I’m curious how many people out there discuss the Analysis of Knowledge literature when they teach Epistemology in their general Introduction to Philosophy courses. I suspect there are a lot of people who don’t.
I thought it would be worth saying why I like to include Gettier discussions when I start epistemology in my introduction to philosophy courses.t.
1. Epistemology isn’t just about skepticism.
Epistemologists don’t sit around all day trying to come up with responses to skepticism. If you think skepticism is mistaken, there are still a wide range of really interesting issues and puzzles to think about in epistemology.
2. Conceptual Analysis
I like to draw attention to that wonderful tool we call conceptual analysis. What do you do when you want to analyze the concept of a person? Step One: Start with some obvious cases of persons and some obvious cases of non-persons. Step Two: See what sorts of properties the obvious cases of persons have that the non-obvious cases lack. Step Three: Use those properties to construct a candidate analysis. Step Four: See what interesting consequences this analysis has and test analysis against other intuitions.
The analysis of knowledge debate is one more example of a kind of skill I think philosophy should help students develop.
3. Familiarity with the Analysis of Knowledge Debate Helps One Discuss Skepticism
A lot of skeptical arguments place some very stringent constraint on knowledge. Something like:
(I) If S knows that P, then it is not possible for S to believe P on the basis of S’s current evidence and be wrong.
One way to respond to the skeptic is to try and explain away our infallibilist intuitions.
Having students start epistemology by discussing The Analysis of Knowledge and Gettier cases puts them in a position to see that these infallibilist intuitions aren’t usually this wide-spread.
I remind my students about something that happened when I walked them through the 4-step process for analyzing knowledge. First, we listed what many would regard as obvious cases of knowledge. When we got to step 2 and started trying to figure out what the obvious cases of knowledge had in common that at least some of the cases of non-knowledge lack, students were very quick to say, “All of those cases of knowledge are true, ” “All of those knowledge cases are believed,” or “All of those knowledge cases have good evidence for them…” – rarely does anything like impossibility of error come up.
Add that interesting fact to some other attempts in the literature to explain away infallibilist intuitions, and you’ve got a case for fallibilism that doesn’t look so bad.
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