Representative concepts: how to analyze knowledge as true belief in the face of Gettier counterexamples

Public Deposited
Analytics

Downloadable Content

Download PDF
Request Version for Screen Reader
Last Modified
  • March 21, 2019
Creator
  • Smith, Modie Christon
    • Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Philosophy
Abstract
  • Gettier counterexamples purport to show that justified true belief is insufficient for knowledge and, ipso facto, that true belief is insufficient for knowledge. I develop a strategy that the proponent of the true belief analysis of knowledge can deploy to explain away Gettier counterexamples, i.e., to show how the subject in them can merely appear to believe something truly without knowing it. I suggest that the proposition that appears to be truly, non-knowingly believed in a Gettier counterexample is actually not believed at all. Rather, the subject believes a closely related, false proposition. The subject cannot believe the true proposition, I propose, because of the special nature of certain of his or her concepts-what I call "representative concepts." The reason the subject appears to believe the true proposition is that we use a true sentence to ascribe the belief in the false proposition to him or her.
Date of publication
DOI
Resource type
Rights statement
  • In Copyright
Advisor
  • Lycan, William G.
Degree granting institution
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Language
Access right
  • Open access
Date uploaded
  • October 20, 2010

Relations

Parents:

This work has no parents.

Items

Thumbnail Title Date Uploaded Visibility Actions
file details Representative concepts : how to analyze knowledge as true belief in the face of Gettier counterexamples 2019-04-10 Public Download