getting to know universal concepts."

When the objects of an inquiry, in any department, have principles, causes, or ele­ments, it is through acquaintance with these that knowledge and understanding is attained. For we do not think that we know a thing until we are acquainted with its primary causes or first principles, and have carried our analysis as far as its el­ements. Plainly, therefore, in the science of nature too our first task will be to try to determine what relates to its principles.

— Aristotle, 184a10–184a16, Aristotle. (1984). Physics. R. P. Hardie and P. K. Gaye (trans.). The Complete Works of Aristotle, J. Barnes (ed.). Vol. 1. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). p.315

Lakatos (Lakatos 1978) wrote:

• "Schools in the theory of knowledge draw a demarcation between two vastly different sorts of knowledge: episteme, that is, proven knowledge, and doxa, that is, mere opinion. The most influential schools - the 'justificationist' schools1 - rank episteme exceedingly high and doxa exceedingly low; indeed, according to their extreme canons only the former deserves the name 'knowledge'."
• "The dominance of justificationism in the theory of knowledge cannot be characterized better than by the fact that the theory of knowledge came to be called 'epistemology', the theory of episteme. Mere doxa was not deemed worthy of serious investigation: growth of doxa was regarded as a particularly absurd idea, since in the orthodox justificationist view,' the hallmark of progress was the increase of rational episteme and the gradual decrease in irrational doxa."
• "The influence of Newtonian success reached even political thought. It created a veritable euphoria among the dogmatists: before Newton the problem was whether it is possible at all to arrive at episteme; after Newton the problem became how it was possible to arrive at episteme, and how one can extend it to other spheres of knowledge. Without appreciating this problem shift one cannot understand eighteenth century thought."

Popper (Popper 1963, Introduction) wrote:

• in paraphrasing Plato, "The difficulties in the way of an understanding of the real world are all but super-human, and only the very few, if anybody at all, can attain to the divine state of understanding the real world—the divine state of true knowledge, of epistēmē." Popper continues, "This is a pessimistic theory with regard to almost all men, though not with regard to all. (For it teaches that truth may be attained by a few—the elect. With regard to these it is, one might say, more wildly optimistic than even the doctrine that truth is manifest.) The authoritarian and traditionalist consequences of this pessimistic theory are fully elaborated in the Laws."
• "Aristotle, and also Bacon, I wish to suggest, meant by ‘induction’ not so much the inferring of universal laws from particular observed instances as a method by which we are guided to the point whence we can intuit or perceive the essence or the true nature of a thing."
• "In spite of their individualistic tendencies, they did not dare to appeal to our critical judgment—to your judgment, or to mine; perhaps because they felt that this might lead to subjectivism and to arbitrariness. Yet whatever the reason may have been, they certainly were unable to give up thinking in terms of authority, much as they wanted to do so. They could only replace one authority—that of Aristotle and the Bible—by another. Each of them appealed to a new authority; the one to the authority of the senses, and the other to the authority of the intellect."

Bruce J. MacLennan wrote : "We will be especially concerned with logical positivism’s view of knowledge, which is, roughly: (1) the only real knowledge is scientific knowledge; (2) by a process of logical analysis scientific knowledge can be reduced to symbolic formulas constructed from 'atomic facts.' Certainly assertion (1) is nothing new; Socrates said as much when he distinguished 'scientific knowledge' (episteme) from a “practice” (empeiria); see Section 2.4.3. Furthermore, assertion (2) is implicit in Pythagorianism and is a continuous theme in most Western epistemology, from Plato and Aristotle, through Hobbes and Leibnitz, to Boole and Hilbert. In this sense logical positivism is just the continuation of this long tradition."

Truth

Inmaculada Perdomo says that empirical success, not truth, is the main goal of science:

the social empiricism of Miriam Solomon, who states that the main goal of science is empirical success, whereas the achievement of truth is only a subsidiary objective. But “truth”, in reality, is only an interpretation of empirical success, the interpretation in which realists believe.
Epistemologically speaking, the empiricism van Fraassen defends would uphold that the only belief implicit in the acceptance of a theory is that it be empirically adequate. Furthermore, it is implied rather than believed, since to accept a theory is to make a commitment to a programme of research, a commitment to the subsequent confrontation of new phenomena in the structure of this theory, a commitment to ensuring that all relevant phenomena can be considered without abandoning this theory. Thus, acceptance is not belief, although the acceptance of a theory implies some degree of belief.

As pointed out by Hans-Johann Glock, a similar point was made by Quine:

Quine stresses that our beliefs are shaped primarily not by brute facts or experience, but by “pragmatic” considerations of predictive power and cognitive efficacy. Our theories “are almost completely a matter of human creativity –creativity to the purpose, however, of matching up with the neural input” (Føllesdal and Quine 2008: 49).

It is interesting that Glock adds in that same context:

James (1978: 238), in particular, anticipated Quine's and Davidson's holistic credo that our beliefs cannot be assessed individually, but only as part of a web of other beliefs.

Given that pragmatism is a lot related to the notion of truth, let us mention how Glock continues:

As Davidson himself recognizes, he further shares with pragmatism the idea that rationality and with it language are essential to human action, which implies skepticism concerning the possibility of animal minds (Glock 2003: ch. 9). Unlike Quine, whose epistemology starts out from the experiences of individuals, Davidson also follows pragmatism by regarding knowledge as an essentially social phenomenon arising out of linguistic communication. Finally, like Quine and Davidson, the American pragmatists are famous for their “debunking of dualisms,” like the Cartesian dualism of mind and matter, the positivists' analytic/synthetic dichotomy or the Kantian distinction between conceptual scheme and empirical content (Rorty 1986: 333, 339).

Rorty wrote:

The question of whether truth or rationality has an intrinsic nature, of whether we ought to have a positive theory about either topic, is just the question of whether our self-description ought to be constructed around a relation to human nature or around a relation to a particular collection of human beings, whether we should desire objectivity or solidarity. It is hard to see how one could choose between these alternatives by looking more deeply into the nature of knowledge, or of man, or of nature. Indeed, the proposal that this issue might be so settled begs the question in favor of the realist, for it presupposes that knowledge, man, and nature HAVE real essences which are relevant to the problem at hand. For the pragmatist, by contrast, ‘knowledge’ is, like ‘truth’, simply a compliment paid to the beliefs which we think so well justified that, for the moment, further justification is not needed. An inquiry into the nature of knowledge can, on his view, only be a sociohistorical account of how various people have tried to reach agreement on what to believe.

Plantinga reaction is:

Richard Rorty is widely credited (some might say "debited") with the view that "truth is what our peers will let us get away with saying." Now this is a bit vague, but if taken seriously, it does, indeed, seem to be incompatible with Christian belief. That is because if a proposition is true (true 'for me', I suppose) if and only if my peers will let me get away with saying it, then, given proposition (1) on p. 424, God is dependent ('for me', if that makes sense) for his very existence on my peers. For if they were to let me get away with saying that there is no such person as God, then it would be true that there is no such person, in which case there would be no such person. So whether there is such a person as God depends upon the behavior of my peers. Not easy to believe. [...] This problem about determining what Rorty intends here is not trivial. Gary Gutting, for example, suggests that Rorty doesn't really intend to say anything at all shocking or paradoxical about truth, or anything out of accord with robust common sense. [...] But could this really be what he meant when, for example, he sided with Dewey in suggesting that truth is what our peers will let us get away with saying? If so, he has expressed himself a little carelessly. [...]

Belief

In addition to the views presented below, there is also the argument of Michael Williams in the section Scepticism, which can be seen as a rejection of the concept of belief that can become knowledge through any form of justification, even weak justification. The point here is that one must judge the concept of belief in terms of its purpose. If the purpose is to define knowledge, then Michael Williams (Agrippan skepticism) applies. Jack Ritchie's point in the section #Reliabilism implies also a different view on belief. Similarly, since belief is related to truth, some of the views on truth, in particular the view of Inmaculada Perdomob in the section Truth shed some light on the notion of belief.

Is belief a fundamental concept?

Most of the points on belief are made under the assumption that belief is a fundamental concept of epistemology, because there is not much to say about belief when the concept is rejected as useless or outside the scope of epistemology from the start. The question whether belief is a fundamental concept is better translated as the question whether internalism and its counterpart, externalism, are fundamental concepts. The point being that as soon as we consider internal mental states that are a priori disconnected, not knowledge, unless some warrant is provided, then the notion of belief is needed to represent the mental states that need the warrant to become knowledge. The well-formed questions are whether epistemology is about objective knowledge or subjective knowledge and what is the role of cognitive science in epistemology.

General (or yet unclassified) points

In a section entitled "Theories of belief (Also known as ACCEPTANCE)". Jonathan Weisberg wrote:

A good deal of Bayesian theorizing is concerned with the degree to which we ought to believe something. But what about the question whether you should believe something tout court? [...] The obvious thing to conjecture is that you should believe those propositions that have attained a certain minimum threshold of probability, say .99. But Kyburg’s [1961] lottery paradox shows that this conjecture leads to inconsistent belief states. [...] Jeffrey [1968; 1970a], for example, seems to have felt that the folk notion of belief should be replaced by the more refined notion of degree of belief [...] If we go this route, then we avoid the lottery paradox and get to skip out on the job of elaborating the probability-belief connection.

Donald Davidson wrote:

It is doubtful whether the various sorts of thought can be reduced to one, or even to a few: desire, knowledge, belief, fear, interest, to name some important cases, are probably logically independent to the extent that none can be defined using the others, even along with such further notions as truth and cause. Nevertheless, belief is central to all kinds of thought. If someone is glad that, or notices that, or remembers that, or knows that, the gun is loaded, then he must believe that the gun is loaded. Even to wonder whether the gun is loaded, or to speculate on the possibility that the gun is loaded, requires the belief, for example, that a gun is a weapon, that it is a more or less enduring physical object, and so on. There are good reasons for not insisting on any particular list of beliefs that are needed if a creature is to wonder whether a gun is loaded. Nevertheless, it is necessary that there be endless interlocked beliefs. The system of such beliefs identifies a thought by locating it in a logical and epistemic space.

He continues:

Someone who can interpret an utterance of the English sentence ‘The gun is loaded’ must have many beliefs, and these beliefs must be much like the beliefs someone must have if he entertains the thought that the gun is loaded. The interpreter must, we may suppose, believe that a gun is a weapon, and that it is a more or less enduring physical object. There is probably no definite list of things that must be believed by someone who understands the sentence “The gun is loaded,’ but it is necessary that there be endless interlocked beliefs.

Anabela Pinto wrote:

There is general agreement that a belief is a mental state that predisposes the believer to accept some propositions as being true. Such propositions relate to events or things that either have or do not have supporting evidence.

Pavese in Knowledge how in SEP wrote:

Some have observed that knowledge-how may differ from propositional knowledge in that, whereas the latter plausibly entails belief, knowledge-how does not (Dreyfus 1991, 2005; Wallis 2008; Brownstein & Michaelson 2016).

He also wrote:

On an “intellectualist” account of belief, on which believing that p requires the subject to acknowledge that p, it is implausible that the athletes have the relevant belief. But intellectualists about knowledge-how might advocate replacing this intellectual notion of belief with a less demanding one. According to a prominent functional characterization of belief, to believe that p entails being disposed to act in ways that would tend to satisfy one’s desires, whatever they are, in a world in which p (together with one’s other beliefs) are true” (cf. Stalnaker 1984: 15; Stalnaker 2012).

It is interesting that the first paragraph in an article of Jaegwon Kim about Naturalized Epistemology is about beliefs. In this article, the third sentence is:

We can view Cartesian epistemology as consisting of the following two projects: to identify the criteria by which we ought to regulate acceptance and rejection of beliefs, and to determine what we may be said to know according to those criteria. Descartes's epistemological agenda has been the agenda of Western epistemology to this day.

It suggests that in naturalized epistemology, belief is a primary concept. Somehow in contrast, referring to Carnap, Wolfgang Stegmüller wrote:

the probabilities of hypotheses were for Carnap probabilities. He chose a starting point quite similar to that of the personalist: the probability of an hypothesis h is accordingly a measure of the belief in h relative to the empirical data e. One may not take the belief of just any person but must take as a model the belief of a rational person and this, in turn, leads to the problem of the criteria of rationality. To solve this problem, says Carnap, one must first depsychologize the concept of belief. Just as in deductive logic the psychological concept of necessary connection between thoughts (ideas) was replaced by the objective concept of logical entailment, so here the concept of degree of belief must be replaced by that of partial logical consequence. The theory of such a concept was called inductive logic.

A.W. Carus adds:

Carnap would not, of course, have been surprised about the contradictions arising from the ‘folk’ concept of belief, as famously diagnosed by Kripke (1979). In the relevant discussions since then, little of what Carnap called explication has been in evidence; attention has focused more on the natural-language folk concepts themselves rather than on any systematic replacement of them (e.g., in the social and cognitive sciences) by better or more precise concepts.

Shahid Rahman, Juan Redmond and Nicolas Clerbout argue that Popper's notion of objective knowledge is closely related to the (content) of belief:

According to Popper, scientific objective knowledge is, different to Frege, hypothetical in nature. Furthermore, the argumentative function can either falsify or provide the means to continue supporting or not the plausibility of given scientific hypotheses. Thus, it looks as Popper's objective knowledge is either very close to justified (or not yet falsified) belief after all or to the antirealist notion of belief: hypotheticals are in fact one way to express the contents of a belief!

Of course, it is well known that Popper's objective knowledge was independent of a relation to a particular subject. Therefore, the above passage refers to the content of a belief. Susan Haack wrote:

the notion of belief plays an important rôle in Peirce’s theory of inquiry. Following Bain, Peirce takes belief to be a kind of habit of, or disposition to, action (see Bain [1875] and Popper cf. [1974] p.68). In a novel environment, however, an old habit may be found ineffectual, so that a new habit must be formed to cope with the unfamiliar situation. Where the original habit is a belief, its frustration by a novel stimulus is doubt. [...]

But the contrast between Peirce’s belief-oriented theory of inquiry and Popper’s concentration on the logical relations between the propositions which are the contents of beliefs is already evident. Peirce’s approach has certain advantages. For example, his naturalistic view of belief and doubt fits better than Popper's concentration on the contents of beliefs with a concern with the growth of science, and supplies a new dimension to the thesis of the continuity of scientific knowledge with inborn habits; and his account of how unfamiliar stimuli interfere with belief to produce doubt and new beliefs anchors Peirce’s epistemology in experience more firmly than Popper's account of basic statements as adopted by a decision somewhat mysteriously “‘motivated”’ by experience.

Konstantin Kolenda wrote:

The convergence of Peirce’s and Popper's views on this point directs our attention to the tireless (and often tiresome) reiteration by Peirce that truth and reality are independent of what any particular person happens to think. He tells us, to cite but one typical instance, that truth disclosed by science is independent of “whether you and I and any generations of men think it to be so or not.” (7.186) But, as in regard to perception and abduction, what is believed to be the case is not independent of mind in general. In one paragraph rich in suggestions,” Peirce denies that any meaning can be assigned to something entirely independent of thought.

David Papineau wrote:

The real reason Popper refuses to concern himself with belief is surely to do with the connection between belief and truth. If scientific methodo- logy were thought of as laying down rules for believing theories, then it would be obvious that there was something wrong with a methodology that selected theories that were likely to be false. For we can’t sensibly set out to believe theories that we think are likely to be false. [...] Many philosophers, and in particular most contemporary philosophers of science, seem to find the Popperian notion of ‘acceptance’ quite unproblematic. But in fact it is a deeply obscure notion. What exactly is one supposed to do when one ‘accepts’ a theory?

C.J.Misak wrote:

Peirce holds that the very notion of belief is such that an inquirer stops believing (i.e. doubts) in the face of a surprising experience that upsets an expectation produced by the belief. Beliefs are such that they automatically resign in the face of recalcitrant experience.

Imre Lakatos wrote:

Many philosophers have tried to solve the problem of demarcation in the following terms: a statement constitutes knowledge if sufficiently many people believe it sufficiently strongly. But the history of thought shows us that many people were totally committed to absurd beliefs. If the strength of beliefs were a hallmark of knowledge, we should have to rank some tales about demons, angels, devils, and of heaven and hell as knowledge. Scientists, on the other hand, are very sceptical even of their best theories. Newton's is the most powerful theory science has yet produced, but Newton himself never believed that bodies attract each other at a distance. So no degree of commitment to beliefs makes them knowledge. Indeed, the hallmark of scientific behaviour is a certain scepticism even towards one’s most cherished theories.

Richard C. Jeffrey wrote:

For knowledge is sure, and there seems to be little we can be sure of outside logic and mathematics and truths related immediately to experience. It is as if there were some propositions - that this paper is white, that two and two are four - on which we have a firm grip, while the rest, including most of the theses of science, are slippery or insubstantial or somehow inaccessible to us. Outside the realm of what we are sure of lies the puzzling region of probable knowledge - puzzling in part because the sense of the noun seems to be cancelled by that of the adjective.

The obvious move is to deny that the notion of knowledge has the importance generally attributed to it, and to try to make the concept of belief do the work that philosophers have generally assigned the grander concept. I shall argue that this is the right move.

William P. Alston wrote:

In several publications, Audi has presented and defended a conception of propositional faith, faith that so-and-so, such as faith that God exercises providence over our lives, that is different from belief that so-and-so, and hence is termed nondoxastic faith (hereinafter ‘NDF’). He argues that philosophers concerned with the cognitive side of religious faith have focused too exclusively on religious belief. He does not deny that belief has a place there, but he insists that religious propositional faith also takes at least one other form, a nondoxastic form, which he is concerned to delineate and to display its important role in the religious life.

Williamson wrote:

Although being coloured is a necessary but insufficient condition for being red, we cannot state a necessary and sufficient condition for being red by conjoining being coloured with other properties specified without reference to red. Neither the equation 'Red = coloured + X' nor the equation 'Knowledge = true belief + X' need have a non-circular solution. Thus belief can be a necessary but insufficient condition of knowledge even if we do not implicitly conceptualize knowledge as the conjunction of belief with that which must be added to belief to yield knowledge. Perhaps the inference from knowledge to belief derives from a conceptualization of belief in terms of knowledge rather than from a conceptualization of knowledge in terms of belief.

Ya-Ting Chang wrote:

If you think it is very likely to fail, you will climb K2. So your desire to see the view, together with the background of the situation, will let us know what you believe. This is the sense in which belief is embedded in desire, so Davidson argues.
When Davidson makes the point that desire is in this sense more fundamental than belief, what he is concerned with is still the condition that makes interpretation possible, or, to put it in another way, the condition that makes understanding human action possible.

Here the view of D. M. Armstrong on belief:

a belief is a map-like state in the believer's mind, having a complex structure. But this state with its complex structure is marked off from a 'mere thought' having the same complex structure (and so the same propositional content) by the fact that the belief-state is, and the thought is not, a potential cause or inhibitor of action. Belief that this glass of water just drawn from the tap is poisonous will make me refrain from drinking it, despite thirst. Merely entertaining the proposition that it is poisonous will have no such effect.

This passage from Zagzebski:

The nature of truth, propositions, and reality are all metaphysical questions. For this reason epistemologists generally do not direct their major effort to these questions when writing as epistemologists, and so discussions of knowledge normally do not center on the object of knowledge, but rather on the properties of the state itself that make it a state of knowing. Accounts of knowledge, then, direct their attention to the knowing relation and focus more on the subject side of the relation than on the object side. [...] The most general way of characterizing the relation between the knower and the proposition known is that she takes it to be true, and this relation is standardly called the state of belief. The idea that the knowing state is a species of the belief state undergirds the almost universal practice in epistemology of defining knowledge as true belief plus something else. But this view can be disputed since the history of epistemic concepts shows that belief and knowledge were sometimes regarded as mutually exclusive epistemic states. This was either because it was thought that knowledge and belief have distinct objects, or because it was thought appropriate to restrict the range of belief to epistemic states evaluatively inferior to the state of knowledge. The first worry has been settled to the satisfaction of almost all contemporary epistemologists by the adoption of the widespread view that propositions are the objects of belief as well as of knowledge and, in fact, the same proposition can be either known or believed. [...] The second worry can be settled by stipulating that to believe is to think with assent, a definition that comes from Augustine.

Zagzebski wrote:

So far we have seen that knowledge is a relation between a conscious subject and some portion of reality, usually understood to be mediated through a true proposition, and the majority of epistemological attention has been devoted to the subject side of that relation. In the state of knowledge the knower is related to a true proposition. The most general way of characterizing the relation between the knower and the proposition known is that she takes it to be true, and this relation is standardly called the state of belief.

Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar, and Duncan Pritchard suggest that (true) belief is what is valuable, but knowledge is valuable as the best way to secure true belief. They wrote:

The core issue about value was, of course, not whether knowledge is better than ignorance, but whether knowledge is better than true belief, or states implicating true belief but falling short of knowledge. The topic is opportune for at least two reasons. The first connects with the fact that there are widely differing views on the nature of knowledge, and on how to pursue the theory of knowledge. [...] The second reason why the project is opportune is that [...] there has been considerable discussion in the literature as to whether knowledge really can be more valuable than true belief or states implicating true belief but falling short of knowledge. Perhaps the best way to secure true belief is to secure something better than true belief, such as knowledge, but once we have true belief as to whether something is so, why should it matter that we know or have a justified belief on the matter?

Sandra Lapointe describes Bolzano's view on belief:

What Bolzano means when he uses the term ‘judgement’ corresponds in a substantial way to the contemporary notion of belief. For Bolzano, a judgement is a psychological entity in which a propositional content is grasped (Bolzano 1837, §34).

Alvin I. Goldman on belief

Alvin I. Goldman wrote:

Deployment of the intellect involves either mental acts or states, or public utterances, frequently both. Among the mental states, beliefs are usually singled out by epistemologists. Among linguistic acts, the ones of central concern are assertions. Most intellectual endeavors try to arrive at some belief on a designated topic, or to formulate a statement on the problem at hand. Accordingly, the 'product' of the scientist or scholar is typically a body of assertions—presumably accompanied by a body of beliefs. So epistemology naturally focuses on either beliefs or assertive claims. [...] let us see where folk psychology, as presented by philosophers, places the concept of belief.

Philosophers commonly divide mental states into two sorts: those that have and those that lack propositional content. The former are propositional attitudes, and the latter sensations, qualia, or the like.[...]

Among propositional attitudes, we distinguish those with a conative or optative attitude toward a proposition—favoring or opposing the proposition's realization—and those with a purely intellectual assessment. The latter involve a stance on the question of whether the proposition is true, quite apart from whether it would be nice if it were true. Such intellectual attitudes include believing, being certain, thinking it likely, doubting, and suspending judgment. These sorts of states are called doxastic attitudes, or sometimes credal attitudes. They are central to epistemology.

In calling beliefs or other doxastic attitudes mental states, philosophers do not imply that they are phenomenological states. Beliefs do not have to occur in consciousness to count as mental. The belief that you reside at 3748 Hillview Road may be held for many years, though you only 'think about' your address intermittently during this period.

In what follows, we see the openness of Goldman toward externalism:

Many issues about beliefs and belief ascriptions are controversial. Most of the controversy concerns belief contents. Does a mental state really have a determinate content? If so, what is the source of this content? Is content determined exclusively by what's 'in the head', or by external factors as well? If external factors are relevant, can we really say that belief states (including their contents) are purely mental, that is, inner states of the individual considered in abstraction from his or her environment or causal ancestry?

It remains to see how metaphysical is Goldman. Next, Goldman makes reference to the notion of propositions being the objects of beliefs:

Another problem concerns the objects (or relata) of beliefs. The term 'propositional attitude' naturally suggests that the objects in question are propositions. And this is a common way of talking, both among philosophers and psychologists. But propositions are problematic entities. As classically interpreted, they are logical or abstract entities, somewhat akin to Platonic forms. Philosophers widely regard this sort of ontological status with suspicion. There are other theories of propositions, but none is free from criticism. In place of propositions some philosophers posit sentences of an inner language, a Zingua mentis, as the relata of beliefs. But this sort of posit is also controversial.

and he presents his direction of thoughts:

I regard propositions as a temporary theoretical posit from which we should ultimately ascend to a better theory. Since such a theory may be quite complex, and its details probably would not seriously affect my project, it is an issue to which I will devote little attention. The bearing of psychology on the belief construct, however, is more central to my concerns. So let me briefly anticipate a fuller discussion of this matter in later chapters. What stance should cognitive science adopt toward beliefs?

Marshall Swain wrote:

One can hardly disagree with the underlying thesis of Goldman’s paper, namely, that epistemologists may profit from a careful study of cognitive psychology. I do not fully agree, however, with Goldman’s mildly polemical criticisms of traditional epistemology. Goldman suggests, for example, that the concept of belief, which is so dear to epistemologists, is too “coarse-grained” for an adequate epistemology. [...] Goldman also suggests that the "methods" and "rules" proposed by traditional epistemologists for improving our cognitive outputs are too restricted, in light of what cognitive psychology can tell us about human capacities and the structure of our mental life. [...] I would certainly not deny that a genuinely executable set of rules of epistemics could have practical value. But I am deeply skeptical about the likelihood of philosophical progress in this area, [...] Moreover, as Goldman himself emphasizes, epistemics can hardly get under way without an understanding of cognitive ends [...] What might these cognitive ends be? Goldman suggests a very general description of the aim of cognition, namely, the solving of goal-attainment problems, whether practical or intellectual. It seems to me that this can be reformulated in traditional epistemological terms. [...] arriving at a solution to an “intellectual” problem is to come to have factual knowledge, whereas arriving at a solution to a practical problem is to come to have practical knowledge (knowing how, when, where, etc.). Other epistemic states, such as justified belief, true belief, justified probability estimates, and whatnot, might be included as means to these ends, or as ends in themselves relative to appropriately specified problems. [...] Let us, as Goldman urges, pay close attention to the results of research in cognitive psychology. But let us use this resource to further our understanding of the nature of knowledge, justified belief, and other central concepts. This, I believe, is a more promising, if more traditional, area of epistemological speculation.

Contradictory beliefs in one person

J.P. Smit wrote:

A number of philosophers have pointed out that Kripke makes an assumption which conflicts with his referentialism. If this assumption is denied, Pierre’s situation is no longer puzzling to the referentialist. This assumption is one that Boghossian (1994:33) has called “epistemic transparency”. He formulates it as follows: Epistemic content is transparent if, and only if, “[when]…two of a thinker’s token thoughts possess the same content, then the thinker must be able to know a priori that they do; and (b) if two of a thinker’s token thoughts possess distinct contents, then the thinker must be able to know a priori that they do” (Boghossian 1994:36)7.

The relevance of epistemic transparency becomes evident if we look at Kripke’s construal of Pierre’s situation. When discussing the possibility of Pierre having conflicting beliefs, Kripke describes Pierre as a “leading philosopher and logician” (Kripke 1988:123). This is done in order to discredit the possibility of Pierre having contradictory beliefs, since, surely, such a person would not have contradictory beliefs.

Halvor Nordby wrote:

One of the main reasons why Kripke finds his puzzle about belief so intriguing is that he thinks that one is always able to notice that one has contradictory beliefs if one has such beliefs. I argue that [...] the best solution to this problem is to reject the idea that one can always notice contradictory beliefs.

Sarah Stroud wrote:

Davidson's answer starts by distinguishing between belief in a contradiction and belief in each of two contradictory propositions: it is easier to credit an agent with two beliefs p and -p than a belief in the single conjunctive proposition (bp A -p) (Davidson 1999b: 444). Davidson's idea is that a person can have two beliefs that she fails to “put together”: in such a case, the agent may simply not realize that two things she believes contradict each other. What is impossible, for Davidson, is to believe a contradiction while seeing that it is a contradiction; but that may never happen in a case like the one described.

Ingmar Persson wrote:

Elsewhere Davidson explicitly maintains that it is this fact that people occasionally hold contradictory beliefs that necessitates divisions of the mind: “people can and do sometimes keep closely related but opposed beliefs apart. To this extent we must accept the idea that there can be boundaries between parts of the mind” (1985a: 147). Mele’s reply (1987: 129) to this claim is that the contradictory beliefs are not simultaneously held: the belief that the data are sufficient to make it highly probable that p replaces the belief that the data are not sufficient. Although Mele’s reply may be right, I would like to argue that it is possible for one simultaneously to hold contradictory beliefs.

Ingmar Persson adds something:

The explanation as to why the belief p and the belief not-p can coexist in the same subject without coalescing into a conjunctive belief that p and that not-p has already been indicated: they are not manifested in episodic thought at the very same time (or, strictly speaking, in immediate succession). They are kept apart in the sense of not being brought together in episodic thought and not in the sense of belonging to different compartments of the mind.

Belief and ascent

Alvin Platinga wrote:

Second, it is widely (though not universally*) agreed that knowledge, whatever precisely it is, also involves belief; a person knows that all men are mortal only if, among other things, she believes that all men are mortal (where here the term ‘believes’ is to be taken in the classical sense of ‘thinking with assent’; it does not imply lack of certainty or mere belief).

Maria Rosa Antognazzza wrote:

Crucial to Stoic epistemology, in particular, is the notion of katalepsis (literally, ‘grasp’), introduced by the founder of Stoicism, Zeno of Citium, as a technical term to indicate the immediate sense-perceptual or intellectual grasp which provides the foundation of all cognition. [...] The common factor in episteme and katalepsis is ‘grasp’. What sets doxa (belief, opinion) apart from these two mental states or cognitive modes seems to be precisely the lack of such a grasp. What links all three is assent:” episteme, katalepsis and doxa all involve assent, but the Stoics take a very dim view of belief, since on their account this is a mental state in which assent is given without being in contact with ‘what is’ —something the wise person would never do. Needless to say, ‘assent’ and ‘belief’ are not the same thing, and should not be confused with one another.

— Maria Rosa Antognazza (Antognazza 2021)

In what follows, Antognazza is not in the context of stoicism, but still emphasizes the distinction in kind between knowledge and belief. She does not use the expression "assent to knowledge", but she could have.

That is, knowledge is a primitive perception or an irreducible mental ‘seeing’ what is the case; knowledge is a primitive presence of a fact to the mind (or to the senses) in which there is no ‘gap’ between knower and known. Belief, on the contrary, is a mental state or a cognitive mode in which precisely the perception or presence which characterizes knowledge is lacking, and assent to the object of cognition is given (rightly or wrongly) on grounds external to the object itself. We should not suppose that the terms ‘belief’, ‘faith’, and ‘opinion’ here carry overtones of questionable speculation determined by something other than convincing reasoning. On the contrary, the ‘assurance’ with which ‘belief’, ‘faith’ or ‘opinion’ may be embraced includes entirely reasonable assurance on thoroughly justified grounds. The distinction of assured true ‘belief’ from ‘knowledge’ lies in the kind or source of assurance, not its degree.

— Maria Rosa Antognazza (Antognazza 2015)

Belief and logic

Peter Gardenfors suggests the metaphysical view that human knowledge is a form of computer knowledge in which the computer only has access to internal propositional knowledge and other propositional knowledge as input:

Belief revision and nonmonotonic logic are motivated by quite different ideas. The theory of belief revision deals with the dynamics of belief states, that is, it aims at modelling how an agent or a computer system updates its state of belief as a result of receiving new information. Of particular interest is the case where the new information is incompatible with the old state of belief. Nonmonotonic logic, on the other hand, is concerned with a systematic study of how we jump to conclusions from what we believe. By using default assumptions, generalizations etc. we tend to believe in things that do not follow from our knowledge by the classical rules of logic. A thorough understanding of this process is desirable since we want Al-systems to be able to perform the same kind of reasoning.

This is a big field in itself that does not seem so connected in practice to epistemology, not sure why. Floridi in The Philosophy of Information (2011) seems to make some link. It will be interesting to learn more about the link between epistemology and Floridi's philosophy of information. The link seems problematic. Floridi says

Voorbraak (1991) has proved, for example, that objective knowledge as formalised in S5-EL does not imply rational belief as formalised in KD45-DL.

But, the notion of objective knowledge of Voorbraak is not the objective knowledge of Popper or Pierce. He wrote:

Let K_a be the operator with the following intuitive meaning:

K_a(P): agent a objectively knows that P, i.e. P is the case (in every world that is possible) given the information available to a.

Since we will restrict ourselves to the one agent case, we will usually omit the subscript. The notion of objective knowledge applies to any agent which is capable of processing information; we do not require the agent to consider the (im)possibility of some worlds.

This notion of objective knowledge is infallible, but both Popper and Peirce are fallibilists.

Belief and inductive logic

Nick Chater, Mike Oaksford, Ulrike Hahn and Evan Heit wrote:

for the cognitive system to deal with uncertainty reliably presumably requires the application of some kind of method — i.e., conforming with, perhaps only approximately, some set of principles. Without some such foundation, the question of why the cognitive system copes with uncertainty (well-enough, most of the time) is left answered. Any particular instance of uncertain reasoning may, of course, be explained by postulating that the cognitive system follows some special strategy, rather than general inference principles. But the mind is able to deal with a hugely complex and continually changing informational environment, for which special-purpose strategies cannot credibly pre-exist. Thus, to explain the reliable (if partial) success of the inductive leaps observed in human cognition, we should consider the possibility that thought is based on some set of principles of good inductive reasoning — i.e., perhaps thought can be explained by reference to some form of inductive logic.

Later, they add:

early, and now unpopular, theories of inductive logic, which pursued the hope that inductive logic might depend purely on the form of sentences, without reference to the meanings of their non-logical terms, or the state of the world (e.g., [Hempel, 1945; Carnap, 1950]) have been little considered. Moreover, theories in which degrees of inductive support are interpreted in terms of proportions of possible worlds (independent of whether these worlds can be conceived by an individual reasoner) are rarely considered (although some theories of probabilistic reasoning have proposed models which involve counting different types of “mental models,” which might be viewed as a psychological analogue to the notion of possible worlds, e.g., [Johnson-Laird et al., 1999]). By far the most psychologically natural perspective on inductive logic is to view inductive support as a matter of subjective probability — i.e., the degree of belief, by a particular individual, in a specific proposition. After all, the key psychological question is the dynamics of belief-revision: how does the addition of new information modifies ones prior states of belief.

and add more later:

The fact that people can appear to be such poor probabilists may seem to conflict with the thesis that many aspects of cognition can fruitfully be modelled in probabilistic terms.

Yet this conflict is only apparent. People struggle not just with probability, but with all branches of mathematics. Yet the fact that, e.g., Fourier analysis, is hard to understand does not imply that it, and its generalizations, are not fundamental to audition and vision.

Belief and desire

Paul Boghossian wrote:

Let us begin, then, with the following question: Could someone have the concept of belief without having the concept of desire? Prima facie, this would appear to be so: it does seem possible for someone to have the idea of accepting a content as true without having any idea of what it would be to desire a content to be true.

One way in which this conceptual appearance could be falsified is if it turned out that I couldn't coherently think of someone as believing something without also thinking of them as desiring something, if it were conceptually impossible to think of someone as a believer without also thinking of them as a desirer. But this doesn't seem impossible. [...]
Let us now ask the converse question: Could someone have the concept of desire, but not yet the concept of belief? Could someone understand the idea of wanting the world to be a certain way, but have no idea at all of what it would be to take it to be a certain way, to accept its being a certain way?
This does seem bizarre.

Belief and doxa

Jessica Moss and Whitney Schwab wrote:

The view [...]—one so widespread these days as to remain largely unquestioned—is that when Plato and Aristotle talk about doxa, they are talking about what we now call belief. Or, at least, they are talking about something so closely related to what we now call belief that no philosophical importance can be placed on any differences. Doxa is the ancient counterpart of belief; hence the modern use of ‘doxastic’ as the adjective corresponding to ‘belief.’ One of our aims in this paper is to challenge this view. [...] Aristotle, expanding on ideas suggested in Plato, explicitly develops a notion that corresponds much more closely to our modern notion of belief: hupolêpsis. Hupolêpsis is a much-ignored and often misunderstood component of Aristotle’s epistemology, usually set aside under the un-illuminating name of ‘supposition.’ We will argue, however, that it exhibits the central feature of belief as nowadays understood: it is the generic attitude of taking-to-be-true. [...] there is nowadays a widely accepted notion of belief as the generic attitude of taking something to be the case or taking something to be true. ‘Taking’ here refers not to a provisional attitude, but to one of endorsement or commitment.
[...] First, it is in virtue of this feature that belief is widely taken to be entailed by knowledge: if one knows P, one must take P to be true. Second, it is in virtue of this feature that belief is often taken to be the genus of knowledge, as in the program exemplified by the Justified True Belief analysis of knowledge and its revisions: knowledge is a privileged kind of taking-to-be-true. [...] Although this program has fallen somewhat out of fashion, this is largely due to pessimism about the prospects of giving a reductive analysis of knowledge, rather than to a revision of the notion of belief. [...] One important caveat: most philosophers today construe belief as a propositional attitude, and our use of ‘taking-to-be-true’ to characterize belief may imply this view, but we do not mean to be taking any stand on the question of whether Plato or Aristotle conceive of doxa, hupolêpsis, or other cognitive states as propositional attitudes. We think that there is real indeterminacy here; [...] Plato and Aristotle [...] consistently contrast doxa with knowledge as an inferior and incompatible state. Moreover, although we will not provide detailed evidence here, they are joined in this by their philosophical, sophistic, and literary predecessors and contemporaries: doxa is widely used to name a state inferior to knowledge. Older scholars of Plato and Aristotle recognized this and expressed it in their translations of doxa as ‘opinion’; some still follow suit. Recent work on Plato has argued for this view explicitly: Plato’s doxa is a “deficient cognitive attitude,” not a component or genus of knowledge but something left behind when knowledge is acquired.

and in the last, concluding, chapter:

We have argued that with hupolêpsis, Aristotle introduced the notion of belief into Greek philosophy. If we are right, this is an important discovery. It will help re-orient not only our understanding of Plato and Aristotle, but also our understanding of subsequent developments in epistemology: we will be able to understand better why things change in the ways they do when they do.

Jessica Moss wrote:

[Plato along with his predecessors and contemporaries] sometimes use ‘doxa’ and its cognate verb, ‘dokein,’ in this way too [that we would translate with ‘believe’ or ‘think’], but even a brief survey suffices to show that they often use them with much narrower connotations: connotations of mere seeming (Section 3 below). I will argue that when Plato uses ‘doxa’ to pick out the salient inferior counterpart to epistêmê, he has these connotations in mind.

Gail Fine has a view on doxa as taken to be true, which makes it a component of knowledge:

One reason to think that doxa, as it is discussed in the Meno, is belief in the sense of taking to be true is that 98a defines epistémé as a species of doxa. However, the dialogue also sometimes takes doxa to be mere belief: that is, belief that falls short of knowledge.

It should be mentioned that Meno 98a is where Socrates recalls that the process of transformation of doxa to knowledge is recollection ("Anamnesis", which is almost always translated as recollection from things known in the past).

Belief and brain

Paul M. Churchland wrote:

[...] that chemical economy is extraordinarily intricate. The genetic message hidden in the DNA is some billion letters long. The sequence by which it is read out can take years, and it makes the running of the world’s most complex computer program look like a game of tic-tac-toe by comparison. In the face of all this, the scientifically untrained micro-Lilliputian tourist [described by Pat’s 1950s biology teacher] will recognize little or nothing of what is going on, just as the thought experiment claims. But that is because the tourist is both ignorant of the relevant concepts and untrained in their application, not because the whole biological show is being run by some nonphysical agency. In this case, at least, we know perfectly well that it isn’t.

and later:

Searle, some will say, sounds too much like Pat’s 1950s biology teacher. His words still echo in our ears: “Yes indeed, the properties associated with being alive are all properties of the physical body, and they are proper subjects of scientific study as well; but they remain distinct from and irreducible to the body’s physical and chemical features!”

Keith Lehrer understand Churchland as saying that:

belief is essentially mental, and consequently that there is no such thing as belief.

Justification

Justification and realism

But, still, what does this come to, given that the contemporary anti-realists are not recommending that we change what we believe? It is true that there are also contemporary realists, people who find it important to insist that the aim of belief is truth, and that truth means correspondence to an independent reality. But is there really a substantial disagreement between the two sides? Do the realists and the anti-realists differ on how we should treat our beliefs, on what we should do with them, or is it just a difference in philosophical style? The realist wants to say a belief is true if it corresponds to reality. The anti-realist wants to say that we count something as real if it is part of the view of the world that we accept. Aren’t they just saying the same thing, but putting the emphasis in different places?
I think that the real difference between the realist and the anti-realist is located in their differing views about the justification of belief. Anti-realists will hold that at some point belief ceases to require justification. They will hold that an analysis of the notion of belief, or more generally of the notion of representation, will show that at some point belief cannot help but fit reality. And so they will hold that at that point questions as to what entitles us to adopt our beliefs cease to be appropriate.

There is a misunderstanding here. The anti-realist does not say that an analysis will show that a belief, which is a concept within the realistic division internal/external, does not need justification. He says that there is a notion of knowledge that does not fit in the internal/external paradigm.

About knowing something that is not true

Martinich and Stroll wrote: "Second, it is agreed by all sides that one cannot have 'knowledge that' [propositional knowledge] of something that is not true." and later "however it is understood, skepticism represents a challenge to the claim that human beings possess or can acquire knowledge. In giving even that minimal characterization, it is important to emphasize that skeptics and nonskeptics alike accept the same definition of knowledge, one that implies two things: (1) if A knows that p, then p is true, and (2) if A knows that p, then A cannot be mistaken (i.e., it is logically impossible that A is wrong."

Nicholas Rescher considered that induction must be accepted pragmatically without further justification and that knowledge is standardly justified true belief. Here the qualifier "standardly" makes an important difference.

Kevin Meeker and Frederick F. Schmitt argue that even in David Hume we can see a view that knowledge is justified true belief. Kenneth R. Merrill rather says that Hume adopted a point of view similar to Quine who saw epistemology as a part of psychology. Schmitt's view on "justification" is not a logical justification: in this manner there is no contradiction.

Sven Bernecker and Fred Dretske wrote that after Edmund Gettier raised a problem with the JTB definition of knowledge no epistemologists found an acceptable variation on this definition. Similarly, Conee and Feldman wrote "Although epistemologists have learned much about knowledge from this research, no consensus has emerged about the solution to the problem raised by examples like Gettier’s. On the other hand, Paul Boghossian wrote that JTB is the standard, widely accepted Platonic definition of knowledge.

Rohit Parikh and Adriana Renero argued that the popular belief that plato adopted JTB as the definition of knowledge is incorrect. This is also a point made by Zina Giannopoulou.

Epistemics versus Cognitive Science

It seems that Epistemics existed and is still viewed by some as a field of study distinct from Cognitive Science. For example Kelly, wrote "To this end, epistemics incorporates everything that the personal epistemology tradition seeks, and then some. Its most significant informing discipline is social epistemology but cognitive science and information science also play a part as well in naturalizing artifacts produced in research (or distilled from lived experience)".

About epistemology as one of the four branches of philosophy

Tertiary sources say that philosophy is divided in four branches. I see a problem here, because Wikipedia is not about truth, but about what is the state of knowledge, what are the well known views, and this includes saying who has these views. Of course, in the case of the sky is blue, there is no need to say who has this view, but in the case of the four branches of philosophy, it seems to me that we cannot simply state that view as if it was the truth. The problem is that tertiary sources are not replacements for secondary sources. The NOR policy says that Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources and, to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources and primary sources. So, I searched the literature in the hope to discover who are the primary proponents of this division of philosophy in four branches. The view points that I present look in the past, but they are found in recent sources about branches of philosophy. There is no original research here—I refer to sources. I ignored the views on philosophy before the Renaissance. Regarding the Renaissance, I found this:

In the universities, natural philosophy (one of the four branches of philosophy, alongside logic, metaphysics, and ethics) consisted in the explication of and commentary on canonical texts, starting with Aristotle’s Physics on the principles of nature (space, time, motion and the like), and advancing to more specialized works on meteorology, psychology or theoretical medicine.

— Ann Blair, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. 3: The Renaissance. Sec. 47: Natural philosophy and the ‘new science’

This is not exactly the division that we see often nowadays, viz, epistemology, logic, metaphysics and ethics. It might not seem so different: instead of natural philosophy we have epistemology. Natural philosophy is now called science and is not a branch of philosophy any more. However, from the point of view of epistemology, it's a big difference. Somehow, it emerged as a branch of philosophy after science received its own status outside philosophy. If we believe Sidgwick, H., science was still a branch of philosophy in 1772 up to 1876:

For the use of the general term Philosophy to mean Physics, which continental writers have noticed as an English peculiarity, has been especially at home in Cambridge since the time of Newton . No doubt the qualified term " Natural Philosophy ” would always have been considered more proper and precise : but still " Philosophy ” without qualification would have been commonly understood to mean Natural Philosophy. We find, for example, that the enlightened Dr. Jebb , describing the examinations of the university as they existed in 1772, speaks of the “ transition from the elements of Mathematics to the four branches of philosophy, viz. Mechanics , Hydrostatics, Apparent Astromony and Optics.

— Sidgwick, H., MIND A QUARTERLY REVIEW OF PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY, Vol I. 1876

OK, this is a very old source, more a primary source, but it might help to find recent sources. Perhaps the transition occurred at the end of the 19th century and we can find recent sources about that. If we could attribute the view that philosophy has the "standard" four branches to some well known source, that will accomplish what we want. However, this is perhaps too much to hope for. The branches are not always the same even in relatively recent sources. For example, I found this written in 1988:

THIS INDEX groups the topics under the headings: Philosophy, Psychology, Economics, and General. Philosophy is broken down into its branches: metaphysics (the study of the fundamental nature of reality and of man), epistemology (the theory of knowledge), ethics (the science of moral values), politics (including both political theory and more concrete public policy issues), and esthetics (the philosophy of art).

— Ayn Rand, The Ayn Rand Lexicon:Objectivism from A to Z

In this division, as expected, epistemology is now a branch of philosophy, but logic is not, whereas politics and esthetics are. I found the "standard" division in Those who Can, Teach. Here, a 1968 text, logic is not a branch of philosophy, but politics is. This one has the "standard" division. Given the fact that some divisions have five branches, I compared the Google Ngrams of "three branches of philosophy", "four branches of philosophy" and "five branches of philosophy" and in 2019, five branches was more frequent than four branches. In any case, the most frequent is three branches. So, clearly the division in four branches does not seem to be a standard division. This more recent source says explicitly that there are no unique division in branches. branches: logic, epistemology, axiology and metaphysics. This source says that this "standard division" is close to the division of philosophy that the American Philosophical Association uses. The difference in the APA division is that aesthetics is also a branch. This source subsumes ethics and aesthetics under axiology, but it says that in its discussion of axiology, ethics and aesthetic are separate subjects. So, in practice, the source uses five branches as does APA. In this 1998 source, epistemology is not mentioned as a branch of philosophy, only the other four branches used by APA are mentioned. This 2007 source, in a specific context, mentions other branches:

Specifically, I outline the theory’s implications for the following four branches of philosophy: (i) the philosophy of mind and language, (ii) the theory of rational belief and rational decision, (iii) first-order normative ethical theory, and (iv) the philosophy of religion.

— Ralph Wedgwood, The Nature of Normativity, 2007

This 2017 source has the five branches of the APA, but subsumes ethics and aesthetics under axiology. It refers to this 1999 dictionary of philosophy, which explicitly refers to the five branches.

Regarding the 5 branches of the APA, it seems that it has changed or the source I used was simply wrong. On the site of the APA, I found "The broadest subfields of philosophy are most commonly taken to be logic, ethics, metaphysics, epistemology and the history of philosophy. Here is a brief sketch of each."

Critic of the lead of Empirical evidence from a critical rationalism view

In the critical rationalist view, an observation is empirical evidence for a theory if it is in logical contradiction with known rival theories and not with the proposed theory. The evidence makes the focus move toward the theory, because it creates problems for the rival theories while leaving the considered theory as a valid alternative. If the observation is evidence for more than one theory, scientists have the tendency to adopt the one that is most falsifiable, i.e., more precise, less vague. Decisions are easier to make under a more precise law, but this is not a rule to justify a theory. In fact, because of the Duhem-Quine thesis, there is not even a rule that says that we should reject theories that have problems because of contradictions with evidence. In other words, evidence is not at all to justify a theory, but is only used to steer the nonrational creative process through problems. In critical rationalism, problems with theories typically support progress. For example, we propose a treatment for an illness, which is a real problem. The proposed theory is a positive effect. The rival theory is simply no effect. We see an effect. This is good and yet a problem with the rival theory. The general principle is that problems with theories are used to steer the nonrational creative process.

Statements that knowledge is justified true belief

Well, this includes those who claims it was the traditional analysis and criticises it. Louis Vervoort and Alexander A. Shevchenko wrote:

As is well known, Gettier’s analysis [Gettier, 1963] can be seen as a critique or extension of Plato’s analysis of knowledge. More precisely, on Plato’s account following equivalence holds: S knows that p ↔ (p is true & S believes that p & S is justified in believing that p).

Here follows a few more citations.

[Russell] philosophical attention turned from metaphysics to epistemology and he continued to work in this field after he returned in 1944 to Cambridge, where he completed his last major philosophical work, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948). The framework of Russell’s early epistemology consisted of an analysis of knowledge in terms of justified true belief (though it has been suggested that he unintentionally anticipated Edmund Gettier’s objection to this analysis), and an analysis of epistemic justification that combined fallibilism with a weak empiricism and with a foundationalism that made room for coherence.

— Nicholas Griffin and David B. Martens (Griffin & Martens 2015)

Suppose also that in fact there is an earthquake in September. The person has a true belief about the earthquake but not knowledge of it. What the person lacks is a good reason to support that true belief. In a word, the person lacks justification. Using such arguments, Plato contends that knowledge is justified true belief. Although there has been much disagreement about the nature of justification, the Platonic definition of knowledge was widely accepted until the mid-20th century, when the American philosopher Edmund L. Gettier produced a startling counterexample

— Avrum Stroll, Epistemology in Britannica

According to the most widely accepted definition, knowledge is justified true belief. That it is a kind of belief is supported by the fact that both knowledge and belief can have the same objects (thus, half an hour ago I believed I had left my raincoat in the garage; now I know that I have) and that what is true of someone who believes something to be the case is also true, among other things, of one who knows it. One who comes to know what he formerly believed does not lose the conviction he formerly had.

— Anthony Quinton, Knowledge and belief in Paul Edwards, Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol 4., 1967

I conclude then that the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowing that something is the case are first that what one is said to know be true, secondly that one be sure of it, and thirdly that one should have the right to be sure.

— A. J. Ayer, The Problem of Knowledge, (Ayer 1956)

Suppose that a truth M, either immediately or after we pay attention to its grounds, has become so evident to us that we assume we could not persuade ourselves of the opposite even if we wanted. In other words, we think that it is not in our power to destroy the confidence with which we are attached to judgement M. In this case I should like to call truth Man item of knowledge [Wissen]. For example, we obtain such knowledge of the truth of the Pythagorean theorem once we have been exposed to its proofs. For now we know the truth of this proposition in a way that assures us that we could not persuade ourselves of its falsity even if we tried. On the other hand, consider a proposition M which we take to be true, but of which we do not have knowledge. In this case it does not seem impossible that we could come to form the opposite judgement, Neg .M, by concentrating our attention on true or apparent reasons against M. In such a case I call the relation between our mind and proposition M a belief in this proposition, provided we intend to continue to pay attention to the grounds for the truth of M.

— Bolzano, Bolzano Theory of Science, Vol 3, translated by Rusnock and George

The translators wrote that Bolzano came to reject that definition later when he developed a foundation for mathematics (published in Bernard-Bolzano-Gesamtausgabe in German).

According to the main tradition in epistemology, knowledge is a variety of justified true belief, justification is an undefinable normative concept, and epistemic principles (principles about what justifies what) are necessary truths. According to the leading contemporary rival of the tradition, justification may be defined or explained in terms of reliability, thus permitting one to say that knowledge is reliable true belief and that epistemic principles are contingent.

— JAMES VAN CLEVE, Reliability, Justification, and the Problem of Induction in MIDWEST STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY, IX, 1984

This is a defense of justified true belief against the Gettier cases.

The main overall aim is to subsume the epistemology of thought experiments under the epistemology of counterfactual conditionals and metaphysical modality developed in the previous chapter, and thereby to reveal it as an application of quite ordinary ways of thinking, not as something peculiarly philosophical.

— Williamson (Williamson 2022, Thought Experiments)

and 15 pages later:

Even if we succeeded in cooking up a suitable conditional for (3*) in respect of conceptual possibility, the reinterpreted argument would show little of philosophical interest. The conclusion would be that it is conceptually possible to have justified true belief without knowledge. That does not refute the hypothesis that knowledge just is justified true belief, of metaphysical necessity, any more than the conceptual possibility of something with atomic number 79 that is not gold refutes the hypothesis that gold just is the element with atomic number 79, of metaphysical necessity.

— Williamson (Williamson 2022, Thought Experiments)

The following is part of a review of (Williamson 2022, Thought Experiments), I think.

So, on his picture, arguments appealing to thought experiments are made up of an affirmation of possibility plus a counterfactual inference from that possibility. (As Williamson notes (2007: 137), 'counterfactual' is something of a misnomer; we can use counterfactuals in arguments to the conclusion that their antecedents obtain.) Here's the way it pans out in Gettier cases. We start by affirming that Gettier cases are possible. We then argue that had a Gettier case obtained, there would have been justified true belief without knowledge. The conclusion we end up with is that justified true belief without knowledge is possible. Here the possibility is to be thought of as metaphysical possibility, and we rely on the principle that 'a counterfactual conditional transmits [metaphysical] possibility from its antecedent to its consequent' (2007: 205).

— Frank Jackson (Jackson 2009)

In what follows, Richard Foley suggests that justification in justified true belief is some extra information (that one must have):

Whether a true belief counts as knowledge thus hinges on the importance of the information one has and lacks. This means that questions of knowledge cannot be separated from questions about human concerns and values. It also means that there is no privileged way of coming to know. Knowledge is a mutt. Proper pedigree is not required. What matters is that one not lack important nearby information.

Admission of serious problems with JTB

Some philosophers, after reflection upon this problem, have despaired of providing any definition of knowledge at all and have suggested that perhaps the best we can do is merely to formulate certain necessary conditions of certain types of knowledge. But let us try to repair the traditional definition of knowledge.

— Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge, 1989

The myth of the traditional analysis of knowledge

Pierre Le Morvan (2017) a écrit:

You have probably heard this story. For several decades, many epistemolo- gists have retold it in their books, articles and classrooms. Composed of two key claims, it runs as follows. In the ages prior to 1963 reigned the ‘tra- ditional’ (or ‘standard’ or ‘classical’) conception or analysis of knowledge according to which justified true belief (JTB) is both necessary and sufficient for knowing that p. In 1963, however, Edmund Gettier, with two famous counter-examples, overturned this conception, or at least seriously challenged it, and epistemology has never been the same. We may call the first part of this story the ‘Knowledge Before Gettier’ or ‘KBG’ claim, and the second the ‘Knowledge After Gettier’ or ‘KAG’ claim.
...

We have seen above that the KBG claim, though widely held by contemporary epistemologists since Gettier (‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’), enjoys surprisingly little in terms of support from textual evidence, and important grounds based on historical counter-examples call its generalization into doubt.

This state of affairs thus presents us with what we may call the ‘Puzzle’: why has this poorly supported historical claim attained the rarified status of a near-consensus view in contemporary epistemology, a field renowned for its lack of consensus? In a related vein, how did it become the case that, as Plantinga (‘Justification in the Twentieth Century’, 45) once put it, the ‘inherited lore of the epistemological tribe’ is that the ‘JTB account enjoyed the status of epistemological orthodoxy until 1963, when it was shattered by Edmund Gettier with his three-page paper “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge”?’

Pierre Le Morvan put in question the claim that the traditional view of knowledge was justified true belief (JTB) until Gettier. He cites many authors that also disagreed with this historical view that knowledge was traditionally seen as JTB: "A few have dissented from this near-consensus. Mark Kaplan (‘It’s Not What You Know That Counts’), Panayot Butchvarov (Skepticism in Ethics), Alvin Plantinga (‘Justification in the Twentieth Century’), John Turri (‘Knowledge Judgments in “Gettier” Cases’), Maria Rosa Antognazza (‘The Benefit to Philosophy of the Study of its History’) and Julien Dutant (‘The Legend of the Justified True Belief Analysis’) stand out for their dissent." He found that Dutant and Antognazza made very good case against this view. Antognazza further developped her view in a book chapter co-authored with Michael R. Ayers.

Nathan Ballantyne in the book Knowing our limits wrote:

What is the problem with contemporary “analytic” epistemology? Why can’t it improve inquiry? According to Bishop and Trout, its goals and methods are “beyond repair” (2005, 22). They advocate a brand of “naturalism” that rejects the standard methodology of consulting intuitive judgments about cases in order to understand epistemic normativity. In addition, they “do not believe that constructing theories [of justified belief] is a fruitful endeavor’’ (2005, 116). [...] Bishop and Trout are not the only philosophers demanding changes to epistemology’s boundaries. [...] Roberts and Wood say that one problem with recent epistemology is the overriding concern to formulate necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge and other epistemic goods such as epistemic justification. Practitioners should quit trying to define these things—a task that is "just an interesting theoretical challenge for philosophy professors and smart students"

In the context of virtue epistemology, Ian M. Church wrote:

According to a common and widespread diagnosis, Gettier counterexamples will be unavoidable so long as whatever take to bridge the gap between true belief and knowledge—justification, warrant, aptness, cognitive achievement, etc.—does not necessary guarantee the truth of the belief in question. This leaves reductive accounts of knowledge with a difficult dilemma: either remain vulnerable to Gettier counterexamples or adopt a view that risks falling into radical skepticism. [...] contemporary virtue epistemology is in a very difficult position: either remain vulnerable to Gettier counterexamples or strengthen the demands of knowledge such that it is almost unattainable, paving the way to radical skepticism.

Michael Ayers wrote:

Why, then, was the research programme implicitly proposed by Gettier so widely—for decades almost exclusively—adopted by ‘analytic’ epistemologists? A quick, unsympathetic answer is simply that Gettier wrote as an analytic philosopher for analytic philosophers, and was criticizing a current attempt at just such an analysis. He and most of his readers were simply not open to the idea that knowledge is not reducible to belief distinguished contextually, whether by the quality of the justification that the believer can give for it or by other aspects of its causality. Gettier’s bringing just such a mythical ‘traditional analysis’ into his argument was, in that context, a bit of inspired spin, hugely effective in the short run but, like much spin, eventually unravelling under interrogation.

— Michael Ayers, Knowing and Seeing: Groundwork for a new empiricism

Ichikawa, Jonathan Jenkins and Matthias Steup wrote:

Much of the twentieth-century literature on the analysis of knowledge took the JTB analysis as its starting-point. It became something of a convenient fiction to suppose that this analysis was widely accepted throughout much of the history of philosophy. In fact, however, the JTB analysis was first articulated in the twentieth century by its attackers.

— Ichikawa, Jonathan Jenkins and Matthias Steup (Ichikawa & Steup 2018)

Use of Plato and Socrates in this myth

Floridi has the following translation of 208b and 210a in the Theaetetus:

[208b] Socrates: So my friend there is such a thing as right belief together with justification, which is not entitled to be called knowledge.

Theaetetus: I am afraid so.

[210a] Socrates: [ . . . ] So, Theaetetus, neither perception, nor true belief, nor the addition of a ‘justification’ to true belief can be knowledge.

Petter Sandstad in a review of the book of Michael T. Ferejohn, Formal Causes. Definition, Explanation, and Primacy in Socratic and Aristotelian Thought, wrote:

The second grade is the discussion of the sufficient conditions of knowledge, i.e. by presenting an analytic definition of knowledge. Here Ferejohn (62–63) refers to the definition of knowledge as justified true belief and the discussion of it in the Theaetetus and the Meno 97a–98a. The third and highest grade is epistemology as it is practiced in the Theaetetus and still today, viz. “the comparative assessment of competing analyses of knowledge” (24). I fail to see that this discussion of the second grade, viz. the thesis that knowledge is justified true belief, is of much relevance for the rest of the argumentation in the book. Ferejohn attempts to tie it together with APo. I 2, 71b9–16, but I remain unconvinced. He thinks that Aristotle is implicitly referring to the passage in the Meno, and that the demonstrations discussed in the Posterior Analytics are supposed to be the justifications of a belief (68–70). The definition of knowledge as justified true belief is certainly to be found in these two Platonic dialogues. It is however far from certain that Plato himself endorsed the definition (prima facie he rejects it in the Theaetetus), and it is implausible that Aristotle endorsed it.

Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski in the book Epistemic Values makes a difference between two notions of knowledge: understanding and certainty (obtained from justification) and writes

Gail Fine translates the word epistēmē in Plato as “knowledge,” but in a sense that includes understanding, whereas Moravscik translates it simply as “understanding.” Either way, understanding is a central epistemic value in Plato. But not justification. Occasionally, a contemporary philosopher such as Chisholm (1966) will claim to find the origin of the idea of epistemic justification in Plato’s Theaeterus (201c–​210b), where Socrates proposes and then rejects the suggestion that knowledge is true belief plus a logos.

Linda Zagzebski in Contemporary Debates in Epistemology wrote:

Although knowledge is worth effort, it does not necessarily require effort. It might not even require reflection. If we look at the history of philosophy, we see a division on this issue. What Plato called “episteme” and Aquinas called “scientia” was a state that demanded considerable reflection and cognitive effort. What most contemporary philosophers call “knowledge” does not. So contemporary epistemologists typically treat simple, true perceptual beliefs in ordinary conditions as knowledge, whereas typical ancient and medieval philosophers did not. I suspect that there is no determinate answer to the question whether Plato and Aquinas differ from contemporary philosophers on the analysis of the same epistemic state, or whether ancient and medieval philosophers were simply talking about a different epistemic state than the one that has received the most attention in contemporary epistemology.

Burnyeat wrote:

The question is 'What is knowledge?' and the dialogue is the kind of Socratic discussion that went on in the earlier dialogues, but on a much grander scale. Three answers are given: knowledge is perception , knowledge is true judgment, knowledge is true judgment together with an account. Each of these answers is knocked down in true Socratic style. We are not told what Plato thinks knowledge is at the end, but we have learnt such an enormous amount about the problem and about the ramifications of the problem that we go away feeling the richer rather than the poorer.

— Burnyeat, Dialogue with MYLES BURNYEAT in BRYAN MAGEE, THE GREAT PHILOSOPHERS

Metaphysical views in the JTB analysis of knowledge

An example of that is (Goldman 1979). Goldman first said that justifications are not needed, but later said that actually he meant epistemological justifications are not needed, but non epistemological justifications are needed. This resulted in a form of naturalised epistemology. Naturalised epistemology is a metaphysical view on knowledge. The following discusses the difficulty of explaining the notion of truth in this view.

Revisionary naturalists and non-naturalists will of course push back against the possibility of such an anomalous naturalism, as we might call it, by insisting that strongly prescriptive properties could not possibly be determined by—because they would be “just too different” from—basic physical properties in the way that causal properties must be. They will insist that normative realists must choose: If their principal concern is to provide a causal epistemology for normative judgments, they will have to make their peace with revisionary naturalism; if their principal concern is to maintain the strong prescriptivity of normative truths, they will have to take their chances with non-naturalism.

— Yang Myers (Myers 2021)

There is an implicit metaphysical view in this analysis of JTB.

We can now discern three Gettier problems that are quite distinct, however closely they may be interrelated. First is a problem of semantic analysis: What is the semantic analysis of the linguistic expression “S knows that p”? Second is a problem of a certain sort of conceptual analysis: With concepts understood either as meanings or as psychological entities, what is involved in someone’s possession and/or deployment of a given concept? This problem thus concerns people’s minds, their psychology, their mental states or the contents of those states. Third is a problem of metaphysical analysis. Here our focus is on an objective phenomenon that need be neither expression nor concept.

[...]

In answer we could then appeal to the ontological nature of knowledge, observing that because knowledge amounts constitutively to justified true belief, therefore, necessarily, whenever someone has knowledge, he must also have relevant truth.

— Ernest Sosa (Sosa 2017)

Another issue with respect to naturalism in epistemology is its connection to naturalism in the philosophy of mind. The naturalist aims to understand the mind as a physical system. Since physical systems can be explained without invoking mental concepts a naturalist in epistemology is weary of using questionable mental concepts to elucidate the nature of epistemic concepts. Internalism in epistemology is not necessarily at odds with naturalism as a metaphysical view but the internalist’s preferred concepts tend to come from commonsense psychology rather than the natural sciences. Externalists, by contrast, tend to stress natural concepts like causation, reliability, and tracking because these set up better for a naturalist view in the philosophy of mind.

— Ted Poston (Poston 2008)

Most organisms other than man incorporate the “solutions” to the problems confronted by their predecessors in their very anatomical design; they die off when these solutions are no longer successful. With man, according to Popper’s “metaphysical” conjecture, things are different. Our invention and use of language creates a new “world,” an “ontologically distinct” realm, which he calls. “World 3” or the “third world.” He thinks that it exists alongside the “first” world of material objects like glasses and polar bears—objects for whose existence, as we have seen, he cannot advance any decisive empirical reasons, only a “metaphysical” faith—and the “second” world of purely mental states, feelings, emotions, dispositions to act. The third world is the world of our intellectual products, the world of documented theories, problems, errors, standards, rules, values, the world of “objective knowledge”—knowledge that is an object, not (as the old “subjectivist” theory held) something that is “in” you or me, an expression of some mental state like certainty or “justified true belief.”

— Jonathan Lieberson (Lieberson 1982)

Here, we see an assumption that there is a reality out there independent of mental concepts in JTB.

Such an approach to metaphysics can be considered deflationary. Instead of saying something substantial about the world, metaphysics would be saying something substantial only about the nature of human thought: a far more modest ambition.

— Stephen Mumford (Mumford 2013)

The following says that knowledge and JTB could belong in different categories.

Metaphysical priority. One way to hold a metaphysical version of the Knowledge-First thesis is to consider knowledge to be a fundamental part of reality. Ted Sider (see e.g., Sider 2011) is a clear exemplar of a metaphysician discussing this sense of fundamentality (though not with respect to knowledge). According to Sider, there is, as an objective matter of fact, a structure to reality: some properties14 are more fundamental than others, and they are the ones that carve nature at its joints. The property of being an ­electron, for example, is purportedly more joint-carving than the property of being a blender. Here is an example of one knowledge-first thesis: knowledge is a joint-carving property.

This kind of claim can come in a stronger or a weaker form. The strong form, suggested by a flat-footed reading of the claim that knowledge is first, would have it that knowledge is absolutely fundamental; it is among the most basic features of reality. [...]

Representational priority. [...] Just as to analyse a chemical compound is to discover the more fundamental elements of which it is made, so might one treat conceptual analysis as the attempt to discover, of a given concept, the more fundamental concepts of which it is comprised. One may read Gettier, then, as having refuted the view that the concept knows is identical with the compound concept justified true belief. One kind of statement of a ‘knowledge first’ thesis in this neighbourhood would deny that knows has conceptual constituents of the traditionally envisaged kind.

— Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa and C. S. I. Jenkins (Ichikawa & Jenkins 2017)

The view (see below) that Russell endorsed the justified true belief analysis should be considered with this in mind:

Russell’s strictly philosophical writings of 1919 and later have generally been less influential than his earlier writings. His influence was eclipsed by that of logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy. He approved of the logical positivists’ respect for logic and science, though he disagreed with their metaphysical agnosticism. But his dislike of ordinary language philosophy was visceral. In My Philosophical Development (1959), he accused its practitioners of abandoning the attempt to understand the world, “that grave and important task which philosophy throughout the ages has hitherto pursued.”

— Nicholas Griffin and David B. Martens (Griffin & Martens 2015)

Hansen 2014 says that ordinary language philosophy is still in use in the modern analysis of knowledge in terms of justified true beliefs. In the next citation, Anthony Quinton says that epistemology is the foundation of Plato's dualistic ontology:

The nature of knowledge has been a central problem in philosophy from the earliest times. One of Plato’s most brilliant dialogues, the Theaetetus, is an attempt to arrive at a satisfactory definition of the concept, and Plato’s dualistic ontology—a real world of eternal Forms contrasted with a less real world of changing sensible particulars—rests on epistemological foundations.

— Anthony Quinton (Quinton 1967b)

Anthony Quinton continues by making a distinction between philosophy "as an ontological undertaking" versus "a critical inquiry, as a second-order discipline concerned with the claims of various concrete forms of intellectual activity". I believe the purpose is to say that in both cases epistemology is important.

The problem of knowledge occupies an important place in most major philosophical systems. If philosophy is conceived as an ontological undertaking, as an endeavor to describe the ultimate nature of reality or to say what there really is, it requires a preliminary investigation of the scope and validity of knowledge. Only that can reasonably be said to exist which can be known to exist. If, on the other hand, philosophy is conceived as a critical inquiry, as a second-order discipline concerned with the claims of various concrete forms of intellectual activity, it must consider the extent to which these activities issue in knowledge.

— Anthony Quinton (Quinton 1967b)

Definition of knowledge in other approaches

Since Ferrier is the one who first used the term epistemology to present a philosophy, it is interesting to see his view on knowledge:

Ferrier advocates an antirealist and rationalistic idealism. Contra the natural and popular view that would separate knowledge and reality, he asserts an essential link between them; absolute existence is one and the same as the knowable, from which fact Ferrier draws the further idealistic conclusion that necessarily the real itself consists in some form a union of subject and object.

— William J. Mander (Mander 2020)

Ferrier wrote (citation taken from McDermid 2018):

The immediate knowledge of an external universe being disproved, its reality was straightaway called in question. For the existence of that which is not known immediately, or as it is in itself, requires to be established by an inference of reason. Instead, therefore, of asking, How is the intercourse carried on between man’s mind and the external world? the question came to be this, Is there any real external world at all? Three several systems undertook to answer this question: Hypothetical Realism, which defended the reality of the universe; Idealism, which denied its reality; and Scepticism, which maintained that if there were an external universe, it must be something very different from what it appears to us to be.

— James Frederick Ferrier, Philosophical Works of James Frederick Ferrier, Vol. 3, 1864

McDermid 2018 also wrote, quoting James Frederick Ferrier, Philosophical Works of James Frederick Ferrier, Vol. 1 :

Since the maxim ‘Whatever is, is what is known’ leads nowhere in ontology unless we already understand the nature of knowing and the nature of knowledge’s objects, the problem of Being cannot be solved unless the problem of Knowledge is solved first: “It is clear that we cannot declare what is—in other words, cannot get a footing on ontology— until we have ascertained what is known—in other words, until we have exhausted all the details of a thorough and systematic epistemology . . . [W]e cannot pass to the problem of absolute existence, except through the portals of the solution to the problem of knowledge” (FW 1: 49). The bottom line, then, is that epistemology is prior to ontology; and since nothing is prior to epistemology, epistemology is first philosophy.

— Douglas McDermid

The following discusses the relative priority of epistemology and metaphysics (or ontology). I find it strange that he speaks of a controversy, because they are only different aspects of philosophy. The fact that one of them, epistemology, was not recognized as a separate division makes it even more improbable. Sure, it was perhaps identified as the study of knowledge (in opposition to a study of what exists), but still I am not aware of debates around that.

The scope of epistemology may be indicated by considering its relations to the allied disciplines : (a) metaphysics, (b) logic, and (c) psychology. [...] The question of the relative priority of epistemology and metaphysics (or ontology) has occasioned considerable controversy : the dominant view fostered by Descartes, Locke and Kant is that epistemology is the prior phi losophical science, the investigation of the possibility and limits of knowledge being a necessary and indispensible preliminary to any metaphysical speculations regarding the nature of ultimate reality. On the other hand, strongly metaphysical thinkers like Spinoza and Hegel, and more recently S. Alexander and A. N. Whitehead, have first attacked the metaphysical problems and adopted the view of knowledge consonant with their metaphysics. Retween these two extremes is the view that epistemology and metaphysics are logically interdependent and that a metaphysically presuppositionless epistemology is as unattainable as an epistemologically presuppositionless metaphysics.

— Ledger Wood (Wood 1960)

In the same entry, the relation with Logic is mentioned.

Despite the fact that traditional logic embraced many topics which would now be considered epistemological, the demarcation between logic and epistemology is now fairly clear-cut : logic is the formal science of the principles governing valid reasoning I epistemology is the philosophical science of the nature of knowledge and truth. For example, though the decision as to whether a given process of reasoning is valid or not is a logical question, the inquiry into the nature of validity is epistemological.

— Ledger Wood (Wood 1960)

and with psychology.

The relation between psychology and epistemology is particularly intimate since the cognitive processes of perception, memory, imagination, conception and reasoning, investigated by empirical psychology are the very processes which, in quite a different context, are the special subject matter of epistemology. Nevertheless the psychological and epistemological treatments of the cognitive processes of mind are radically different: scien­ tific psychology is concerned solely with the description and explanation of conscious processes, e.g. particular acts of perception, in the context of other conscious events ; epistemology is interested in the cognitive pretention!l of the perceptions, i.e. their apparent reference to external objects. In short, whereas psychology is the investigation of all states of mind including the cognitive in the context of the mental life, epistemology investigates only cognitive states and these solely with respect to their cognitive import.

— Ledger Wood (Wood 1960)

We should mention that Kenneth R. Merrill says that Hume adopted a point of view similar to Quine who saw epistemology as a part of psychology. Also Russell saw epistemology as a mix of logic and psychology.

Epistemology, therefore, is just psychology plus logic; psychology engages in analysis, whereas logic engages in synthesis. It thus appears that epistemology is a hybrid discipline, involving both empirical science and logic. But Russell proceeds to argue that even the logical part of epistemology-the search for epistemological order-can not be separated completely from psychology.

— Richard F. Kitchener (Kitchener 2007)

See also:

Russell was clear in TK [Theory of Knowledge] and OKEW [Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy] that psychology is of great importance for epistemology. In Chapter 4 of TK, he ascribes the difficulty in defining ‘epistemology’ or ‘theory of knowledge’, in part, to its overlap with psychology and logic.

— Gary Hatfield (Hatfield 2013)

Here the relation with Ethics is discussed.

Epistemology, the study of knowledge and justified belief, is one of a handful of subjects – along with ethics, metaphysics, and logic – that are traditionally thought of as central to philosophy. Like ethics, it is fundamentally a normative subject. That is, it deals not merely with how things are, but also with how they ought to be. For example, it addresses questions about how we ought to go about acquiring knowledge (assuming for the moment that we can acquire knowledge and that it is desirable to do so). It also addresses questions about what we are justified in believing, which, as I have argued elsewhere (Coady 2012, ch. 1), are equivalent to questions about what we ought to believe.

— David Coady (Coady 2016)

Here is the not less interesting view of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) :

if there is knowledge of reality at all, which Leibniz hardly seems to doubt, and reality is ultimately mental, then knowledge too must be of the mental. Leibniz would not be arguing from the premise that knowledge must be identical with the known, thus that reality must be mental because knowledge is, but would rather be concluding with this identity: since reality itself is mental, it is after all identical (in kind) with knowledge.

— Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann (Guyer & Horstmann 2023)

Here are other views.

Aristotle [...] said that “All men by nature desire to know.” This is the first sentence of his treatise called Metaphysics. Epistemology asks about this “knowing,” addressing as one of its principal topics the nature of knowledge. Conveniently, but not entirely coincidentally, we find metaphysics and epistemology in close proximity.

— Crumley II 2016, Introducing Philosophy

Thus, that which is a concrete being also disappears. Abstractions dominate, and they become the object of philosophy. Since concrete reality disappears, the way truth is ­understood is also modified in a peculiar way. Truth is no longer the agreement of knowledge with reality. The truth is a property of a system, and truth itself consists in this, that it allows one to resolve problems that have not been resolved before, and it allows new problems to emerge.

— Piotr Jaroszyński (Jaroszyński 2018)

Ryle thought that the possession of knowledge—whether it belongs under the head of knowledge-that or of knowledge-how—was “a mark of intelligence.” And when he spoke of ‘know’ as a “determinable dispositional word ... signify[ing] abilities ... to do things of many different kinds,” he made no distinction between possible objects of knowledge.2 In his view, both knowledge-how and knowledge-that are connected with abilities of certain sorts, as indeed are knowledge of a language or a tune or knowledge of syntax.
Why then should Ryle have insisted on the importance of his distinction between two species of knowledge?

— Jennifer Hornsby, Hornsby 2012

Ryle also thought that presence of knowledge-that requires knowledge-how. He said that he wanted to prove that “Knowledge-how is a concept logically prior to the concept of knowledge-that” (1945, 4–5). He argued that “knowing-that presupposes knowing-how,” saying, “To know a truth, I must have discovered or established it. But discovering and establishing are intelligent operations, requiring rules of method, checks, . . . etc.”

— Jennifer Hornsby, Hornsby 2012

A good connection between Popper's philosophy and the traditional analysis of knowledge is given in Stock & Stock 2013 :

Knowledge is subjective, and thus forms part of Popper’s World 2, when a user disposes of it (know-that and know-how). Knowledge is objective and thus an aspect of World 3 in so far as the content is stored user-independently (in books or digital databases).

— Wolfgang G. Stock and Mechtild Stock

Some critical rationalists, however, think that it is just too costly to give up justification altogether. For example, Musgrave (1999, pp. 331-2) suggests, on Popper’s behalf, replacing the justification condition with the following: S can justify his believing that p. In this way, he distinguishes between S’s justifying that p and S’s justifying his believing that p and argues that the definition of knowledge should include the latter, not the former. He then introduces the hitherto unnoticed justificationist principle, according to which S’s believing that p is justified (reasonable) if and only if S can justify (or give good reasons for) p. The amended condition and the newly added principle then yield the traditional account given in the first section.

— Gürol Irzik, Critical Rationalism in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science

Constructivist criticism of Popper's try at essentialist demarcation centers on the reproducibility of falsifying empirical evidence. Falsifiability is a logical condition but falsification is a practical accomplishment of observation and experiment, and on this Popper and his constructivist critics agree. They disagree on whether falsification is a straightforward unambiguous lineup of evidence against theory, or whether the process is shrouded in interpretative ambiguities that get resolved only through complex socia negotiations (that go beyond logic and methodology).

— Thomas F. Gieryn (Gieryn 1995)

On the one hand, he maintained that a set of methodological rules is introduced as a "proposal for an agreement or convention" depending on a choice of purposes or values (1959, p. 37); from this point of view, epistemology has an axiological warrant whose suitability requires a discussion which "is only possible between parties having some purpose in common". On the other hand, he affirmed that his own proposal for a falsificationist method depends on the consequences of this method, and especially on "how far it conforms to his [the scientist's] intuitive idea of the goal of his endeavours" (1959, p. 55); taken in this sense, the warrant of methodology is intuitionistic or, perhaps, descriptive, for methodologists can resort to the scientists' intuitive ideas of scientific goals and their greatest achievements only through empirical scrutiny of their practice and, therefore, through historical examination. Lakatos took the second view as the only legitimate one and embarked upon his project. But at the very beginning he made an unexpected, disappointing discovery; he noticed (or was sure he had noticed) that "history 'falsifies' falsificationism (and any other methodology)" (1971a, p. 213).

— Marcello Pera (Pera 1989)

Finally there are conventionalists who view methodological principles as conventions to be adopted, or decided upon, relative to some purpose; this is the view of the early Popper of the Logic of Scientific Discovery in which he argues that methodological rules are neither empirical nor logicist but are conventions adopted for the purpose of making theories testable and revisable

— Nola Sankey (Nola & Sankey 2000)

The promise of a "logic" of discovery, in the sense of a set of algorithmic, content neutral rules of reasoning distinct from j ustification, remains unfulfilled. Upholding the distinction between discovery and j ustification, but claiming nonetheless that discovery is philosophically relevant. many recent writers propose that discovery is a matter of a " methodology, " "rationale," or "heuristic" rather than a "logic." That is, rather than there being formal rules for mechanically generating discoveries, there is only a loose body of strategies or rules of thumb - still formulable independently of the content of scientific belief - which one has some reason to hope will lead to the discovery of a hypothesis.

— Dudley Shapere (Shapere 2017)

David Miller in an unpublished paper available on the Internet since 2017 that he asks not to quote without permission mentions that people around the world say to him that they do not try to find a logic of induction or abduction, but to establish general knowledge that can help to discover laws. He says that if these are conjectural, he welcomes that and that it is not in contradiction with the non existence of a logic of induction or abduction. Actually, this seems to correspond to the old idea of metaphysical programs. Statistical laws and many mathematical theories help in this way. It's the most natural thing in a scientific program.

[Welbourne, M. (1986)] argues that knowledge is conceptually prior to belief and cannot be defined in terms of it.

— C.A.J. COADY, Testimony in Edward Craig, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Immediate knowledge that p, Price averred, ‘cannot be defined in terms of belief’ and is a kind of knowledge for which it is ‘pointless to ask for reasons’ (89). Thus, Price did not hold that a JTB conception properly applied to all knowledge that p.

— Pierre Le Morvan, Knowledge before Gettier in BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, 2017

For Cook Wilson, knowledge being sui generis cannot be defined in terms of belief: ‘Belief is not knowledge and the man who knows does not believe at all what he knows; he knows it’

— Pierre Le Morvan, Knowledge before Gettier in BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, 2017

Your forming that inductive belief can exist as a manifestation of knowledge-how, even in the absence of being constitutively guided by prior knowledge-that. So, this is how we break the claimed (and worrying) dependence of inductive knowledge upon prior (yet unattainable) inductive stability-knowledge. We end the threatened Humean vicious infinite regress in a way that, it seems, instantiates how Ryle ended the vicious infinite regress posed by intellectualism.

— Hetherington 2008

Another way to discard Ryle’s view of knowledge-that and knowledge-how as fundamentally different is to regard knowledge-that as a kind of knowledge-how – knowledge how to assert accurately, question accurately, answer accurately, act accurately, reason accurately, etc. This is a practicalism about knowledge-that ’s nature. Practicalism is a further way of conceiving of knowledge’s nature as somewhat practical.

— Hetherington 2012

Before we present our analysis of knowledge-what and its relation to induction, we give, in section 2, a brief account of why induction has been seen as generating knowledge-that, and then outline our own cognitivist and naturalistic stance. We present arguments for dividing knowledge into knowledge-how, knowledge-what and knowledge-that in section 3. In section 4, we map this tripartition of knowledge onto three kinds of long-term memory – procedural, semantic and episodic – thereby connecting our account of knowledge to cognitive neuroscience. Then in section 5 we introduce conceptual spaces as a tool for modelling knowledge-what in the form of relations between categories and properties. Finally, in section 6 we argue that induction concerns methods for generating knowledge-what.

— Gärdenfors & Stephens 2018

[After some arguments that knowledge does not require belief.] These reflections lead one also to doubt the rationalistic conception of (propositional) knowledge as inextricably associated with the having of reasons or justification for belief. For if knowledge does not require belief, then it does not require justified belief.

— McGinn 1984

Given that practical knowledge is different than (pure) propositional knowledge, the comparison between these two kinds of knowledge made by Armstrong must be taken into account. Some discussion regarding the non necessity of justification is found in (Sankey 2013), (Nola & Sankey 2000) and (Kornblith 2008). (Felix & Stephens 2020) argues that knowledge-how cannot be reduced to knowledge-that. Apparently, Jason Stanley claimed that it could. He did claim that in Stanley & Williamson 2001. See also (Kremer 2017) on that subject. To have a link with the naturalistic approach of Popper, (Musgrave 1993) seems interesting. (Hookway 1994) is a review.

Knowledge-how is not a kind of knowledge-that

One possible response is to concede that mere knowledge-that is not sufficient for knowledge-how, but then maintain that knowledge-how can be identified with a special kind of knowledge-that involving some further condition. The most well-known account of this kind is Stanley and Williamson’s (2001: 429) appeal to a practical mode of presentation (PMP) condition, where meeting this condition is meant to entail the possession of dispositions related to the activity of �-ing. Stanley and Williamson’s own version of this strategy – on which a PMP is a special way of being related to a coarse-grained ‘Russellian’ proposition – was widely criticized for being elusive and lacking in details.

— Yuri Cath Cath 2019

The following view is interesting, except that it seems to confuse a belief in the ability as a part of the ability, nothing at the level of proposition, with a belief in a proposition.

The two predominant views of knowledge-how are the intellectualist and the anti-intellectualist views. On the intellectualist views defended by Stanley and Williamson (2001) and Brogaard (2007, 2008, 2009), one knows how to A just if one knows that w (for some w) is a way for one to A. On the anti-intellectualist view, originally defended by Ryle, one knows how to A just if one has the ability to A. The two views are normally thought to be in conflict. However, I have argued that the conflict is only apparent. The conflict can be partially resolved by noting that there are two ways in which a knowledge state can be grounded. A knowledge state can have either cognitive abilities or practical abilities as its justificatory ground. Whereas knowing that snow is white requires a cognitive ability as its justificatory ground, knowing how to fix the faucet or what to do to get your mother’s attention requires a practical ability as its justificatory ground. The really problematic cases of knowledge-how are cases in which the agent does not have a belief that w (for some w) is a way for her to A.

— Berit Brogaard Brogaard 2012

Assumption that knowledge is a kind of belief to justify justification

(Devitt 2014) wrote

But what we need if we are to take the a priori way seriously is a positive characterization, not just a negative one. We need to describe a process for justifying a belief that is different from the empirical way and that we have some reason for thinking is actual.

Know-how as distinct, not as a fundamental requirement

Ryle thought that know-how is logically prior to the concept of knowledge-that. In other words, know-that without know-how is like a scientific theory without its interpretation in technology : it is meaningless. This aspect of Ryle's view on know-how seems to have been ignored. For example, (Kremer 2017) does not mention it at all. The followings say explicitly that it can be ignored.

• (Mccain 2020) discusses the distinction between know-how and know-that and says each can exist without the other:

  For example, someone might know many true propositions about how to sing, say from studying musical theory and listening to many great performances, and yet not be able to sing in tune. In such a case, the person has propositional knowledge, but she lacks the know-how of a singer.

• (Pritchard, Turri & Carter 2022) in the entry The Value of Knowledge of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy wrote :

  The received view in mainstream epistemology, at least since Gilbert Ryle (e.g., 1949), has been to regard knowledge-that and knowledge-how as different epistemic standings, such that knowing how to do something is not simply a matter of knowing propositions, viz., of knowledge-that. If this view—known as anti-intellectualism—is correct, then the value of knowledge-how needn’t be accounted for in terms of the value of knowing propositions. Furthermore, if anti-intellectualism is assumed, then—to the extent that there is any analogous ‘value problem’ for knowledge-how—such a problem needn’t materialize as the philosophical problem of determining what it is about knowledge-how that makes it more valuable than mere true belief.

• (Hintikka 1993) in the entry Different Constructions in Terms of 'Knows' of Dancy, Sosa A Companion to Epistemology wrote :

  One special use of the wh-constructions may be worth mentioning. Knowing how is used both (a) for knowing how something is done and (b) for knowing that and being able to apply to that knowledge in practice ('know-how'). The latter sense is sometimes thought to be sui generis. In reality, the corresponding sense of applied knowledge occurs in all the wh-constructions (ii) as well, as a survey of ordinary usage easily shows.

About Plato

Plato — whose theory of forms seems an arch example of pure theoretical knowledge — nevertheless is fascinated by the idea of a kind of technê that is informed by knowledge of forms. In the Republic this knowledge is the indispensable basis for the philosophers’ craft of ruling in the city. Picking up another theme in Plato’s dialogues, the Stoics develop the idea that virtue is a kind of technê or craft of life, one that is based on an understanding of the universe. The relation, then, between epistêmê and technê in ancient philosophy offers an interesting contrast with our own notions about theory (pure knowledge) and (experience-based) practice. There is an intimate positive relationship between epistêmê and technê, as well as a fundamental contrast.
[...]
In Plato’s dialogues the relation between knowledge (epistêmê) and craft or skill (technê) is complex and surprising.
[...]
Throughout the dialogues characters frequently cite technê as a way of illustrating important points in their philosophical conversations. Some crafts mentioned are medicine, horsemanship [...]
In some dialogues, craft (technê) and knowledge (epistêmê) seem interchangeable in much the same way as in Xenophon’s Socratic dialogues.
[...]
As the concept of technê develops, the role of reflective knowledge is emphasized. Whereas technê is associated with knowing how to do (epistasthai) certain activities, epistêmê sometimes indicates a theoretical component of technê.
[...]
There is a second feature of technê that is vital for understanding its importance to Plato. In the Gorgias, technê is distinguished from empeiria not only by its ability to give an account but also because it seeks the welfare of its object.
[...]
Indeed, most accounts of knowledge in the dialogues are carried out in the context of such discussions. Even in the Theaetetus, the dialogue most often thought of as dedicated to epistemology, we find the same theme. When he argues against Protagoras’ relativism, Socrates gets the sophist to concede that some people are wiser than others when it comes to what is good for the city (167c–d).

— Richard Parry (Parry 2021)

This other passage from (Parry 2021) is particularly significant, because it makes the connection between the highly abstract notion of Forms and the practical notion of techne, both strongly associated with episteme.

Plato — whose theory of forms seems an arch example of pure theoretical knowledge — nevertheless is fascinated by the idea of a kind of technê that is informed by knowledge of forms. In the Republic this knowledge is the indispensable basis for the philosophers’ craft of ruling in the city."

— Richard Parry (Parry 2021)

Throughout the dialogues Plato contrasts a superior kind of cognition with an inferior one, often calling the superior kind epistêmê and the inferior kind doxa. He studies the nature of each and the differences between them, he argues for the superiority of epistêmê, and he discusses how to achieve it.
What is Plato doing when he does all this—what kind of project is he undertaking?
The answer will seem obvious: epistemology. [...]
One major presupposition of this answer, sometimes made explicit, is that Plato’s epistêmê and doxa are obviously to be identified with the main players in contemporary epistemology (both folk and philosophical): knowledge and belief. Indeed our word ‘epistemology’ wears this lineage on its sleeve: it lays claim to being the study of that very thing Plato discussed, epistêmê.
[...]
Another major presupposition, shared even by some who doubt that Plato’s epistemological categories should be straightforwardly identified with our knowledge and belief, is that Plato’s concerns in studying epistêmê and doxa are broadly similar to the concerns prominent in epistemology nowadays.
[...]
The main task of this book is to challenge both presuppositions, and to offer a very different account of Plato’s epistemology instead.
[...]
although I will speak throughout about epistêmê and doxa, this is not a book about the meaning of those words. I think that Plato is loose with his epistemological (as well as other vocabulary), sometimes using several words synonymously while at other times distinguishing their meanings, and often using a single word ambiguously.
[...]
In the dialogues that distinguish an imperceptible realm of Being (the Forms) from a perceptible realm of Becoming, epistêmê is of the former and doxa of the latter (Republic 479d–e, 534a; Timaeus 27d–28a, 52a).
[...]
One need only step back from recent analytic Plato scholarship to see that [...] the identification of Plato’s epistêmê and doxa with knowledge and belief, standard as it has become, is only a recent development, and has already faced forceful criticism.
[...]
If we look back before the 1960s, we find that a very common English translation of epistêmê is ‘Science.’11 This translation picks up on a philosophical tradition that begins with the widespread use of ‘epistêmê’ in Plato’s time to denote what we would call sciences: specialized bodies of knowledge held by experts in particular areas.12 Aristotle elevated this use into a very specific theory: his epistêmai are deductively valid systems grounded in necessary truths about natures or essences.

— Jessica Moss (Moss 2021, Introduction)

I conclude that in this passage Plato is loosening his terminology. This is however nothing radical for him. The Republic is full of references to epistêmê that do not fit the theory laid out in the central books: Plato refers to various expertises about perceptibles, possessed by non-philosophers—house building, flute playing and the like (428b–c, 438d, 601e–602a)—as epistêmai. Notably these passages are rarely cited as evidence against the Distinct Objects interpretation: evidently it is obvious even to committed Overlappers that they are not relevant to the debate. Perhaps Plato is here using ‘epistêmê’ in accordance with convention, as a synonym for ‘technê;’

— Jessica Moss (Moss 2021, Chap. 7.6 : Objections: Doxa of Forms?)

This strand of thought is characterized by key distinctions between the intelligible and the sensible, reality and appearance, knowledge and belief. In short, one of the main thrusts of Platonism (at least as historically interpreted) is the intuition that knowledge and belief are different in kind, distinguished by two different powers or faculties.21 The power of knowing is the power to apprehend or ‘see’ the Forms, or what really is; the power of opining is the power to judge (rightly or wrongly) of appearances. Like the freed prisoner of the Cave, we can only achieve knowledge by turning away from doxa and appearances.

— Maria Rosa Antognazza (Antognazza 2015)

In fact, leading representatives of the Western philosophical tradition do not merely reverse the relationship between knowledge and belief: they conceive of knowledge, belief and the relationship between them in a very different way. According to these traditional views, knowing and believing are distinct in kind, in the strong sense that they are mutually exclusive mental states: the same cognitive subject cannot, simultaneously and in the same respect, be in a state of both knowing and believing the same thing. Knowing is not ‘the best kind of believing’; nor is believing to be understood derivatively from knowing.
[...]
The view that knowledge and belief are distinct in kind in this strong sense is routinely dismissed in contemporary literature as so obviously implausible as to deserve little or no discussion (see Williamson 2000, p. 42; Alston 1991, pp. 70–1; Pasnau 2017, p. 219). My proposal breaks decisively with this trend by showing that this view is well-attested in the history of epistemology, and provides the basis for an account of cognition that avoids many of the pitfalls discussed in the literature.

— Maria Rosa Antognazza (Antognazza 2021)

Plato distinguishes his cognitive capacities by an appeal to two criteria: to what the capacity is naturally related and what the capacity produces (eph’ hō te esti kai hō apergazetai – 477d1). Let us call these two conditions ‘the relata condition’ and ‘the production condition’, respectively. As I have already said, the bearer of the relata condition, for knowledge, is the Forms: the knower’s knowledge is related to Forms, whereas the believer’s belief is related to sensible particular things.

— Nicholas D. Smith (Smith 2012)

Why should we value knowledge more than mere true belief? Socrates [in the Meno] responds by a comparison with the statues of Daedalus, which run away unless they are tethered. True beliefs are liable to be lost, unless they are so anchored that they constitute knowledge.

— Timothy Williamson (Williamson 2002)

This same line of thought seemingly makes Plato suggest that it is possible to have knowledge only about Forms, and that knowledge about sensible objects is impossible (Rep. 477–80, Tim. 51). Moreover he also seems to hold sometimes that we cannot have about Forms that kind of cognition, belief or opinion, that we do have of sensibles (ibid.). On the other hand, he allows that it is possible to make mistakes about Forms, and also to be in a cognitive state vis-à-vis a Form that seems indistinguishable from what he seems obliged to call false belief or opinion.

— Nicholas P. White (White 2010)

In the Meno and Phaedo dialectic employs a method of “hypothesis”, in which propositions about Forms are examined and provisionally accepted. In the Republic, however, Plato seems to think that this method can ultimately attain the certainty of an “unhypothesized” principle, seemingly concerned with the Good (510–11, 533–4).

— Nicholas P. White (White 2010b)

Hintikka provides an analysis of Plato's argument, but the following quote focalizes on the Plato's conclusions acknowledged by Hintikka, not on Hintikka's analysis of the argument

Those 'functions' or 'ends' of the 'faculties' of knowledge and belief which serve, e.g., to distinguish each faculty from the others and which are somehow analogous to the products of a craftsman's skill were for Plato not just cognitive states in this or that man but sometimes tended to comprise also those objects which one's knowledge or opinion is about.
[...]
The objects of knowledge and belief are different [...] By connecting the conclusion (6) of the above argument with suitable assumptions concerning knowledge, truth, and time, Plato argues further that the different objects mentioned in (6) are the Forms and the objects of the senses, respectively.

— Jaakko Hintikka (Hintikka 1974)

The followings are extracts of the book Plato on Knowledge and Forms : Selected Essays by Gail Fine. It is done in the context of the traditional analysis of knowledge. In that sense, it does not correspond to a background for the debate, but is a part of the debate.

[For Plato,] even if one has no knowledge whatsoever about a thing, one can inquire into it. For complete ignorance is not the only alternative to knowledge: there are also true beliefs. And, Plato argues, if one has and relies on them, one will make progress in inquiry; indeed, one can progress all the way to knowledge.

[...]
Though the slave now has a true belief about the answer, Plato says that he still doesn't know the answer.8 Plato also says, however, that if the slave continues to inquire in the same way, he will eventually acquire the knowledge he currently lacks (85 b 8-d 1).
[...]
the theory of recollection [...] is meant to explain the remarkable fact that, when faced with contradictions among our beliefs, we tend to favour the true ones over the false ones. It explains how inquiry in the absence of current knowledge is possible
[...]
[Plato] owes us an account of how knowledge differs from true belief. He provides one in 98 a, where he says that knowledge is true belief that is bound by an aitias logismos.
[...]
It is often thought that in the middle dialogues Plato favours the Two Worlds Theory. There are different versions of this general sort of theory. On one familiar version, knowledge and belief have disjoint objects—forms and sensibles, respectively.
[...]
Plato says that knowledge is true belief bound by an aitias logismos; on this view, knowledge, so far from excluding belief, implies it.
[...]
[Plato] says, for example, that although the slave has a mere true belief about the answer to the geometrical question Socrates poses, he can acquire knowledge of it. Plato also says that one may know, or have a mere true belief about, the way to Larissa (97 a ff.). The Meno also seems to allow knowledge of sensible particulars as well as beliefs about forms.”
[...]
Hence Plato is cited not only as the first Western philosopher to say that knowledge is justified true belief, but also as a Classic example of someone who takes knowledge to exclude belief. Those who do the first typically focus on the Meno and Theaetetus; those who do the second typically focus on the Republic.
[...]
As I construe the argument, Plato is interested both in propositional knowledge and in knowledge of things. That he is interested in propositional knowledge is clear from the fact that he repeatedly emphasizes that knowledge but not belief implies truth. That he is interested in knowledge of things is clear from the fact that he argues that one can have knowledge only if one knows forms. Yet it has been argued that Plato is interested here only in knowledge of things: in which case, contrary to what I say, esti is not used veridically.”
[...]
Or, to put it the other way around, even though he is interested in knowledge of things, we shouldn’t infer that he doesn’t fo- cus on propositional knowledge. For in his view, to know a form requires knowing what it is; and that, in turn, is to know its definition, which is a matter of propositional knowledge.
[...]
In Republic VI-VH, in the famous images of the Sun, Line, and Cave, Plato goes further, and says that there is (or can be) knowledge of sensibles,”! and that there is mere belief about forms. The Republic, then, so far from endorsing the Two Worlds Theory, is incompatible with it.”
[...]
Plato is often thought to solve the regress by embracing foundationalism. There are many versions of foundationalism, but on one version often associated with Plato, the regress comes to a halt with isolated acts of acquaintance, by which we grasp individual forms; I can know each form in and of itself, by being acquainted with it, by having some sort of direct apprehension of it.
[...]
In Chapter 4, I argue that Plato stops the regress by endorsing coherentism:*° here as elsewhere, he conceives of knowledge holistically. One can’t know a single entity or proposition on its own; knowing any given entity or proposition requires knowing related ones as well.
[...]
Yet at the end of the Theaetetus, he seems to reject the view that knowledge is true belief plus an account; and the dialogue ends aporetically.

— Gail Fine (Fine 2003, Introduction)

In the modern account, the definiendum concerns one’s knowledge that a particular proposition is true. Plato tends instead to speak of knowing things (virtue, knowledge, Theaetetus, and the sun are among the examples he gives of things one may know or fail to know). But this difference should not be pressed too far. First, the account that certifies that one knows a particular thing will itself be a proposition: one knows a thing through or by knowing certain propositions to be true of it.

— Gail Fine (Fine 2003, Knowledge and Logos in the Theaetetus)

About Aristotle

The next citation appears when Richard Parry discusses techne and episteme in the theaetetus. It is interesting that the idea that episteme is like doxa with an account has a similar counterpart in the relation between a practice and techne seen as episteme:

It is in Aristotle that we find the basis for something like the modern opposition between epistêmê as pure theory and technê as practice. Yet even Aristotle refers to technê or craft as itself also epistêmê or knowledge because it is a practice grounded in an ‘account’ — something involving theoretical understanding.

— Richard Parry (Parry 2021)

But Aristotle sharply distinguishes dialectical from scientific or causal reasoning, and he devotes the Posterior Analytics to analyzing 'demonstrations' or scientific syllogisms, arguments that give their possessors knowledge or science (epistêmê) of some object; here epistêmê is a cognitive state that not only grasps an object as it is, without the possibility of falsehood, but also understands why the object is as it is. It seems surprising that mere arguments, without direct contact with the object, can give such knowledge, and Aristotle tries to analyze the conditions under which this can happen. The premises must be true, necessary, and better known than the conclusion; they must also express the causes that explain why the conclusion is true. We can of course come to know an object by reasoning from effects to causes, but properly scientific and explanatory knowledge must reason from causes to effects; the logical structure of the argument will mirror the causal structure of the world. On pain of circularity or regress, the first principles of demonstrations must be known by some means other than demonstration (Aristotle calls the nondemonstrative grasp of first principles nous rather than epistêmê).

— Stephen Menn (Menn 2005)

About the Stoics

Epistēmē, regularly translated “knowledge,” is used by the Stoics (to whom Sextus devotes a great deal of attention) to describe a comprehensive grasp of the nature of things, attained only by the sage. But the Stoics also posit (and Sextus also questions the possibility of) a lesser state, katalēpsis, “apprehension” or “cognition,” the requirements for which put it in close company with knowledge understood as justified true belief, or whatever permutation of that one might wish to settle on post-Gettier. Someone who has katalēpsis grasps some state of affairs as it is—​that is, as it is independently of the subject’s perspective—​and cannot be wrong about it.

— Richard Bett (Bett 2020)

In the first place, Zeno’s definition stresses the cognitive character of a technê as well as its complexity and systematicity. An art does not consist in a single katalêpsis, cognition, but in a collection made out of cognitions (cf. ek katalêpseôn) conceptually related to each other in some systematic manner. Given their systematic character, it seems reasonable to infer that each such set of cognitions is governed by principles and rules, and also can be modified and enriched over time. Moreover, Zeno’s contention that the cognitions constituting a technê must be practised together suggests, I think, that no sharp dividing line should be drawn between the theoretical elements and the practical application of a technê.

— Voula Tsouna (Tsouna 2021)

Tsouna continues "The following passage indicates the complexity of the relation between technê and epistêmê and the different ways in which the Stoics put these notions to use.

Epistêmê is a cognition (katalêpsis) which is secure and cannot be shaken by argument. Secondly, it is a system of such epistêmai, like the rational cognition of particulars existing in the virtuous person. Thirdly, it is a system of expert epistêmai (epistêmôn technikôn) which has intrinsic stability, as the virtues do. Fourthly, it is a tenor for the reception of impressions [cf. hexin phantasiôn] which is unshakable by reason and consists, as they claim, in tension and power. (Stobaeus, Ecl. II p. 74, 16; see also D.L. VII.47; Cicero, Acad. post. 1.41; Sextus, M VII.151

— cited by (Tsouna 2021)

She continues:

Comparably to Plato, the Stoics view dialectic as the ideal method of philosophical enquiry and the only route to reality and truth. Hence, many members of the school, and especially Chrysippus, place it at the heart of the philosophical enterprise and of the sage’s wisdom (sophia). Moreover, according to Aetius, the Stoics believe that philosophy, the loving pursuit of wisdom, is ‘an exercise (askésis) of techné in utility’ (techné epitédeia), while virtue is the most accomplished techné of that sort (Aetius I, Preface 2).’° Logic, ‘which is concerned with /ogos, reasoning, as well as discourse, and which they also call dialectic’ (Aetius I, Preface 2), corresponds to one of the three generic virtues related, respectively, to the three parts of philosophy — the other two parts being ethics, which occupies itself with human life, and physics, which investigates the world and its contents.

— Voula Tsouna (Tsouna 2021)

Stoicism and mark of truth

In the next citation, Dutant speaks of what can be considered a mark of truth. However, he refers to test and that goes beyond, I believe, the notion of mark of truth. After all, if it has a mark of truth, why should we test it, whatever it is.

The founders of two new schools, Epicurus (341-271) and Zeno of Citium (334-262), argued that there were “criteria of truth”, yardsticks with which opinions could be tested for knowledge.

— Julien Dutant, The legend of the justified true belief analysis, (Dutant 2015)

(Chisholm 1989) does not use the terminology "mark of truth", but describes in different words this aspect in stoicism. He says stoics are dogmatic (and the Pyrrhonian are inductivist whereas the Academic skeptics are in another category : they adopt what he calls the "critical theory").

According to "the theory of the evident perception," the appearance presents us with two things—the appearance itself and the external thing that appears: there is a way of appearing that presents itself to the subject and also presents another thing to the subject—a thing that appears in a certain way to the subject.[...] What makes this view "dogmatic" is the fact that the criterion contains the guarantee "makes it evident that" rather than the more tentative "tends to make it evident that." [...] Chrysippus suggests that the appearance that is yielded by a veridical perception could not be duplicated in an unveridical perception or in an hallucination. But this is contrary to what we know.

— Roderick M. Chisholm (Chisholm 1989)

(Maddalena 2010), comparing Peirce's theory of assent to the view of previous philosophers, says that Wittgenstein and John H. Newman held a psychological theory that some power explains the different degrees of belief, a view that was held in Stoicism, Saint Augustine's philosophy and other philosophies. The next one is misplaced because it is not about stoicism, but for now, I mention it here.

I arrived, first, at a sense of the importance of an understanding of the phenomenal integration of the senses, a pretty obvious feature of sense experience more or less ignored or, in effect, denied by the tradition, and hardly a hot philosophical topic even by the 1980s. [...] Second, I concluded that, in order to achieve a philosophical understanding of what lies behind the traditional ideas of ‘evidence’ and ‘seeing’ the truth, it is helpful, if not essential, to distinguish between primary and secondary knowledge, the former being knowledge acquired in such a way that, in acquiring it, we are ipso facto aware of just how we are acquiring it. We are aware of our cognitive relationship to the object of knowledge, which in the case of perceptual knowledge comprises awareness of how its object is impinging on our senses. Primary knowledge is therefore something other, and more, than the reliably caused true belief that many analytic philosophers have definitively identified as what constitutes knowledge. It is knowledge that is consciously knowledge. And without some primary knowledge—some immediate and conscious cognitive contact with what is known—no knowledge is possible.

— Michael Ayers (Ayers 2019)

It is interesting that Ayers and Antognazza consider that episteme, even in the context of katalepsis is scientific knowledge, but they say "full scientific knowledge", whatever that means.

For the Stoics, knowledge is, if anything, even more sharply distinguished from belief or opinion than by Plato, but between full scientific knowledge on the one hand and opinion on the other lies the degree of knowledge afforded by ‘cognitive impressions (phantasiai kataleptikai), which, indeed, supply the foundations of scientific knowledge. Apparently under the pressure of sceptical argument, it was held by some later Stoics that the wise never assent to what is not known. There is no such thing as justifiably believing—only an ignorant fool has opinions, whether true or false. An impression is ‘a printing on the soul’ which normally ‘reveals itself and its cause, and which may be either sensory or intellectual. Impressions, simply as such (even, on one account, reasonable impressions), may be misleading or false. Cognitive impressions, however, which command assent and ground scientific knowledge, are each clear and striking (enargés, tranés, plektike), ‘impressed exactly in accordance with what is, and ‘such that an impression from what is not so could [not] be just like it.

— Michael Ayers and Maria Rosa Antognazza (Ayers & Antognazza 2019)

Stoicism and the three ways to assent to a phantasia

The notion of assent or synkatathesis is essential to the Stoics. Zeno used this term to express the thought that one can accept any phantasia or impression as true. Merely to have a phantasia is not to believe anything. It is not a belief until one has assented to the phantasia. There are three ways to accept a phantasia as true, namely: (1) as opinion (doxa), which is weak and fallible, (2) according to apprehension (katalêpsis), which is infallible belief, and (3) in understanding (episteme), that is, knowledge. Assent is furthermore voluntary, according to Zeno.

— Henrik Lagerlund (Lagerlund 2010)

(Dutant 2015) says that he is interested in the Stoic theory of cognition, not to their theory of episteme, which, in his understanding of stoicism, only wise men, if any, could have. He wrote

Here we are interested in their theory of “cognition”, and we will simply call it knowledge. Knowledge is assent to a cognitive impression (LS 40B). Impressions are quite literally images imprinted into the mind. They have content. We can assent to them, that is, believe their content, or not. Among impressions, some are “cognitive”. They are characterized thus:

A cognitive impression is one which arises from what is and is stamped and impressed exactly in accordance with what is, of such a kind that could not arise from what is not. (LS 40E, see also LS 40C, 40D)

— Sextus Empincus in Long and Sedley 40E

— Julien Dutant (Dutant 2015)

The key point made by Dutant is that a cognitive impression is a discernible mark of truth for the knowledge it corresponds to. "Mark of truth" and "discernible mark of truth" are expressions introduced in the context of ancient Greek philosophies and subsequent philosophies. A knowledge (with a mark of truth) is necessarily the case. He wrote

Requiring a mark of truth makes the view infallibilist. Requiring it to be discernible makes the view internalist. I call the view Classical Infallibilism.

— Julien Dutant (Dutant 2015)

Stoicism and foundationalism

(Rescher 2003, Chapter 7 : Foundationalism and Coherentism) views the "Stoic doctrine of kataleptic perceptions" as a "starter-set of basic truths" within an "essentially axiomatic concept of truth". For Rescher, Stoicism, as most past and even recent philosophies, adopts foundationalism in opposition to coherentism. He views the "wise man" of the Stoics as an idealization in the same category as the "ideal observers" [of some empiricists] or the “ideally rational agent” of the economists, or the like and considers that this option is utopian and unrealistic.

Stoicism and internalism

(Plantinga 1993), mentions "Commonly (and correctly) thought of as the fountainheads of the tradition of classical foundationalism, Descartes and Locke are equally and perhaps even more significantly the fountainheads of the tradition of classical internalism." He adds a footnote :

Historians may point out that the internalist tradition goes much further back, at least as far back as the later Platonic Academy, and perhaps back to the Stoics and to Plato himself. I don't propose to dispute the point; but the internalist tradition is very much in eclipse in medieval philosophy, and certainly the important proximate sources of the contemporary version of that tradition are Descartes and Locke.

— Alvin Plantinga (Plantinga 1993)

Stoicism and induction

Aristotle’s theory of science has a place for both deduction and induction. Scientific knowledge is obtained by demonstration from undemonstrable first principles, and knowledge of these first principles is in turn obtained by induction. One might expect therefore that Aristotle would have discussed deduction and induction at something like equal length. In fact his remarks about induction are fairly brief and in many respects very obscure.

— J. R. Milton (Milton 1987)

This indicates that Milton is concerned by the different meanings of induction. In that context, he wrote :

Philodemus’ treatise, so far as we can judge from its surviving parts, was a defence of inductive and analogical inferences against various objections. The source of these objections is not clearly identified in the parts of the work which we possess, but most modern scholars attribute them to the Stoics. The Stoics were indeed quite as hostile to induction as the Epicureans had been well-disposed. One possible explanation for this is that they rejected the whole idea of rational non-deductive inference. Burnyeat ascribes to the Stoics the view that the logic of our reasoning is always deductive (Burnyeat [1982], p. 236, cf. p. 231). “The upshot is that Stoic logic guarantees to Stoic epistemology that the only warrant which one proposition can confer on another is the warrant of conclusive proof’ (ibid., p. 235). Unfortunately the nature of the surviving evidence makes interpretation difficult and more than usually precarious. It is possible that Chrysippus was as explicit as Popper, but Chrysippus’ works have all been lost, and nowhere in the surviving sources is there a clear statement of the position ascribed by Burnyeat. Moreover the Stoics’ opposition to induction can be explained without supposing them to have been strict deductivists. The mere fallibility of inductive inferences would, for the Stoics, have been a powerful reason for discarding them altogether. Merely fallible inferences cannot provide us with knowledge of anything, for according to Stoic doctrine we only know something when we have an intellectual grasp of it which cannot be weakened by further evidence or argument. Belief or opinion, which can be so weakened, is a very inferior state of mind. Indeed the Stoic ideal, the Sage, is characterised by his refusal to hold any mere opinions; like the ideal sceptic, he lives adoxastés, without beliefs of any kind.

— J. R. Milton (Milton 1987)

End of the school

According to Dutant 2015, the schools for the Academics and the Stoics ended around 100 BCE (but the philosophy itself was studied by other schools after).

Knowledge-First

This is about Williamson's book Williamson 2002 (first published in 2000).

‘Knowledge-First’ constitutes what is widely regarded as one of the most significant innovations in contemporary epistemology in the past twenty-five years. Knowledge-first epistemology is (in short) the idea that knowledge per se is an epistemic kind with theoretical importance that is not derivative from its relationship to other epistemic kinds, such as rationality. Knowledge-first epistemology is rightly associated with Timothy Williamson (2000) in light of his influential book, Knowledge and Its Limits (KAIL). In KAIL, Williamson suggests that meeting the conditions for knowing is not constitutively explained by meeting the conditions for anything else, e.g., justified true belief.1 Accordingly, knowledge is conceptually and metaphysically prior to other cognitive and epistemic kinds. In this way, the concept know is a theoretical primitive.

— Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa and C. S. I. Jenkins (Ichikawa & Jenkins 2017)

Relevant points from sources (to the History section)

• To support the view that Locke did not consider knowledge as a kind of belief, (Ayers & Antognazza 2019) wrote:

  "[For Locke, the] distinction between assured true ‘belief ’ and ‘knowledge’ lies in the different kind and source of assurance, rather than simply in its degree."

• To put the justified true belief approach into contexte, one of the most important concept is knowledge-how. Most sources on the traditional analysis of knowledge (as justified true belief) start by making this distinction and then focalize on knowledge-that or propositional knowledge. Pavese 2022 mentions:

  "The debate is partly epistemological: is knowledge-how an altogether distinct kind of knowledge, different from knowledge-that?"

  "Brogaard (2009, 2011) argues that, in general, knowledge can have cognitive abilities or practical abilities as its justificatory grounds. In the latter case, agents know in virtue of ability states that are not subject to the usual epistemic constraints that characterize belief states generated by cognitive abilities. Correspondingly, knowledge-how fits the bill for this practically grounded knowledge. Cath 2015b argues that we should distinguish between theoretical knowledge-that and practical knowledge-that.

  "Some have observed that knowledge-how may differ from propositional knowledge in that, whereas the latter plausibly entails belief, knowledge-how does not (Dreyfus 1991, 2005; Wallis 2008; Brownstein & Michaelson 2016)."

  "The most recent debate on knowledge-how has intertwined with a debate on the nature of skills."

  "The topic of skill and expertise is central since ancient philosophy through the notion of technē. Although both Plato and Aristotle took technē to be a kind of knowledge, there is significant controversy about their conceptions regarding the nature of this kind of knowledge and its relation to experience (empeiria) on one hand, and scientific knowledge (epistēmē) on the other (Johansen 2017; Lorenz & Morison 2019; Coope 2020)."

  "Annas (1995, 2001, 2011) develops an interpretation on which skill and virtue (or phronēsis) are closer in Aristotle’s action theory than usually thought and they are both conceived along a broadly intellectualist model."

• Hornsby 2012 mentions :

  "Ryle also thought that presence of knowledge-that requires knowledge-how. He said that he wanted to prove that “Knowledge-how is a concept logically prior to the concept of knowledge-that” (1945, 4–5). He argued that “knowing-that presupposes knowing-how,” saying, “To know a truth, I must have discovered or established it. But discovering and establishing are intelligent operations, requiring rules of method, checks, . . . etc.”

• Musgrave 1993 mentions :

  "What cannot be denied, I think, is that animals and humans possess instinctive or innate know-how."

• Annas 2012 is mentioned in Pavese 2022.
• With regard to the problem of justification, the issue of whether knowledge is know-how or know-that is a special case of the relativism issue mentioned in (Sankey 2013):

  "The problem of justification may be illustrated by considering the two major sources of justificatory problems which relate to method. The first [...] is the problem of replying to the Humean skeptic [...]. The second is the problem of epistemological relativism, which arises from the methodological variation and pluralism highlighted by Kuhn and other historical philosophers of science. [...] the solution may require a unified approach that addresses both the skeptic and the relativist [...] many philosophers [Popper, Quine, Piaget, etc.] have embraced a naturalistic approach to philosophical matters [...] In the context of the problem of the justification of method an epistemological naturalist approach has a great deal to offer [...] On such a naturalistic approach, the challenge of the epistemic skeptic is dissolved by noting that the skeptic sets unrealistically high standards of justification. [...] As for the threat of relativism, the naturalist may simply deny that no distinction may be drawn between right and wrong in relation to methodological matters. "

Epistemology in natural sciences, social sciences and religions

The Epistemology entry of Encyclopedia.com gathers 8 English encyclopedia articles (and 2 short dictionary entries) with title epistemology. One of these articles (Cipolla & Giarelli 2000) appears in an encyclopedia of sociology. The article explains that "the term epistemology is used with two separate meanings according to different cultural traditions." It says that the first meaning is associated with the English speaking contries, whereas the second is associated with continental Europe. It says that only the continental European meaning is directly concerned with social and natural sciences and the entire article adopts that second meaning of the term. Another of these articles (Faubion 2008) is also about social sciences and it also ignores the first meaning that is associated with the English speaking countries. A third article (about epistemology) in the list (Hatfield 2004) belongs to an encyclopedia about the early modern world from 1450 to 1789. Given that it is about epistemology, it could have described the traditional analysis of knowledge that is supposed to have existed since Plato, but it does not say anything about knowledge as true belief. It does not even contain the word belief or opinion and the notion of justification is only mentioned once to say that David Hume rejected the idea that a rational justification of human laws exists. Among the five other articles in the list (Parry 2021, Marshall 2014, Reilly 2003, Le Roy Finch 2005 and Murray 2003), only Parry and Murray refer to the traditional analysis of knowledge.

About induction for the ancient Greeks

(Biondi 2014) gives his view on the difference between the meaning of induction in Aristotle's texts and the meaning of induction in Hume's texts (and contemporary discussions) :

According to Hume, induction, considered as the empirical form of reasoning resulting in knowledge of matters of fact, is problematic. Aristotle, on the contrary, thinks that induction can be trusted to provide even the principles of scientific knowledge. This essay argues that the key to explaining the differences between the Humean and Aristotelian accounts of induction lies in their respective attitudes towards human reason: whereas Hume takes an anti-Rationalist (and an anti-rational) approach in his account so that reason is entirely evacuated from the inductive process, Aristotle gives to reason and, in particular, to rational insight (noein or noesis) a significant role in induction. A number of points are compared and contrasted, including the objects of perception, the faculties of the mind involved in induction, and the inductive process. A key to the argument is to note that Hume’s attack on human reason presupposes the Rationalist conception of it, whereas Aristotle’s confidence in reason does not rest on this conception. In fact, Biondi shows how Aristotle’s account of induction is built upon quite different epistemological and metaphysical assumptions than is Hume’s account. Ultimately, an Aristotelian conception of the inductive process offers for us today a viable alternative to the Humean brand.

— Biondi 2014

Ordinary knowledge Vs expert or scientific knowledge

Socrates, Plato and Aristotle mostly discussed expert knowledge: geometry, astronomy, medicine, politics, philosophy and so on—what we may now call theoretical disciplines or sciences.21 Their Hellenistic successors were squarely interested in ordinary knowledge: knowing that something is sweet, that something is a dog, that someone is your child (LS 39C, 40H). The shift was so significant that Brunschwig (1999) calls it an “epistemological turn”.

— Julien Dutant (Dutant 2015)

Value problem and virtue epistemology

First thing first, here is a view that suggests that solving the value problem is not a primary objective :

As might be expected, the nature problem and the value problem of knowledge are intimately connected in a very important sense: The value that we attribute to knowledge can only be explained in the event that we are able to provide a clear and principled distinction between knowledge and merely true beliefs. If this is correct, we can plausibly maintain that any successful solution to the value problem would have to rely heavily on a successful solution to the nature problem of knowledge. From an explanatory standpoint, we can therefore say that the nature problem enjoys some sort of logical priority19 over the value problem of knowledge in contemporary epistemology.

— John Ian K. Boongaling (Boongaling 2021), Dissolving the Gettier Problem : Beyond Analysis.

Here, Zagzebski, who coined the expression "value problem", explains that the Gettier problem is a kind of value problem, but she does not propose any other way than being Gettierized for a proposal to fall short of knowledge. So, it could very well be that the Gettier problem is the only value problem, that is, the value problem would be the same as the Gettier problem, in practice.

The Gettier Problem is not the same as the value problem, but notice that the Gettier Problem is a kind of value problem. That is because a gettiered belief is one in which it is luck that the belief is true.

— Linda Zagzebski (Zagzebski 2017), The Lesson of Gettier in Rodrigo Borges, Claudio de Almeida, and Peter D. Klein (eds), Explaining Knowledge : New Essays on the Gettier Problem

Here is some link with virtue epistemology.

The notion of intellectual virtue made its contemporary debut in Ernest Sosa’s 1980 paper “The Raft and the Pyramid.” At the time, analytic epistemology was teeming with proposed solutions to the Gettier problem (Gettier 1963), newly minted objections to both internalism and externalism, and seemingly intractable disagreements between foundationalists and coherentists. Sosa (1980) drew the then iconoclastic conclusion that the notion of intellectual virtue might help us resolve the foundationalism–coherentism debate. Linda Zagzebski subsequently argued (1996) that the notion of intellectual virtue could help circumvent the debate between internalists and externalists. Zagzebski (1996, 2009) and Sosa (1991, 2007, 2015) likewise championed virtue-based solutions to the Gettier problem. In short, virtue epistemology was originally proposed as a way to solve the problems that were plaguing belief-based theories of justification (Battaly 2008).
Fast forward to the present. Virtue epistemology is now a diverse and burgeoning field that is well established as a sub-discipline. The defining feature of virtue epistemology is its focus on the epistemic evaluation of people and their intellectual abilities and character traits. It contends that agents (people) are the primary objects of epistemic evaluation; and that epistemic (intellectual) virtues, which are evaluations of agents, are the fundamental concepts and properties in epistemology. In other words, virtue epistemology takes epistemic virtues, which are types of agent-evaluation, to be more theoretically fundamental than justification and knowledge, which are types of belief-evaluation.

— Heather Battaly, Introduction in Heather Battaly (ed), The Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology

Very roughly, the value problem is the problem of explaining just how knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief or perhaps belief that falls short of knowledge. For more on the value problem see (Kvanvig 2003, Pritchard 2007a). For virtue epistemological approaches to the value problem see e.g., (Riggs 2002, Greco 2010, Sosa 2015).

— Christoph Kelp, Knowledge-First Virtue Epistemology in J. Adam Carter, Emma C. Gordon, and Benjamin W. Jarvis (eds), Knowledge First.

In recent work Linda Zagzebski has called attention to the value problem for knowledge. An adequate account of knowledge, she points out, ought to explain why knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief. The account of knowledge presented above readily suggests an answer to that problem.

— John Greco, Virtues in Epistemology in Paul K. Moser ed. The Oxford Handbook of Epistemology 2002

Solving the secondary value problem requires explaining why it is better to know than to be in a state that falls short of knowledge— a Gettierized+true belief.

— Anne Meylan (Meylan 2018)

Accounting for the value of knowledge requires us to offer an explanation of why knowledge has not just a greater degree, but also a different kind of value than whatever falls short of knowledge. Call this the tertiary value problem

— Pritchard, The value of knowledge in Harvard Review of Philosophy

One important advantage of the virtue-reliabilist’s analysis of knowledge — defended by John Greco (2003, 2010, 2012) and Ernest Sosa (2007, 2009a, 2011, 2015)— over process-reliabilism is its ability to provide an elegant answer to the three value problems above.

— Anne Meylan (Meylan 2018)

This is a view point that seems to deny the value problem as described by Kvanvig. Hopefully, someone, maybe Kvanvig, has responded to this.

[L]et us consider the specific challenge that [Kvanvig] poses for virtue epistemology. In essence, Kvanvig’s argument rests on the assumption that it is essential to any virtue-theoretic account of knowledge—and any internalist account of knowledge as well, for that matter (i.e., an account that makes a subjective justification condition necessary for knowledge possession)—that it also includes an anti-Gettier condition. If this is right, then it follows that even if virtue epistemology has an answer to the primary value problem—and Kvanvig concedes that it does—it will not thereby have an answer to the secondary value problem since knowledge is not simply virtuous true belief. Moreover, Kvanvig argues that once we recognize what a gerrymandered notion a non-Gettierized account of knowledge is, it becomes apparent that there is nothing valuable about the anti-Gettier condition on knowledge that needs to be imposed. But if that is right, then it follows by even virtue epistemic lights that knowledge—i.e., non-Gettierized virtuous true believing—is no more valuable than one of its proper sub-sets—i.e., mere virtuous true believing.

— Duncan Pritchard, John Turri, J. Adam Carter (Pritchard, Turri & Carter 2022)

They raise their own issue here :

According to Carter and Pritchard’s diagnosis, the underlying explanation for this difference in value is that knowledge-how (like understanding, as discussed in §4) essentially involves a kind of cognitive achievement, unlike propositional knowledge, for reasons discussed in §4. If this diagnosis is correct, then further pressure is arguably placed on the robust virtue epistemologist’s ‘achievement’ solution to the value problems for knowledge-that, as surveyed in §3. Recall that, according to robust virtue epistemology, the distinctive value of knowledge-that is accounted for in terms of the value of cognitive achievement (i.e., success because of ability) which robust virtue epistemologists take to be essential to propositional knowledge. But, if the presence of cognitive achievement is what accounts for why knowledge-how has a value that is not present in the items of knowledge-that the intellectualist identifies with knowledge-how, this result would seem to stand in tension with the robust virtue epistemologist’s insistence that what affords propositional knowledge a value lacked by mere true belief is that the former essentially involves cognitive achievement.

— Duncan Pritchard, John Turri, J. Adam Carter (Pritchard, Turri & Carter 2022)

This is the key idea in Kvanvig's argument. It does not apply only on virtue epistemimology, but to any internalist condition for knowledge, because it does not take into account the environment. BTW, "robust" is better explained above. It means that the knowledge is the achievement of the knower, a skill must be involved.

What makes such a virtue-theoretic proposal robust is the fact that it attempts to exclusively analyse knowledge in terms of a true belief that is the product of epistemically virtuous belief-forming process. The big attraction of virtue-theoretic accounts of knowledge is that they capture our strong intuition that knowledge is the product of one’s reliable cognitive abilities. [...] On the face of it, robust virtue epistemology does not look particularly promising because of the difficulty of specifying the virtue-theoretic condition on knowledge in such a way as to deal with the problem of knowledge-undermining epistemic luck—e.g. of the sort found in Gettier-style cases. After all, no matter how reliable an epistemic virtue might be, it seems possible that it could generate a belief which is only true as a matter of luck.

— Duncan Pritchard (Pritchard 2010)

It is apparent, then, that a virtue-theoretic approach to the value problem meets all the demands that Kvanvig requires of an adequate solution. So why is Kvanvig dissatisfied with this kind of answer? I can only speculate that it is because he misses the force of the proposal. For example, when he first introduces the virtue-theoretic approach he writes,

Recently, several epistemologists have proposed such an idea, to the effect that credit accrues to the agent who has intellectually virtuous beliefs. . . . All three share a common theme about the value of the virtues, for they think of this value in terms of some kind of credit due to the agent whose belief is virtue-based.(Kvanvig 2003: 81)

— Kvanvig

— John Greco (Greco 2009)

Virtue reliabilism thus appears to be significantly different from generic reliabilism. Since the generic reliabilist admits that any reliable mechanism can be a source of knowledge, a mechanism can be a source of knowledge even when its success owes to an external manipulator rather than to the agent’s own abilities. So, she must grant our two agents knowledge. The virtue reliabilist, in contrast, need not grant our two agents knowledge, for the source of their beliefs is not sufficiently grounded in their own cognitive abilities, and for that reason it is ruled out by virtue reliabilism as being a source of knowledge. With this distinction in place, the virtue-theoretical response to the value problem is straightforward. More value accrues to true belief that derives from the agent’s own cognitive abilities, because achieving true belief of this sort is to the agent’s credit.

— Berit Brogaard, Can Virtue Reliabilism Explain the Value of Knowledge? (2006)

Reliabilism

This section mentions reliabilism, but this view of Jack Ritchie is added because it says something more about it, which connects reliabilism with the notion of methodology of the logical positivists and Popper.

What distinguishes knowledge from mere true belief is something the subjects themselves may know nothing about. The chicken sexers are an example of such subjects. They know but they do not know that they know. Reliabilism is for this reason classed as a version of epistemological externalism. What makes the difference between mere true belief and knowledge is not something that the subjects themselves are aware of. [...] Brandom’s view clearly rules out the possibility of the dog mentioned above having knowledge that bones are buried in a certain place. If reliabilists are right that knowledge does not require us to be able to offer justifications, then they require an account of belief that is different from Brandom’s. [...] We do offer explicit justifications for our beliefs. If the reliabilist account of knowledge is correct, then it provides us with a way of understanding what we are trying to do as responsible enquirers seeking knowledge. What we are looking for are reliable ways to form our beliefs. [...] Perhaps this is the right way to think about what scientists are doing. The carefully controlled experiments, mathematical techniques and methods of peer review used in the sciences are to be held in high regard precisely because they are reliable mechanisms for producing true beliefs.

Descartes and virtue epistemology

Hilary Kornblith wrote:

Here then are some questions with which Descartes dealt.

1. (a) How ought we, objectively speaking, to arrive at our beliefs? What processes available to us, if any, are conducive to truth?

1. (b) How ought we, subjectively speaking, to arrive at our beliefs? What processes available to us, if any, seem conducive to truth?

2. (a) What actions ought we, objectively speaking, to perform in order to make the processes by which we arrive at our beliefs more conducive to truth? What actions available to us, if any, will bring it about that our beliefs be formed by processes conducive to truth?

2. (b) What actions ought we, subjectively speaking, to perform in order to make the processes by which we arrive at our beliefs more conducive to truth? What actions available to us, if any, would seem to bring it about that our beliefs be formed by processes conducive to truth?

In both 1 (a) and 1 (b), the processes are available to the person and that is a subjective concept. The part that is objective in 1 (b) is that the process is conducive to truth. Kornblith says that, for Descartes, processes in 1 (a) are also in 1 (b): Descartes's position is that "the principles that seem right from one's present perspective, given sufficiently careful consideration, are objectively right as well." Moreover, Kornblith interprets Descartes as saying that we can choose any process that leads to a belief through an action and thus "Descartes runs the questions under (1) together with those under (2)".

Kornblith continues with:

It is now widely agreed that belief is not subject to direct voluntary control, and I will take this for granted in what follows. This will be sufficient to pry apart questions under (2) from those under (I). Further, in the spirit of naturalistic epistemology, I will assume that there are no a priori knowable truths, or, at any rate, none of any significance for epistemological theorizing. This will force us to separate questions (a) and (b).

Two important principles against Descartes are stated here. The first one makes a distinction between the actions that one can decide to execute and the processes through which the person might go (to reach a belief or for any other outcome). One has control over his actions, but he does not have total control over the processes through which he goes. In particular, one does not control the beliefs that he gains from these processes. The second principle is that there is no a priori knowledge (and one has to rely on scientific knowledge).

Coherentism

The chapter Coherentism of Jonathan Kvanvig in The Bloomsbury Companion to Epistemology is a criticism of the subject that does not impose the burden of the proof to the coherentists in the sense that it concludes that there is hope that this research program might succeed. It sees three issues.

First issue: In fundamentalism, "the issue of exactly what is involved in basing a belief on a reason might still be a difficult question to answer, but identifying which particular item this relation must relate the target belief to is not difficult. Once we adopt a holistic account of justification, however, this simple answer is no longer available." But, Kvanvig says the holistic requirement can be additional to the usual fundamentalist approach.

Second issue: Kvanvig wrote "A second major objection to coherentism claims that coherentists cut off, or isolate, the story of justification from the story of the world, leaving the concept of justification too independent from reality itself." Kvanvig seems to argue in the same line as Popper who says that one can go deeper and includes the interpretation as needed.

Third issue: He wrote "Issues related to the truth connection arise initially when one notes that a good piece of fiction will display exceptional coherence in spite of having no connection at all to what is actually true." Kvanvig offers a seven pages response.

Coherentism and Plato

Franco Trabattoni wrote:

When understood in the realistic terms just outlined, the [Two Worlds Theory] provides a suitable metaphysical framework for the picture of Platonic epistemology I wish to present in this book. Drawing upon the language of contemporary philosophical debate, the separation between the world of ideas and the world inhabited by the embodied soul requires a “coherentist” rather than rigorously “foundationalist” conception of knowledge: since human beings in their mortal condition have no direct access to the knowledge of the ideas, the criterion for evaluating the truth of our descriptions of intelligible objects cannot be the comparing of the objects themselves and their description, but only the relative coherence or incoherence of the descriptive picture suggested. Having said this, the metaphysical context just outlined makes Platonic “coherentism” stronger than modern forms of coherentism, which usually lack any such background.

Coherentism and Hegel's idealism

W. J. Mander wrote:

To Hegel, “the Universe was not a system of thoughts, but a thinking reality manifesting itself most fully in man”."°* And the word ‘fully’ is important, for it indicates to us that developmentalism about knowledge that we have already exam- ined in Jones’ mentor, Edward Caird. Metaphysics is fit to travel without first securing a certificate of health from theory of knowledge, but it certainly has a journey to undertake and against the foundationalism that inspires the epistemolo- gist’s project, Jones proposes an idealist coherentism in which “‘certainty’ is to be found only in a complete system, in a consistent view of the world as an organic whole, and not in erecting an edifice of knowledge on a fragmentary fixed datum by mechanical means”.'”

Coherentism and correspondence theory: metaphysical considerations

Haig Khatchadourian wrote:

A main theory of the nature and criterion of truth in Western Philosophy is the coherence theory of truth or “coherentism” advanced by the Neo- Idealists in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as by some [other] philosophers in the 20th century. Coherentism in that form is a fundamental part of [...] the metaphysics of objective idealism, which conceives of reality as an internally-related organic whole: for example, Absolute Reason in Hegel’s philosophy. [...]
At the beginning of the section on “Coherentism” in Conceptions of Truth, Wolfgang Künne observes that Neurath is a defender of “coherentism” [or the “coherence” theory of truth], which is contrasted with the “correspondence theory.” Neurath, he adds, argues that “statements are compared with statements, not with experience.

The raft vs swamp metaphor : coherentism vs critical rationalism

Neurath compared science to a raft that floats free of any anchor.

The coherentists reject the metaphor of the pyramid in favor of one that they owe to the positivist Neurath, according to whom our body of knowledge is a raft that floats free of any anchor or tie. Repairs must be made afloat, and though no part is untouchable, we must stand on some in order to replace or repair others. Not every part can go at once. According to the new metaphor, what justifies a belief is not that it be an infallible belief with an indubitable object, nor that it have been proved deductively on such a basis, but that it cohere with a comprehensive system of beliefs.

— Ernest Sosa (Sosa 1980)

Neurath indeed only required a coherence in the system. Popper criticized him for that reason. He also had a similar metaphor, but it was used differently. For Popper, objective knowledge was fundamental. This objective knowledge was like a building built on a swamp. The temporary foundation on this swamp was the empirical basis. He proposed in this way that scientific knowledge and its empirical basis was something external to the scientists. He accepted that, in principle, it could be a single scientist, like Robin Crusoe on his island, but that it was less likely to make science works. There was not necessarily a single building. Different groups of scientists could have different buildings or interact with different parts of a single building so that, in practice, they have like different buildings. The key point is that it was something external to the subjectivity of the scientists. This allowed Popper to add a material requirement to the empirical basis. This means that for Popper, knowledge was on the side of the environment and was linked to other parts of the environment by the material requirement. That requirement has a subjective aspect to it, because it refers to some intersubjectivity or communication between subjects, including communication between the same subject at different times, but a key point is that scientists could agree on it without having to reject as false or accept as true any particular observation at a given time and location. Nevertheless, this is something that would be unacceptable for both internalists and externalists in modern epistemology. The internalists insist that the warrant is subjective and usually discernible by the subject. The externalists also consider that knowledge is subjective, but they accept that the warrant can be external to the subject. Both groups require that knowledge itself is subjective. As we saw in the context of the material requirement, Popper is very much aware that, in general, this objective knowledge would have no life if it was not for the subjectivity of the scientists that interact with it and through it, but somehow we succeed through critical rationalism that only the best of our subjectivity makes this objective knowledge alive. In other words, Popper acknowledges an important interaction between the subjective world, which he calls world 2, and the world of objective knowledge, which he calls world 3. Moreover, Popper insists that he does not claim that these are real worlds. They are just a convenient way to model the progress of science. He says that one could add a fourth world, etc. if convenient. So, he has a model of science in which knowledge is objective and scientific knowledge respects a material requirement, which is a part of his falsifiability requirement for scientific knowledge. But he has also an important interaction with the subjective world. In this way, this is the key point, Popper does not have to deal with the internalisme/externalisme debate, because both the external and internal aspects are part of the model.

Traditional realism vs comtemporary physics realism

David Papineau wrote:

For most philosophers of science this century ‘realism’ has been the view that theories about scientific unobservables are to be taken at face value, as telling us the truth about an independent, albeit unobservable, reality. The opponents of such realists were the ‘instrumentalists’, who maintained instead that the worth of such theories about unobservables consisted in their usefulness as tools for organizing observations, or some such.

An analogous debate, in some ways more serious and in some ways less, is the traditional debate between ‘realists about the external world’ and their ‘idealist? opponents. Here the idealists denied that any judgements about a world beyond our immediate experience should be taken at face value, including judgements about such mundane medium-sized physical objects as sticks and stones. The realist, siding with common sense and Dr Johnson, saw no reason to deny that such judgements answer to a non-mental reality.

About moderated realism

The idea of unknowable things in themselves was universally regarded as the most problematic aspect of Kantian metaphysics. Fichte was the first to offer a systematic response, abandoning the idea of things in themselves and arguing that knowledge, and consciousness more generally, cannot have any grounding in some supposed world to which we do not have access. Consciousness cannot be grounded in anything external to itself. The world as it appears to us is the world, and it is generated by self-​consciousness: thinking and being are identical. Hegel too saw the key issue as overcoming the opposition between thinking and being, though he was adamant that that did not mean a reduction of being to thinking, as in Fichte. Consequently, although his system is usually referred to as ‘objective idealism’, in his later writings he himself preferred the term ‘ideal-realism’.

— Stephen Gaukroger, Introduction, The Philosophy of Knowledge: A History Volume III, Knowledge in Modern Philosophy.

The perceptual situation — and this analysis may presumably be extended with appropriate modifications to memory, imagination and other modes of cognition—consists of a subject (the self, or pure act of perceiving), the content (sense data) and the object (the physical thing perceived). In terms of this analysis, two issues may be formulated: (a) Are content and object identical (epistemological monism), or are they numerically distinct (epistemological dualism)? and (b) Does the object exist independently of the knowing subject (epistemological idealism) or is it dependent upon the subject (epistemological realism)?

— Ledger Wood, Epistemology, Dictionary of Philosophy edited by Dagobert D. Runes

Adler like Mach and most presentists tended to define Metaphysik in a prejudicial way as the study of what allegedly existed beyond sensory or conscious bounds and hence was illegitimate for them as if incompatible with science. But the term is used in many other ways. Perhaps the most neutral is to make it identical with ontology as the study of reality such that far from being illegitimate or incompatible with science it helps provide basic assumptions for science.

— J Blackmore, R. Itagaki, and S. Tanaka, Note 68 of chapter 2 of Ernst Mach's Vienna 1895-1930 Or Phenomenalism as Philosophy of Science

On the continental side, some philosophers interpret Kant as saying that we cannot know things as they are in themselves (the noumena). We can know only how they appear to us (the phenomena), resulting in a form of external-world skepticism (the view that we lack knowledge of the external world), Husserl’s phenomenology (philosophical description of inner mental life free from the traditional distinction between it and external reality), or a constructivist view (the idea that we construct reality). For a brief overview of these issues, see Ellis (2014b). For a more thorough discussion, see Critchley (2001).

— K. S. Sangeetha (Sangeetha 2021)

Empiricism is properly a methodological term meaning interest in or reliance on sensory evidence and is compatible with numerous different types of epistemology and ontology. For example, Bacon and Locke were "empiricists", but this does not mean that they were phenomenalists like Berkeley, Hume, Mach, or Carnap.)

— K. S. Sangeetha in Section 8.4 of J Blackmore, R. Itagaki, and S. Tanaka in Ernst Mach's Vienna 1895-1930 Or Phenomenalism as Philosophy of Science.

This is somehow related :

[John Locke] was worrying about what features account for a person remaining the same or identical person over time, even through various changes. But a second sort of question can be raised about numerical identity: What constitutes the identity of a person; what features or properties make some being this person and not some other? These two questions are sometimes characterized as a persistence question: what makes this the same person as that one earlier; and an individuation question—what makes someone this person and not someone else at the same time.

— Jack S. Crumley II in Introducing philosophy : knowledge and reality.

Chisholm held that we are not identical with a body, but rather a “self” that continues in some one of the bodies. That we are unable to decide which body “contains U” does not lead to the conclusion that U is not one of them.

— Jack S. Crumley II in Introducing philosophy : knowledge and reality.

This also:

Double-Aspect Theory : Theory that the mind and the body of an individual are two distinguishable but inseparable aspects of a single underlying substance or process. Spinoza, as a consequence of his metaphysical doctrine that "thinking substance and extended substance are one and the same thing" (Ethics, Part II, prop. 7) was committed to the Two-Aspect Theory of the body-mind relation. Cf. C. Lloyd Morgan (Life, Mind and Spirit, p. 46) ; S. Alexander (Space, Time and Deity) and C. H . Strong are recent advocates o f a two-aspect Theory.

— Ledger Wood, Double-Aspect Theory, Dictionary of Philosophy edited by Dagobert D. Runes

Reversed realism

Henk Visser wrote:

Most recently (1994), John W. Cook has compared Mach's view "that the world consists only of our sensations" with Wittgenstein's remark that "all experience is world and does not need the subject": "This is", for Cook, "an explicit affirmation of neutral monism, although Ludwig Wittgenstein in his notebooks, calls it 'realism' (NB, P. 185) and in the Tractatus 'pure realism' (TLP, 5.64)".
Indeed, for some critics the very fact that young Wittgenstein reverses the normal definitions of the terms "realism" and "idealism" in the marmer in which many followers of Berkeley, Hume, and Kant56 have done "proves" that he was a phenomenalist or even a subjective idealist, but this criticism is not fair since many philosophers, especially in the German-speaking realm, think that Kant-inspired counter-definitions are the "normal" ones and not the anti-Berkeley definitions that one generally finds in most dictionaries and encyclopedias of philosophy to whit: "Realism is the position that there is a physical world and it exists independently of all consciousness of it".

Sources of knowledge

Opposed to empiricism is rationalism, the view that reason is the primary source of knowledge. Rationalists promote mathematical or logical knowledge as paradigm examples. Such knowledge can be grasped, they claim, through reason alone, without involving the senses directly. They argue that knowledge accessed through reasoning is eternal (i.e., it exists unchanged throughout the past, present, and future). For instance, two plus three remains five. Rationalists are impressed by the certainty and clarity of knowledge that reasoning provides, and they argue that this method should be applied to gaining knowledge of the world also. The evidence of the senses should be in conformity with the truths of reason, but it is not a prerequisite for the acquisition of these truths.

Knowledge that is independent of (or prior to) observation and experience is called a priori (Latin for “from the former”). Rationalists maintain that reason is the basis of a priori knowledge. But where do we ultimately get the ideas on which reason is based, if not from observation or experience? Rationalists tend to favor innatism, the belief that we are born with certain ideas already in our minds.

— K. S. Sangeetha (Sangeetha 2021)

How is such a priori knowledge of one’s own identity through time possible? How can I know already that I will be able in the future to connect all thoughts into the unity of my consciousness and proceed from one thought to any other? Such knowledge is only possible, Kant claims, if the forms of transition from one thought to another are themselves a priori, that is, unchanging and independent of the contents of thoughts.

— Eckart Förster (Förster 2011)

How could it be that all the truths that we ever come to know are already contained within the soul itself waiting to be recollected? This is never fully explained in Meno, but it seems to have something to do with the fact that the soul is imperceptible, immaterial, and eternal (existing for all of time—past, present, and future), and so in some way ‘akin’ to the Forms, as Plato argues at length in Phaedo (78b–80c). It also seems that the Forms collectively are the source of an intelligible system of necessary truths, which somehow articulates the nature of the Forms. So, presumably, one of the main ways in which the soul is ‘akin’ to the Forms is in somehow reflecting this system of necessary truths.

— Ralph Wedgwood (Wedgwood 2018)

Kant thought, in effect, that there are unchanging, universal, and a priori principles of knowledge (synthetic a priori truths) that lie at the heart of empirical science and of all knowledge and that these can be revealed by philosophical investigation of Reason and its limits. Kant’s rationalist interpretation of science was eventually challenged by developments in geometry and arithmetic...

— Martin Curd and Stathis Psillos (Curd & Psillos 2013)

I am here using the names "Popper" and "Kuhn" to denote not only individuals but also successive generations. Now why did stability suddenly become unstuck? Popper, like so many of his peers, was deeply moved by Einstein's successive revolutions in space-time, special and then general relativity. They were matched by the old and new quantum mechanics of 1900 and 1926-27. Stirring times, but also anomalous ones. They stand out because so many of the eternal verities, in the form of a priori knowledge about space, time, continuity, causation, and determinism, were abandoned. Refutation and revolution were in vogue where stability and subsumption had been the norm.

— Ian Hacking (Hacking 1992)

This one is from unpublished lecture notes.

But in Being and Time Heidegger explicitly rejects such an understanding. Absolute truth and the absolute subject are declared to be rests of Christian theology that philosophy ought to leave behind:

... Both the contention that there are ‘eternal truths’ and the jumbling together of Dasein’s phenomenally grounded ‘ideality’ with an idealized absolute subject, belong to those residues of Christian theology within philosophical problematics which have not as yet been radically extruded. (SZ 229)

— Heiddegger

As I have already suggested, I would question Heidegger on this point: The transcendental subject is not dismissed quite that easily.

— Karsten Harries

The fundamental problem is the possibility of the existence of synthetic judgments a priori. Because they would be judgments a priori, they would be necessary, not permitting the possibility of error, i.e., apodictic; because at the same time they would be synthetic judgments, they would provide information about an empirically knowable reality. A science which forms judgments a priori would deserve to be called an ideal science since it would satisfy man’s eternal longing for an absolutely certain knowledge of reality. Metaphysics would be knowledge of that kind.

— Michael Heller (Heller 2011)

Fixing the scope

To put it otherwise, the question of whether to respond to — or bypass — the objections of a radical skepticism, for example, can only be broached at a meta-epistemological level. We should not expect this type of naturalized epistemology to be concerned with responding to the same questions as other epistemological approaches: ...

— John Capps (Capps 1996)

Richardson, in particular, emphasizes that in the debate between Quine and Carnap, the “semantic, pragmatic, logical, epistemological, scientific, ‘natural,’ formal, and metaphysical are at stake all at once”. On Richardson’s account, the Morris and Carnap conception of scientific philosophy was structured so as to exclude traditional metaphysics or epistemology. Precisely by limiting the scope of the intelligible, philosophy of science was to clarify philosophical disputes.

— Paul A. Roth (Roth2013)

The question of the relative priority of epistemology and metaphysics (or ontology) has occasioned considerable controversy: the dominant view fostered by Descartes, Locke and Kant is that epistemology is the prior philosophical science, the investigation of the possibility and limits of knowledge being a necessary and indispensable preliminary to any metaphysical speculations regarding the nature of ultimate reality. On the other hand, strongly metaphysical thinkers like Spinoza and Hegel, and more recently S. Alexander and A. N. Whitehead, have first attacked the metaphysical problems and adopted the view of knowledge consonant with their metaphysics.

— Ledger Wood (Wood 1960)

The philosophical study of first-order philosophical inquiry raises philosophical inquiry to a higher order. Such higher-order inquiry is metaphilosophy. The first-order philosophical discipline of (e.g.) epistemology has the nature of knowledge as its main focus, but that discipline can itself be the focus of higher-order philosophical inquiry. The latter focus yields a species of metaphilosophy called metaepistemology.

— Paul K. Moser (Moser 2015)

The problem of the criterion, by all accounts, is a metaepistemological problem concerning the possibility of a non-fallacious justification of a theory of knowledge. Roderick Chisholm, who maintained quite puzzlingly that one could only deal with the problem by begging the question, initiated its revival. Luciano Floridi, in his ambitious book, Scepticism and the Foundation of Epistemology, attempts to "deal" with the problem by offering a novel dissolution which, he argues, avoids the dual horns of begging the question and infinite regress.

— Robert P. Amico (Amico 2000)

Rejection of a priori and objective knowledge

Many philosophers have noted that naturalism was introduced in opposition to the notion of a priori knowledge. For example, Michael Fuerstein wrote the following about Philip Kitcher, British American philosopher notable for his wide-ranging development of naturalism,

Kitcher holds that no claim is immune to reasonable doubt in the face of experience. The heart of his naturalism is therefore a comprehensive rejection of a priori knowledge

— Fuerstein 2015

Jonathan Lieberson describes Popper's World 3 as metaphysical:

With man, according to Popper’s “metaphysical” conjecture, things are different. Our invention and use of language creates a new “world,” an “ontologically distinct” realm, which he calls. “World 3” or the “third world.” He thinks that it exists alongside the “first” world of material objects like glasses and polar bears—objects for whose existence, as we have seen, he cannot advance any decisive empirical reasons, only a “metaphysical” faith—and the “second” world of purely mental states, feelings, emotions, dispositions to act.

Rejection of idealism

This area of philosophy is hard to understand, perhaps because it is difficult to find a universally accepted definition of idealism. It is typically seen as opposed to realism, but that is often used to mean things like realists see the world as it is, whereas idealists see the word as dependent upon our thoughts. This is, of course, a biased view in favour of realism and against idealism. Both idealists and realists accept the same laws of nature. The way the variables in these laws are associated (often only indirectly) with our sensory experiences as well as with how we can set the state of a system is the same for idealists as for realists. From the point of view of the laws and their interpretation in science, one cannot distinguish between a realist and an idealist. The difference can only be explained in terms of the subjective experiences that we have through the senses. The realist believes that there is a reality "outside" these sensory experiences. The idealist prefers to say this reality is "inside" these subjective sensory experiences. Philosophers who do not care about that notion of inside versus outside somehow mysteriously created by our subjective sensory experiences are often classified as idealists, because it is a form of rejection of realism. A realist considers there is a reality outside that is responsible for the sensory experiences, which are, to a good approximation, the only connection with the reality. This view is useful to account for sensory experiences. However, it might be inadequate to fully explain the nature of knowledge and how it came to existence as much as it is useless to answer questions about how DNA and life came to existence. One can be a realist regarding sensory experiences and yet be an idealist regarding the possibility of knowledge that is a priori.

Pragmatism, research programs, plato's recollection and the problem of the criterion

Rescher’s methodological pragmatism is a naturalistic account of the justification of method that treats methodological principles as, in part, subject to empirical evaluation. He recognizes a fundamental problem concerning the justification of principles of method, which he expresses in terms of the Pyrrhonian sceptics problem of the criterion or diallelus, that is, circle or wheel (see Rescher 1977: ch. II, $2).

— Robert Nola and Howard Sankey, Chap. 12.3 in Theories of Scientific Method : An Introduction

But, as Lakatos calls it, the ‘‘Pyrrhonian machine de guerre’’ (hs 122) can be positively applied to define a changing logic when knowledge is characterized as fallible and historical. Those conditions are, of course, nowhere to be found in Kant, while quite clearly, in Lakatos’s self-application of the methodology of scientific research programmes, ‘‘the action of the forms of thought’’ are combined ‘‘with a criticism of them,’’ just as Hegel demanded. This solution to the skeptical problem of the criterion consists largely in recognizing the historical conditions of knowledge. In Lakatos, that means research programmes have a historical character whose status is also that of fallible and changing historiographical tools.

— John Kadvany, Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason

Thus the strategic importance of recollection and of Ideas becomes clear. In short, ennoiai are the criterion. And if they are to effectively serve as a criterion, we must be certain that they are true. The Stoic empiricist explanation is not able to establish the trustworthiness of ennoiai, but luckily the Platonists have the solution: they develop a theory that may account for the formation of ennoiai in a non-empiricist way by making ennoiai depend on the prenatal view of Ideas and by claiming that the ennoiai are reactivated by the process of recollection. This is also why we can rely on them for scientific knowledge: once correctly articulated in definitions, they will lead us to the Ideas.

— Mauro Bonazzi, The Platonist Appropriation of Stoic Epistemology in From Stoicism to Platonism

[...] we have found some evidence for thinking that Plato held some version of an innateness hypothesis, which by the time we get to the Meno is explained by the theory of recollection. [...] so the question, ‘When did we first learn all these things?’ never arises. Such an answer obviously contradicts the evidence of cosmogeny, as well as that of biological evolution [...] Contemporary epistemologists plainly have very different ways of grounding epistemic optimism, but few now accept anything like Plato’s theory of innate content. Obviously, epistemic optimism can also be supported by a theory of innate capacity.

— Nicholas D. Smith, PLATO’S EPISTEMOLOGY in Epistemology: The Key Thinkers

Skepticism

Skepticism is discussed at many places here. This is just a point that indicates that the role of skepticism is to make people change paradigm. I believe this is what is meant by Michael Williams in the following sentence by "declining the challenge":

It may be that the challenge of Pyrrhonian skepticism, once accepted, is unanswerable. The question, however, is whether that challenge may be reasonably declined. I think that a proper diagnosis shows that it can be. [...] And I think that (in fact) a salutary fallibilism has been one of the skeptical tradition’s great contributions to philosophy. But if the Agrippan argument is to constitute a problem today, it must point toward something other than fallibilism. [...] Putting these points together, the Agrippan argument implies that no belief is justifiable, even to the slightest degree. Accordingly, the argument threatens to wipe out all epistemological distinctions. This is why Agrippan skepticism is intolerable.

Here is the position of John Greco in his 2000 book Putting Skeptics in Their Place :

This book has three major theses: (1) that a number of historically prominent skeptical arguments make no obvious mistake and therefore cannot be easily dismissed; (2) that the analysis of skeptical arguments is philosophically useful and important and should therefore have a central place in the methodology of philosophy, particularly in the methodology of epistemology; and (3) that taking skeptical arguments seriously requires us to adopt an externalist, reliabilist epistemology. More specifically, it motivates a position that 1 call “agent reliabilism,” which is an externalist version of virtue epistemology.

Guy Axtell wrote:

Even where no ‘‘true skeptics’’ are present to support them, skeptical arguments, whether those of ‘‘global’’ (radical) or ‘‘local’’ (domain-specific) import, help uncover the depth in a conception of epistemic agency and allow us to reflect more carefully upon our human epistemic condition. As John Greco puts it, the study of skeptical arguments ‘‘drives positive epistemology’’ (2000, 51).

However, at the beginning of the section Pyrrhonian Skepticism and the Underdetermination Argument it is clear that Axtell, citing Pritchard, considers that "not internalistically justified in believing everyday propositions" implies "lack knowledge of everyday propositions", that is, there is the assumption that knowledge requires justification. In that context, Axtell later adds:

As Pritchard points out in Epistemic Luck (2005), it centrally supports the view “that any claim to know can be called into question via the skeptical techniques the Pyrrhonian skeptics have identified, and [that] this highlights the ultimately ‘brute’ nature of our epistemic position”.

Solution to skepticism

Peter Klein wrote:

In order to understand Sosa’s response to philosophical skepticism it is crucial to see that Sosa adopts a Cartesian distinction between two forms of knowledge — cognitio and scientia. Cognitio is true, justified belief that is appropriately caused or subjunctively related to the object of the belief. Tempting though it would be, I will not comment on Sosa’s account of cognitio beyond what is required to discuss his response to skepticism.” Scientia is a reflective form of knowledge that results from “ascending” to a position from which we can assess whether we satisfy the conditions required by cognitio.

To be continued.

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• Myers, Robert H. (2021). "Davidson's Meta-normative Naturalism and the Rationality Requirement". In Yang, Syraya Chin-Mu; Myers, Robert H. (eds.). Donald Davidson on Action, Mind and Value. Logic in Asia: Studia Logica Library. Singapore: Springer Singapore. doi:10.1007/978-981-15-7230-2. ISBN 978-981-15-7229-6.

Further reading

• Dancy, Jonathan; Sosa, Ernest; Steup, Matthias, eds. (2010-01-15). A Companion to Epistemology (1 ed.). Wiley. doi:10.1002/9781444315080. ISBN 978-1-4051-3900-7.
• Sosa, Ernest (2004-08-12). "Two False Dichotomies: Foundationalism/Coherentism and Internalism/Externalism". In Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter (ed.). Pyrrhonian Skepticism (1 ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0195169727.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-516972-0.
• Bergmann, Michael (2006-05-18). Justification without Awareness: A Defense of Epistemic Externalism (1 ed.). Oxford University PressOxford. doi:10.1093/0199275742.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-927574-8.
• Sosa, Ernest (1991-03-29). Knowledge in Perspective: Selected Essays in Epistemology (1 ed.). Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/cbo9780511625299. ISBN 978-0-521-35628-2.
• Lehrer, Keith (1990). Theory of Knowledge. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.
• Bonjour, Laurence (2010). Epistemology : Classic Problems and Contemporary Responses (2 ed.). Rowman & Littlefield.
• Alston, William (1989). Epistemic Justification. Essays in the Theory of Knowledge. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• Benson, Hugh, ed. (2006). A Companion to Plato. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. doi:10.1111/b.9781405115216.2006.x. ISBN 978-1-4051-1521-6.
• Nola, Robert (2007-08-30). Theories of Scientific Method: An Introduction (1 ed.). Acumen Publishing Limited. doi:10.1017/upo9781844653881. ISBN 978-1-84465-388-1.
• Fine, Gail (2021-05-25). Essays in Ancient Epistemology. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198746768.001.0001. ISBN 9780191809040. Retrieved 2023-05-28.
• Olsson, Erik J. (2022). "Explicationist Epistemology and the Explanatory Role of Knowledge". Journal for General Philosophy of Science. 53 (1): 41–60. doi:10.1007/s10838-020-09520-8. ISSN 0925-4560.
• Bricker, Adam Michael (2022). "Knowledge is a mental state (at least sometimes)". Philosophical Studies. 179 (5): 1461–1481. doi:10.1007/s11098-021-01714-0. ISSN 0031-8116.
• Carter, J. Adam; Gordon, Emma C.; Jarvis, Benjamin W., eds. (2017). Knowledge First. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198716310.001.0001.
• Capecchi, Danilo (2021). Epistemology and Natural Philosophy in the 18th Century: The Roots of Modern Physics. History of Mechanism and Machine Science. Vol. 39. Springer International Publishing. ISBN 9783030528522.