Abstract
For a long time philosophers have struggled to reach a definition of knowledge that is fully satisfactory from an intuitive standard. However, what could be so fuzzy about the concept of knowledge that it makes our intuitions to not obviously support a single analysis? One particular approach from a naturalistic perspective treats this question from the point of view of the psychology of concepts. According to it, this failure is explained by the structure of our folk concept of knowledge, which organizes its constitutive information in a much looser way than we assume when we rely on intuitive knowledge ascriptions. I will adopt the same starting point here, but argue against the proposed answer and defend the view that this difficulty is explained not by something related to the specific structure of our concept of knowledge but, on the contrary, by its lack of structure. I claim that our folk concept of knowledge should be understood as a primitive mental state concept.
Highlights
For a long time philosophers have struggled to reach a definition of knowledge that is fully satisfactory from an intuitive standard
What could be so fuzzy about the concept of knowledge that it makes our intuitions to not obviously support a single analysis? One particular approach from a naturalistic perspective treats this question from the point of view of the psychology of concepts
Why is that? What is so fuzzy about the concept of knowledge that it makes our intuitions to not obviously support a single analysis? One particular approach from a naturalistic perspective treats this question from the view of the psychology of concepts
Summary
There are different views regarding both the nature of epistemic intuitions and their role in the theorization about knowledge. The basic premise of the naturalistic view is that when epistemologists use epistemic intuitions they are trying to reveal something about our underlying concept of knowledge or justification (Goldman, 1993, 2007; Goldman & Pust, 1998; Kornblith, 2002), and this is the starting point of epistemological theorization. A common starting point of conceptual analysis, in general, is to observe our ascription patterns regarding a certain kind of things and to define the concept C by pulling out what is common about the cases we are willing to categorize as instances of C This is the case of the analysis of knowledge. The lack of structure of knowledge are mental representations responsible for our categorization and a number of other cognitive processes, it is proper to attribute those intuitions to the folk concept. What is with KNOWLEDGE that could explain our intuitive struggle?
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