AN ESSAY ON INFERENTIAL KNOWLEDGE

Bücher

Angebote / Angebote:

Under what conditions do we have inferential knowledge? I propose and defend the following principle: S knows that p via inference only if S knows all the premises essentially involved in her inference in support of p - "KFK" for short. Even though KFK is at least tacitly endorsed by many figures in the history of philosophy, from Aristotle through Descartes, and Kant to Bertrand Russell -and, more recently, by David Armstrong - KFK has fallen into disfavor among epistemologists over the past fifty years. In response to Edmund Gettier's legendary paper, many have proposed views according to which one's reasoning is a source of knowledge even if one fails to know some or all premises essentially involved in one's reasoning, while others have given up offering a theory of inferential knowledge and have focused on reasoning as a source of justified belief instead. Unfortunately, these accounts that deal with inferential knowledge are problematic, they cannot, for example, fully explain our common practice of evaluating negatively inferences with unknown premises.