There is a New Idea in epistemology. It goes by the name of ‘knowledge first,’ and it is particularly associated with Timothy Williamson’s book Knowledge and Its Limits. In slogan form, to put knowledge first is to treat knowledge as basic or fundamental, and to explain other states—belief, justification, maybe even content itself—in terms of knowledge, instead of vice versa. The idea has proven enormously interesting, and equally controversial. But deep foundational questions about its actual content remain relatively unexplored. We think that a wide variety of views travel under the banner of ‘knowledge first’ (and that the slogan doesn’t help much with differentiating them). Furthermore, we think it is far from straightforward to draw connections between certain of these views; they are more independent than they are often assumed to be.
Friday, January 16, 2015
New paper on knowledge first epistemology
Carrie Jenkins and I have written a paper exploring what it means to put "knowledge first". Here is our current draft. From the introduction:
Hi Dr. Ichikawa,
ReplyDeleteI was reading your paper 'On Putting Knowledge First' and noticed the following problem in the references:
• Kornblith, Hilary (2007). Naturalism and Intuitions. Grazer Philosophische Studien 74 (1):27-49.
• Koslicki, K. (2012). Varieties of Ontological Dependence. In Fabrice Correia and Benjamin Schnieder (eds.) Metaphysical Grounding: Understanding the Structure of Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 186-213. • ——— (2008). Knowledge Needs No Justification. In Quentin Smith (ed.), Epistemology: New Essays. Oxford University Press. 5-23.
The 2008 'Knowledge Needs No Justification' is attributed here to Koslicki, but should be attributed to Kornblith (as it is in the text's footnote 5). I realize that this is a month's old draft, and that you may have noticed and corrected this already, but just in case I thought I'd alert you to it!
Best,
Eric
Thanks!
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