1. EPISTEMOLOGY INTRODUCTION

2. WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY In order to start thinking about Epistemology it might make sense to remember what philosophy itself is about. So let’s begin by thinking about this question: What is philosophy?

3. LOVE OF WISDOM? Is it about the ‘love of wisdom’ (which is what the word actually means!) or is it ‘thinking about thinking’ or ‘a search for ‘the truth’?

4. IS EVERYONE A PHILOSOPHER? Some philosophers have said that everyone is a philosopher. Do you think that is right? Or are there things that philosophers do, ways in which they argue and question things, which are different from how non-philosophers do these things?

5. ACTIVITIES If there are no answers in Philosophy but just more questions, does this mean it is worth doing at all? The English philosopher Bertrand Russell said that philosophy is ‘the no-man’s land between science and theology’. What do you think he meant by that? The German philosopher Nietzsche thought that a philosopher was ‘a terrible explosive in the presence of which everything is in danger’! What do you think that view suggests?

6. WHAT IS EPISTEMOLOGY? Epistemology is a particular branch or part of philosophy concerned with asking questions about the nature of knowledge. In epistemology we are interested in trying to work out what knowledge is, how we know things, and whether or not – as a result of possible answers to these questions – it is possible to be sure or to be certain about what we know.

7. WHAT IS EPISTEMOLOGY? These are very important questions because all the things that we think of as ‘true’ might be affected by the answers. Some things that we think are certain and true might turn out to be false, some things we think are sure and certain might end up being unsure and uncertain, so this part of Philosophy is clearly very important.

8. WHAT IS EPISTEMOLOGY? Whether or not we think that philosophy is just about questions – not answers – it is certainly the case that some philosophers tried to work out arguments that provided definite and clear answers to the big questions. In the area of Epistemology, philosophers like Plato in ancient Greece and Descartes in France tried to provide us with definite answers about the nature of knowledge. We will be looking at some of the things these philosophers had to say.

9. ACTIVITY 4 List three things you know for certain. Why do you think these are good examples of certain knowledge? Can you think of an example of something that we previously thought was true but which we now know is false?

10. PLATO The Ancient Greek philosophers were interested in questions about the nature of things, about how the world came to be and how it worked. For many of them it seemed clear that the world around us is always changing and nothing stands still, so from that they came up with the view that there could not be any certainty about things.

11. PLATO Some, like Plato did not agree and argued that we could not just rely upon how things looked on the surface, we had to think, we had to reason about the world and that when we did we could identify things that did not change and remained true. However surely we know about the world through being able to see, hear, and feel, in other words we know about things because of the senses. Is it not the case that the senses give us knowledge of the world about us? Plato was not impressed by this idea. It is too easy for the senses to be misled, for us to get it wrong in some way.

12. PLATO For example if we put a pencil into a glass of water, it might look as if the pencil was bent when in fact we know it’s straight. There are many other examples of problems of this kind, where the evidence based on the senses is just wrong – and we know it’s wrong. For this reason the senses, according to Plato are just not enough they do not provide us with ‘knowledge’ of the world, because they can give us false information.

13. PLATO Is knowledge then just about what we can work out in our minds? Is it just reason at work? After all, we ‘know’ the pencil does not bend when it goes into water – and we ‘know’ that just because of our ability to reason – to work things out. But our reason too can be wrong, so Plato was not satisfied by this argument either. Knowledge had to be more than just the things told to us about the world by our senses, and more than just what we can work out by reason.

14. ACTIVITY 5 Give three examples things we can know through sense experience. Give three examples of things we can discover by pure reason.

15. THE TRIPARTITE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE Knowledge, for Plato, has to be about what is true – so he makes a distinction between what we just believe – things that may or may not be true – and knowledge which is what we know to be true. In order to know something is true we have to have some kind of justification for our belief. That gives us two conditions for ‘knowledge’. We have to believe it. We have to have some kind of justification for believing it.

16. THE TRIPARTITE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE So it’s not enough just to say that something is true just because ‘I know it’s true!’ – we have to have some kind of evidence or argument that gives a justification for our belief. But there is one other condition that has to apply as well – we have to be right – what we believe and what we think we have justification for – does also have to be true. That gives us the third part of the ‘Tripartite Theory of Knowledge’ – for something to be ‘knowledge’ and not just our belief – it has to be ‘Justified, true belief’.

17. THE TRIPARTITE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE Let’s take an example to demonstrate this point. Imagine the following scenario: ‘The Prime Minister says that crime rates will go down next year.’ Is this a piece of knowledge according to the tripartite theory?

18. THE TRIPARTITE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE According to the tripartite theory, the Prime Minister can only be said to have knowledge if: He believes that crime rates will go down (ie. he isn’t just lying to us). He can justify his belief (eg. by referring to recent crime figures suggesting a downward trend). It is actually true that crime rates will go down. (He can’t be said to have had knowledge if it turns out that crime rates are going up.)

19. ACTIVITY 6 According to the tripartite theory, what three conditions must be met for the statement ‘Scotland will win the next world cup’ to count as knowledge?

20. PROBLEMS WITH JUSTIFIED TRUE BELIEF On the face of it the Tripartite theory looks quite good. Plato had insisted that in order to qualify as knowledge and not just as some kind of belief, we had to have satisfied the three conditions: we had to believe it, we had to have justification for what we believed, and it had to be actually true. However there are a number of examples where these conditions are not easily met.

21. PROBLEMS WITH JUSTIFIED TRUE BELIEF: EXAMPLE Jim is on holiday in America. When driving in the West he passes by towns that look like towns he has seen in films about the ‘Wild West’ and he thinks he is seeing genuine places that the films are based upon. In fact what he seeing in fake fronts raised by enterprising tourist companies to give a completely false impression, but as it happens as he drives along he also goes through a genuine ‘frontier’ town with genuine buildings. In this instance he is right to think of the town as a genuine ‘Wild West’ location. But is this justified, true belief? There seems to be a problem with the evidence, the sensory-based information we have about the world that in effect undermines what we consider to be knowledge.

22. PROBLEMS WITH JUSTIFIED TRUE BELIEF In fact we can take that problem a step further. Sometimes when people are ill in one way or another they can find it difficult to understand the difference between what they thought or even dreamt happened, and what actually happened. What if we are all really in that position, what if everything we see, feel, hear and so on, is nothing more than a complicated form of dream? If we can be deceived by the senses, maybe we can also be deceived about what is real and what is not real by the ways in which our minds work?

23. PROBLEMS WITH JUSTIFIED TRUE BELIEF In the film The Matrix the central character discovers that his ‘reality’ is in fact an elaborate programme run in a computer system and that the reality is that his body is being kept in a state of sleep by machines while the illusion of reality is fed into his brain. For most people subject to this process there is no escape, no way that they can tell that they are part of a computer program. What if that is true and the world about us is all a dream?

24. THE GETTIER PROBLEM In the 1960s a philosopher called Edmund Gettier came up with some questions and examples that really undermined the tripartite theory.

25. GETTIER-TYPE EXAMPLE John is the supporter of a particular football team. His team are playing in an important final and he wants to know the results. He calls up a friend to ask him how things went. His friend only saw part of the match, and is sure that John’s team lost but decides as a joke to tell him his team won. What John’s friend does not know is that after he stopped watching the match, John’s team went on to win. So John believes something that is in fact true, it was justified by his friend’s account, and it turned out to be in fact true.

26. THE GETTIER PROBLEM But does this really count as knowledge when in fact it was an accident that his belief was true? Does this actually mean that you can just be lucky sometimes about what is truly knowledge and meets the terms of the tripartite theory, or is it the case that the theory is just wrong? The worrying thing about the Gettier example is that every condition of the tripartite theory has been met and yet we still wouldn’t want to count it as knowledge.

27. ACTIVITY 7 Consider the following scenario. Do you think that it counts as an example of knowledge? If so, state how it satisfies the tripartite conditions. If not, explain why not. The Lucky Rabbit’s Foot Every time Sandra puts on a bet she rubs her lucky rabbit’s foot which is on a key ring in her pocket. Each time she does this the horse she bets on wins. One day she loses her keys and doesn’t find them in time to rub the rabbit foot before placing her bet. The horse loses and she loses her bet and says to herself, ‘I knew that horse was going to lose! I didn’t get a chance to rub my lucky rabbit’s foot.’

28. ACTIVITY 8 Consider the following scenario. Do you think that it counts as an example of knowledge? If so, state how it satisfies the tripartite conditions. If not, explain why not. The Hesitant Student Billy is sitting daydreaming in class. They are doing Maths and he hates Maths. Suddenly his teacher asks, ‘Billy, what is the square root of nine?’ Suddenly woken out of his daydream Billy gathers himself and answers, ‘Er, three?’ ‘Well done Billy’, says his teacher.

29. SCEPTICISM, RATIONALISM AND EMPIRICISM If someone has philosophical doubt about the reliability of evidence based on our senses, they are being a ‘sceptic’. If knowledge requires justification and requires to be true – we are in trouble when we come up against a sceptic, because they will tell us that we don’t know what is true, because everything we sense could be false.

30. SCEPTICISM, RATIONALISM AND EMPIRICISM We do need to be clear that there is a difference between ordinary doubt about something and being a philosophical sceptic. For example during a football match there is a dispute over a goal: your friend is convinced the ball went over the line, but you are in doubt. During the reply the camera focuses close up on the line and in fact it was not a goal. Does the fact that you doubted the goal make you a sceptic? No.

31. SCEPTICISM, RATIONALISM AND EMPIRICISM Where it is possible to clarify a doubt, to resolve it by use of evidence, then the grounds of the doubt are not the issue. Sceptics have issues with the nature of evidence, they are not satisfied that doubts can be resolved by evidence, because all evidence can be doubted.

32. SCEPTICISM, RATIONALISM AND EMPIRICISM For example, once Neo in The Matrix knows that the world he lives in is false, no amount of evidence presented to him in that world is going to convince him that it is true. The sceptic is in a similar position: the very evidence that people might call upon to ‘prove’ that it is possible to have reliable knowledge of the world is based upon the view that it is possible to have reliable knowledge!

33. SCEPTICISM, RATIONALISM AND EMPIRICISM Some philosophers believe that it is the case that real, true knowledge is based on the experience we have of the world, that is to say that our senses, tricky and fallible though they are, do tell us about what is going on outside of our own minds. These philosophers are described as empiricists. Empirical knowledge is knowledge based on experience and this is also described as a posteriori knowledge, that is to say knowledge that comes after experience.

34. SCEPTICISM, RATIONALISM AND EMPIRICISM Some philosophers don’t agree with that view, and think that even though we do learn about the world through our senses, more importantly we reason, and it is the operation of our reason that gives us the real truth about the world. These philosophers are known as rationalists because they think that reason is more important than experience. This is also described as a priori knowledge – that is, knowledge that comes before experience.

35. SCEPTICISM, RATIONALISM AND EMPIRICISM Sceptics think that both these positions are in trouble, because we can’t rely on the senses, but we can’t rely upon reason either!

36. ACTIVITY 9 What is the Difference between Scepticism, Empiricism and Rationalism? Write a paragraph outlining your answer.

37. ACTIVITY 10 Think about the following statements. Can they be justified: Yes or no? If so how: by reason or by experience? Australia has poisonous spiders. The Arctic is just ice floating on water. Men travelled to the moon in a spacecraft, landed and walked on the surface. There are aliens in spacecraft watching our every move. There is an invisible force called ‘gravity’ that pulls everything down to the ground. In the past people thought that the world was flat instead of round.