Epistemology, for a large chunk of the twentieth century, was dominated by attempts to produce a conceptual analysis of knowledge. As everyone knows, it didn’t go too well. Gettier’s (1963) introduction of his eponymous counterexamples catalysed a flurry of attempts to pin down the elusive ‘missing ingredient’ that JTB apparently lacked. Yet to this day, despite reams of paper and gallons of ink spent, no solution has been found. Within the last quarter-century or so, there have been growing signs that the discipline has finally started to grow weary of the chase. Linda Zagzebski (1994), for instance, has argued that the Gettier problem is simply an inescapable consequence of fallibilism—that it cannot be ‘solved’. Fans of ‘knowledge first’ approaches (following Williamson, 2000) have, meanwhile, suggested that knowledge may simply be basic and unanalysable. Perhaps this looming sense of futility explains why epistemology’s primary focus has slowly started to shift away from the analysis of knowledge, to embrace a variety of more general epistemological topics such as epistemic value or the ethics of belief.

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Conceptual Engineering, the Value of Knowledge, and the Value of Understanding

  • Jennifer Nado

摘要

Epistemology, for a large chunk of the twentieth century, was dominated by attempts to produce a conceptual analysis of knowledge. As everyone knows, it didn’t go too well. Gettier’s (1963) introduction of his eponymous counterexamples catalysed a flurry of attempts to pin down the elusive ‘missing ingredient’ that JTB apparently lacked. Yet to this day, despite reams of paper and gallons of ink spent, no solution has been found. Within the last quarter-century or so, there have been growing signs that the discipline has finally started to grow weary of the chase. Linda Zagzebski (1994), for instance, has argued that the Gettier problem is simply an inescapable consequence of fallibilism—that it cannot be ‘solved’. Fans of ‘knowledge first’ approaches (following Williamson, 2000) have, meanwhile, suggested that knowledge may simply be basic and unanalysable. Perhaps this looming sense of futility explains why epistemology’s primary focus has slowly started to shift away from the analysis of knowledge, to embrace a variety of more general epistemological topics such as epistemic value or the ethics of belief.