An alternative analysis of knowing

Abstract

When we say of a man that he knows something we are making a claim that is both descriptive and evaluative. Most philosophers seem to agree that the descriptive aspect of a knowledge claim can be explicated in terms of true belief. There is also considerable agreement that the eval uative aspect is to be explicated in terms of the structure of the justifica tion one has for his belief. During the last decade, epistemologists have devoted a considerable amount of attention to the problem of explicating the evaluative aspect of knowledge claims. They have been inspired, in part, by the highly recalcitrant problems raised in Edmund Gettier's brief but epoch-making paper 'Is Justified True Belief Knowledge 7'1 To date, no universally agreed upon theory concerning these questions has been presented. One of my goals in this paper is to present an adequate ex plication of empirical knowledge. In addition to these attempts at explicating the concept of knowledge, many philosophers have worked recently on the logic of epistemic ex pressions, principally on expressions containing 'knows' and 'believes'. A great many insights into the formal characteristics of these expressions have been gained as a result of this work.3 Very little has been done, however, toward combining the results of this enterprise with the results achieved by those who have worked on the explication of the concept of knowledge. A second goal of this paper is to effect such a combination by constructing an explication of the concept of knowledge in terms of some notions which I earlier developed in an essay on the logic of epis temic expressions.4 In that essay, my primary concern was with the con cepts of evident, reasonable, and unreasonable belief. The approach adopted there is intended, however, to provide a basis for a general logic of epistemic expressions. I shall begin by giving a brief account of the basic elements of that approach.