Knowledge and justification
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The distinction between knowledge and belief
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"I believe it, therefore it is true." Find counter-examples to this argument. Define what a valid argument is. Explain why this argument is not valid. Questions of this kind point us to the way in which we do distinguish naturally between believing something and knowing something. It very often happens that something that we thought or believed was true, turns out to be false. For example, someone might be having a pleasant meal in a restaurant confident that his car is safely in the car-park where he left it, when in fact it has been stolen. Suppose we were having dinner with him, and we challenged his confident assumption that his car is safely parked in the garage, and said, "But do you really know that you car has not been stolen?" In reply, we would expect most people to acknowledge that the security of the car is not certain, and this seems to open up a distinction between knowledge and belief. Logically, any argument starts with one or more statements that are assumed or asserted to be true. These statements are called premises. From these premises, a conclusion is drawn. Any argument is valid if the premises force the conclusion to be true. That is, if the premises are true, then the conclusion could not possibly be false. When this is the case we say that the premises entail the conclusion, or that the conclusion is deduced from the premises. In this case we are examining an argument whose premise is: 1. I believe X. Here X stands for a statement (or proposition). For example, "I believe that my car is safely parked in the garage". There is only one premise in this argument, and the conclusion is: 2. X is true. Here X stands for the same statement (or proposition) mentioned in premise; in our example, "It is true that my car is safely parked in the garage." The whole argument is an example of a logical inference from a single premise to a single conclusion: 1. I believe X. Therefore, 2. X is true. We use the line to represent the process of drawing an inference from one or more premises. We also use the word "therefore" (or "thus", "hence", "so", and other terms) to show this process of drawing the conclusion, so strictly speaking we either don't need the line in the above example, or we don't need the "therefore"; however, this is an introduction to the whole idea of valid argument, so we include both.
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Contents of
Knowledge and justification
1 The distinction between knowledge and belief
2 Unsound, invalid, possible world and fallacy
3 Counterexample, exposing a fallacy
4 Belief and doubt
5 Believing that and knowing that
6 Knowledge and certainty - the tripartite definition of knowledge
7 True, justified belief
8 Plato: The Theaetetus
9 Plato: Forms
10 The possibility of scepticism and categories of belief
11 Global scepticism
12 The Argument from Authority
13 Valid argument, inference and justification
14 Chain of deductive inferences, self-evident truths
15 Sense experience, empiricism
16 The dialectic method, thesis and antithesis
17 Rationalism and empiricism; the Discourse on the Method
18 The Cogito, Reason and Rational Insight
19 Bertrand Russell, Acquaintance
20 Universals, Forms
21 Scepticism, Existentialism and Faith
22 The evil genius argument
23 Existentialism
24 Soren Kierkegaard - Fear and Trembling - the Absurd
25 Foundation for Knowledge
26 Theory of Knowledge, Epistemology and Metaphysics
27 Rationalism, Mathematics and Logic, Innateness
28 Innate Ideas
29 The a priori
30 Truth by convention, Hume and the Method of Doubt
31 Hume and the distinction between belief and knowledge
32 Hume and the definition of belief
33 Truth as a logical operator on sentences
34 The correspondence theory of truth
35 Wittgenstein: On Certainty
36 Wittgenstein and the coherence theory of truth
37 William James and Pragmatism
38 W.V.O. Quine, pragmatism and the Two Dogmas of Empiricism
39 Postivism and pragmatism
40 Pragmatism and utilitarianism
41 Pragmatism and religiion
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