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Knowledge is among the many kinds of cognitive success thatepistemology is interested in understanding. Because it has attractedvastly more attention in recent epistemology than any other varietyof cognitive success, we devote the present section to considering itin some detail. But the English word “knowledge” lumpstogether various states that are...

Whatever precisely is involved in knowing a fact, it is widelyrecognized that some of our cognitive successes fall short ofknowledge: an agent may, for example, conduct herself in a way that isintellectually unimpeachable, and yet still end up thereby believing afalse proposition. Julia has every reason to believe that her birthdayis July 15: it sa...

Anyone who knows anything necessarily knows many things. Our knowledgeforms a body, and that body has a structure: knowing some thingsrequires knowing other things. But what is this structure?Epistemologists who think that knowledge involves justification tendto regard the structure of our knowledge as deriving from thestructure of our justificatio...

Beliefs arise in people for a wide variety of causes. Among them, wemust list psychological factors such as desires, emotional needs,prejudice, and biases of various kinds. Obviously, when beliefsoriginate in sources like these, they don’t qualify as knowledgeeven if true. For true beliefs to count as knowledge, it is necessarythat they originate i...

6.1 General Skepticism and Selective Skepticism

Much of modern epistemology aims to address one or another kind ofskepticism. Skepticism is a challenge to our pre-philosophicalconception of ourselves as cognitively successful beings. Suchchallenges come in many varieties. One way in which these varietiesdiffer concerns the different kinds of cognitive success that theytarget: skepticism can challenge our claims to know, or ourclaims to believe justifiably, or our claims to havejustification for believing, or our claims to have anygood reas...

6.2 Responses to the Closure Argument

Next, we will examine various responses to the BKCA argument. According to the first, we can see that (C2) is false if we distinguish between relevant and irrelevantalternatives. An alternative to a proposition p is anyproposition that is incompatible with p. Your having hands andyour being a BIV are alternatives: if the former is true, the latteris false, and vice versa. According to the thought thatmotivates the second premise of the BIV argument, you know that youhave hands only if you can...

6.3 Responses to the Underdetermination Argument

Both the contextualist and the Moorean responses to BKCA, as discussed in the previous section, leave out one important detail.Both say that one can know that one isn’t a BIV (thoughcontextualists grant this point only for the sense of“know” operational in low-standards contexts), but neitherview explains howone can know such a thing. If, byhypothesis, a BIV has all the same states of mind that Ihave—including all the same perceptual experiences—thenhow can I be justified in believing that I’...