Knowing Minimally : A Truthful Epistemology

Omtale

When philosophers insist that knowing is more than being correct, must you believe them? Not according to a minimalist picture of the nature of knowing: perhaps knowing is just being correct. Western epistemology began with two of Plato’s dialogues (Meno and Theaetetus) asking what knowledge is, and very few philosophers since have doubted Socrates’ claim that there is more to knowing than merely being correct. And what might that ‘more’ be? The most traditional answer is that something like good evidence is what begins to mark the difference between knowing and merely being correct. This means that unless a belief is somehow being supported by good evidence, it is not knowledge, even if correct. Philosophers assure us that knowing is more of an achievement than merely being correct. In practice, we often do want much more than truth when seeking knowledge. We often seek good evidence with which to defend a claim, showing that it is knowledge. We often seek good evidence with which to explain a claim, showing why it is knowledge. For these and other reasons, then, we might want even a true belief to be accompanied by good evidence. But do even those observations prove that knowing must include having good evidence? They do not: what typically allows or even helps one to defend or use some knowledge might not be inescapably needed as part of what is being defended or used. This book presents a minimalism about knowledge’s nature. It is a conceptual minimalism – describing the surprisingly small core of how we must conceive of knowing. And it is a metaphysical minimalism – describing the surprisingly small essence or underlying nature of knowing. The good news from knowledge-minimalism is that a path leads to knowledge simply by leading to truth; nothing else is needed.