Epistemological Holism
...Plato’s dialogues. It is in the dialog Theaetetus where we find that Plato gives his account of what Socrates considers knowledge. Knowledge for the ancient Greeks was not only true, but also justified. Thus the knowledge as ‘justified true belief’ (JTB) thesis was born. This main idea held for over 2500 years with philosophers quibbling primarily over how beliefs were justified. Then, in the 1960’s, Edmund Gettier published an essay which set the epistemological world on fire. Aptly titled, Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? Gettier's essay gives two examples in which most would agree that the subject’s belief is both true and justified but which we would not claim to be knowledge. Since the Gettier paper, a wide array of positions, both for and against the JTB thesis have been offered. It is my intent to give an overview of several of these positions, various reasons for their dismissal, and offer my own, holistic view of what knowledge is.
The best place to begin, as they say, is at the beginning. Therefore it is with a brief discussion of knowledge as justified true belief, foundationalism, coherentism, and hybrid theories that I shall begin. Next, an analysis of Gettier’s paper and its implications for the JTB thesis will be discussed. Various replies to Gettier, such as Goldman’s externalism, Churchland’s non-sententialism, Rorty's pragmatism, fallibilism, and anti-individualism will then be surveyed. Finally, once each of the traditional views on epistemology have been surveyed and found lacking in one way or other, I shall put forward a mixed thesis of holism covering accounts of both a priori and a posteriori knowledge which I believe is a more accurate reflection of how it is that knowledge as a human endeavor continues to march forward in both relevancy and usefulness.
In the Platonic dialog where we first find a discussion of what...
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