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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 June 2010
To know is to believe but to believe is not necessarily to know. The latter, unfortunate fact gives rise quite naturally to the question: How can we distinguish between those beliefs that qualify as items of knowledge and those that do not? The standard reply given to this question by philosophers is that knowledge is justified belief. Although the reply sounds eminently reasonable it does not really answer the question. Rather than settling the issue it succeeds instead in stirring up a host of philosophical problems of the most thorny and baffling kind. So difficult do these problems become that they have driven many philosophers to the skeptical conclusion that it is impossible to provide any justification for our beliefs at all. My main object in this paper will be to pursue what seems to me to be the most important and difficult of these problems and to examine some of the recent solutions that philosophers have offered for it. Before beginning this task, however, it might be well to clarify the notion of knowledge (as it is normally understood) a bit more fully. Just what qualifies a belief as a justified belief and thus as an item of knowledge?
1 This is, of course, an over-simplification of the situation, as it usually occurs. Ordinarily a person will back up a knowledge claim by appealing to a preliminary criterion (for example, he might say the temperature hit 980 the preceding day because he had read it in the newspaper); however, behind the preliminary criterion, and sometimes several steps back, lies the final criterion to which he is appealing (in our case presumably empirical evidence as observed on an official thermometer). The criterion which is of interest for our argument is the final criterion on which the knowledge claim rests.
2 Rules for the Direction of the Mind (Rule III). It should be added that contemporary “Cartesians” have adhered to this conception of knowledge through noetic experience much more closely than did Descartes himself.
3 This last point is well illustrated by Feigl's, Herbert essay “De Principiis Non Disputandum…” published in Philosophical Analysis, ed. Black, M. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1950), pp. 119–156Google Scholar.
4 For the purposes of our argument it is not necessary to analyze what a pragmatist does or could mean by “desirable.” It should be noted, however, that this notion is loaded with difficulties.