Defining Knowledge

Download or read book Defining Knowledge written by Stephen Hetherington and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-10 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Post-Gettier epistemology is increasingly modalized epistemology – proposing and debating modally explicable conditionals with suitably epistemic content (an approach initially inspired by Robert Nozick's 1981 account of knowledge), as needing to be added to 'true belief' in order to define or understand knowing's nature. This Element asks whether such modalized attempts – construed as responding to what the author calls Knowing's Further Features question (bequeathed to us by the Meno and the Theaetetus) – can succeed. The answer is that they cannot. Plato's and Aristotle's views on definition reinforce that result. Still, in appreciating this, we might gain insight into knowing's essence. We might find that knowledge is, essentially, nothing more than true belief.