Epistemology

I'm having a reasonably packed May, but I'll get to that in another post. But while waiting for my flight back to CA I finished up Epistemology by Richard Feldman. The book is, not too surprisingly, about Epistemology, aka Theory of Knowledge. Reading Anathem got me interesting in checking out certain areas in philosophy. In particular the parts discussing if pure mathematical concepts live in a universe of their own and then filter down to our own, and if so does our universe filter down to other universes. Also if I stayed in high school in Paris I would have taken a theory of knowledge class for the IB and I always kinda wondered what it was about.

Well Epistemology was nothing like the stuff in Anathem. On one hand I liked finding out what theory of knowledge is all about, on the other hand as someone who took mostly science and engineering classes in college it's really weird to see a subject that has been studied for thousands of years and yet has no definitive answers.

So quick(ish) summary. The traditional analysis of knowledge is that the requirements to know something are: 1. it is true 2. you believe it (not in a blind faith way, but a generally think it is true way) 3. you are justified in believing it 4. the justification for the belief does not essentially depend on any falsehood (the last one is just to deal with certain weird cases). There are a lot of ways to describe what it takes for a belief to be justified. The main one the author backs is you know what you think you see and what you think you remember and from those essential facts you can build up beliefs. Others involve things like you're justified if the belief fits into your whole system of beliefs or if you are able to track as something goes between true and false. But he shows why those others really have problems.

Then he goes into skepticism which is asking if there's much you can really be justified in believing. Gets into a lot of the how do you know you aren't a brain in a vat with a computer making you think things are happening to you. And almost all knowledge is built on induction, but just because something has always worked a certain way in the past do you really know it will do it the same way in the future. The main response is even if you aren't absolutely certain it will happen the same way you are justified in thinking it will. So if you distinguish knowledge from absolute certainty then it still works. There are a number of other skeptical arguments and not all of them have been dismissed by the traditional analysis of knowledge.

He talks about science and epistemology. One part is scientific studies show that humans very often get some basic logic and probability questions wrong which along similar lines to skepticism makes you ask if there's much that people are really justified in believing. The author's arguments against this seemed the weakest of any in the book. He also discusses if epistemology should take a more scientific approach. He argues it doesn't really need to which also comes off a bit weak (maybe I'm showing a bit of a bias).

I sort of expected the book to be a bit more concrete about how you evaluate when you know something and distinguish what knowledge is justified and what isn't. I guess it does exactly that, except more philosophically (not surprisingly) than I expected.

Not sure that I'd recommend the book unless you've been wondering what theory of knowledge is about for over 10 years or if your name is Angie.