Does Knowledge mean to Track-the-Truth? (eBook)

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Philosophy - Theoretical (Realisation, Science, Logic, Language), grade: 1,0, Leuven Catholic University, language: English, abstract: In his 1981 essay “Knowledge” published in “Philosophical Explanations” Robert Nozick deals with two major problems of epistemology: firstly what is knowledge or what does it mean to say that someone knows a proposition p? Secondly, what can we say to the skeptic who holds the view that we cannot know anything?

It was widely agreed among philosophers that knowledge is justified true belief. This standard analysis was defeated in 1963 by the brief but powerful essay “Is justified true belief knowledge?” by Edmund Gettier. Using thought experiments Gettier developed counterexamples to the standard analysis of knowledge by describing situations in which we would not say that someone knows "that p" although he has a well justified and true belief about p. In the following years philosophers tried to substitute or add to conditions of the standard analysis in order to find a theory which is strong enough to rule out Gettier counterexamples. This is what Nozick tries. After explicating his account of knowledge he shows how it can handle the skeptic’s objections.

In this essay I will first give a description of Nozick’s truth-tracking-theory of knowledge and what this means with regard to philosophical skepticism. After this I evaluate Nozick’s account and show that his theory is not as strong as it looks. My thesis is that Nozick overlooks that knowledge is more than true belief which varies with the truth value of p. Nevertheless, Nozick draws attention to an important connection which is in itself not sufficient for knowledge but which should be attended to by developing a theory of knowledge.