We have seen that the no-lemmas and no-false presuppositions kind of solves the gettier cases, or making a causal theory of knowledge like Goldman.
In the history of epistemology: in the last 50 years, people have pretty much stopped wondering what the x-condition is supposed to be. What epistemologists actually care about is the nature of justification, and when one is justified in believing that p.
And we are working with an internalist frame of mind: for a subject to be justified in a belief, the subject must in some sense be aware of the reasons why the relevant belief is like to be true.
Three bigger famillies in terms of how to talk about knowledge, and depending on which you flesh out, a different kind of knowledge system arrises.
What is the logic of justification.
It is a transitive verb. If we want to justify something, and we want to know whether we are justified or not, what do we do?
There is something that justifies something.
If I think that I have to do x, that is because of a justification y.
Providing reasons for a justification is not the same as being justified.
Propositional and doxastic justification.
Propositional: Doctor A & B. A=B. Pp fever. There is malaria where they are. Doctor A treats for Malaria due to experience and education. Doctor B treats for malaria due to fortune teller.
These are both propositionally justified.
Propositional: having good reasons to believe a justification.
Doxastic: Holding a belief in a justified way (this is not necessarily a virtue)
S is justified in believing that p, if she has supporting beliefs which can be offered as grounds for holding p to be true.
Evidence as a belief that supports a belief.
But what grounds a supporting belief? Regress due to justification’s transitive nature.
Due to Agrippa’s Trilemma, we get:
Either we get out of that regression by creating unjustified basic belief. If we have something justified at the bottom of the chain of justification, why is this justified?
Or we accept the infinity of the regression. We accept that there is an unsolvable regress. This is more or less skeptic. We accept that there is no real justification for any knowledge. And so there is not really knowledge.
Or we embrace the circularity, and close the loop by ending at some other proposition that has already appeared. This seems like an informal logical fallacy.
Depending on which one you decide to bite, you get either foundationalism, infinitism and coherentism, in that order.
Foundationalism is like an upside down pyramid. It is a non-repeating finite chain of reasons.
Basically one has a few axiom that cannot be questioned, and out of that infers the rest of knowledge. Distinguishes between basic and non-basic beliefs. Both empiricism and rationalism are foundationalist.
Provide a non-inferential account of justification. We need to identify what is intrinsically justifed.
Coherentism: Repeating finite chain of reasons
It looks like a spiderweb or a Ship (Quine or Neurath).
Wilfrid Sellars: ”The myth of the given”.
For empiricism the ultimate adjdicator of our empirical beliefs is observation.
If I look at a desk, I can see that it is for eg. brown.
”There is a table out there” is a proposition, but at what point do the proposition and the perception of the appearnce intercept, and become one.
We can have raw sense data, and then that is immediately translated in a linguistic way, that is how our brain works, and the myth of the given describes this relation.
How do you get the justification to the proposition?
How can you transfer an epistemic propositional thing from something that is not?
There is a gap between that the justification is placed on the raw sense data, and the raw sense data is seperated from the propisition used to describe it, and somehow the justification needs to be transfered from one to the other.
Furthermore, do you ever perceive raw sense data?
If I perceive the brown of a desk, can I really perceive the brown of this desk, rather than the brown of my mind? Do we ever have that kind of pure data?
Actually, we do not. We are always imbedded in a linguistic interpretation of reality.
There are some concepts that are required in order to make sense of what we see.
Sellars argues that we cannot disentangle the conceptual parts of our eexperience from the ”raw-data” of sensation.
When thinking about science as an overall enterprise, it looks most like coherentism.
We cannot have a strong account of justification.
It is somehow difficult to prove that the way we describe the world, actually describes the world. If the coherence comes from the system of knowledge, we have no way to justify that what we know is true. We can only justify that what we know is the best we can know. But there is still a gap between the world and the way we describe it.
If there are many alternative coherent systems of belief, which include beliefs that are not compatible across systems, then how are we to judge what system of belief is the best indicator of truth.