[No abstract submitted] / Arts, Faculty of / Philosophy, Department of / Graduate

Contemporary philosophers distinguish a certain "propositional knowledge (KP)" from other sorts of knowledge such as "knowledge by acquaintance (KA)". However, when Plato began to do philosophy no one had formulated the concept of KP, indeed, no one had formulated the notion of what we call a "proposition". On the contrary, the ancient Greeks unreflectedly presupposed that all knowledge was simply some sort of acquaintance with the object of knowledge. This presupposition of theirs naturally caused a great deal of confusion in their epistemology and at the beginning of his career, Plato himself was victim and perpetrator of this confusion. However, as the following thesis shows, Plato began to make explicit and to question the presupposition that all knowledge was KA and he did make progress towards finding the crucially missing category, KP. It was not that he succeeded totally in isolating the notion of KP. For that matter, he never attained to a notion of "proposition" in all its modern generality. However, he did come to hold that sometimes knowledge involves not only acquaintance with the object of knowledge but also a knowledge of interrelations among things known. Having at first tried to understand all knowledge in terms of a model that construed it as nothing more complex than some sort of acquaintance with the object of knowledge, Plato subsequently abandoned this model and proceeded to develop an epistemology capable of accomodating cases of what we would call KP. I shall argue that Plato did this after he had written the Charmides and before he wrote the Theaetetus. / Arts, Faculty of / Philosophy, Department of / Graduate

Thesis (Th. M.)--Westminster Theological Seminary, 1990. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 67-69).

Thesis (Th. M.)--Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, 1987. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 79-82).

Three related topics in probabilistic epistemology are studied. 1. Issues in the theory of rationality raised by cases in which eithermultiple doxastic attitudes would be warranted if you had them or none would. 2. The concept of credential deference, which lies behind David Lewis's Principal Principle, Bas van Fraassen's Reflection Principle, et al., is analyzed. Particular interest comes from considering agents who are not always certain what their own credences are. 3. The concept of conditional probability. It is argued that the ratio formula for conditional probability functions as an analytic constraint on what can count as conditional probability, yet the abiding interest of the concept stems from the different concrete relations that (often imperfectly) model this formula. The chapter traces the appearance of these concrete relations through the early centuries of probability theory, in which conditional probability went unrecognized as a distinct concept.

No description available.

published_or_final_version / Philosophy / Master / Master of Philosophy

No description available.

Most epistemologists agree that epistemic justification is required for knowledge. This requirement is usually formulated in one of two ways: (JR1) S knows that p only if S is justified in believing that p. (JR2) S knows that p only if S's belief that p is justified. Surprisingly (JR1) and (JR2) are generally regarded as synonymous formulations of the justification condition. In Chapter 1, I argue that such a synonymy thesis is mistaken and that, in fact, (JR1) and (JR2) specify substantively different requirements. (JR1) requires that the person be justified, whereas (JR2) requires that the belief in question be justified, and intuitively, these constitute different requirements. Thus, it is concluded that (JR1) and (JR2) employ inherently different kinds of epistemic justification in their respective analysantia. I dub them "personal justification" and "doxastic justification", respectively. The remainder of the dissertation is devoted to demonstrating both the legitimacy and the importance of the personal/doxastic justification distinction. For example, the distinction helps account for the divergent intuitions that regularly arise regarding justificatory evaluations in demon-world contexts. In Chapters 2 and 3 I provide analyses for doxastic and personal justification. Chapter 2 spells out an externalist reliabilist account of doxastic justification which safely avoids demon-world counterexamples. Chapter 3 advances an internalist coherence account of personal justification. In defending this coherence theory, I argue that all foundation theories are false and that the regress argument on which they are predicated is unsound. In Chapter 4, I propose an analysis of ordinary knowledge which only requires doxastic justification. Nevertheless personal justification plays a negative, undermining role in the analysis. I then demonstrate that this analysis of knowledge is immune to typical Gettier examples. It also remains unscathed by Harman's beefed-up Gettier cases. Finally, I consider a stronger analysis of knowledge requiring both doxastic and personal justification. Though the latter analysis proves too strong for ordinary knowledge, it remains interesting as an analysis of a more intellectualistic kind of knowledge. The final chapter examines the internalist/externalist controversy and demonstrates that this controversy is yet another manifestation of the personal/doxastic justification conflation.

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