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A woman glances at a broken clock and comes to believe it is a quarter past seven. Yet, despite the broken clock, it really does happen to be a quarter past seven. Her belief is true, but it isn't knowledge. This is a classic illustration of a central problem in epistemology: determining what knowledge requires in addition to true belief.
In this provocative book, Richard Foley finds a new solution to the problem in the observation that whenever someone has a true belief but not knowledge, there is some significant aspect of the situation about which she lacks true beliefs--something important that she doesn't quite "get." This may seem a modest point but, as Foley shows, it has the potential to reorient the theory of knowledge. Whether a true belief counts as knowledge depends on the importance of the information one does or doesn't have. This means that questions of knowledge cannot be separated from questions about human concerns and values. It also means that, contrary to what is often thought, there is no privileged way of coming to know. Knowledge is a mutt. Proper pedigree is not required. What matters is that one doesn't lack important nearby information.
Challenging some of the central assumptions of contemporary epistemology, this is an original and important account of knowledge.
Part I: The Basic Idea
Chapter 1: An Observation 3
Chapter 2: Post-Gettier Accounts of Knowledge 6
Chapter 3: Knowledge Stories 9
Chapter 4: Intuitions about Knowledge 12
Chapter 5: Important Truths 19
Chapter 6: Maximally Accurate and Comprehensive Beliefs 32
Chapter 7: The Beetle in the Box 41
Chapter 8: Knowledge Blocks 46
Chapter 9: The Theory of Knowledge and Theory of Justified Belief 51
Part II: Puzzles and Questions
Chapter 10: The Value of True Belief 59
Chapter 11: The Value of Knowledge 65
Chapter 12: The Lottery and Preface 70
Chapter 13: Reverse Lottery Stories 73
Chapter 14: Lucky Knowledge 78
Chapter 15: Closure and Skepticism 81
Chapter 16: Disjunctions 86
Chapter 17: Fixedness and Knowledge 88
Chapter 18: Instability and Knowledge 91
Chapter 19: Misleading Defeaters 95
Chapter 20: Believing That I Don't Know 99
Chapter 21: Introspective Knowledge 102
Chapter 22: Perceptual Knowledge 106
Chapter 23: A Priori Knowledge 110
Chapter 24: Collective Knowledge 113
Part III: The Structure of Epistemology
Chapter 25: A Look Back 121
Chapter 26: Epistemology within a General Theory of Rationality 124
Chapter 27: The Core Concepts of Epistemology 134
Notes 137
Index 149
Overview
A woman glances at a broken clock and comes to believe it is a quarter past seven. Yet, despite the broken clock, it really does happen to be a quarter past seven. Her belief is true, but it isn't knowledge. This is a classic illustration of a central problem in epistemology: determining what knowledge requires in addition to true belief.
In this provocative book, Richard Foley finds a new solution to the problem in the observation that whenever someone has a true belief but not...