Year: 2012
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Robert Nozick’s conception of knowledge has triggered a lot of criticism over the last three decades. According to one kind of objection, Nozick’s conditions of knowledge are either not necessary or not suffi cient or neither necessary nor suffi cient for knowledge. It is not clear how serious this kind of objection is: Nozick did not intend his proposal to constitute a fi nal reductive defi nition of knowledge in terms of individually necessary and jointly suffi cient conditions; whether Nozick’s account can deal with such objections depends on the interpretation of certain aspects of the account as well as on the further development of the account. For all or almost all objections of this kind (see, e.g., Kripke 2011), there have been interesting and perhaps even promising defenses of Nozick’s theory (see, e.g., Adams and Clarke 2005 ). Another kind (see, e.g., Kripke 2011), of objection, however, is more serious. No matter what the exact details of the theory and no matter how one further develops it, it will always be incompatible with a very plausible and important epistemic principle, namely the principle that knowledge is closed under known entailment (the “principle of closure ”). Nozick himself openly stated that his account of knowledge is incompatible with closure (see Nozick 1981 , 206–11 1 ) – and stuck with the theory, dropping closure. Most philosophers went the other way and stuck with closure, giving up on any theory like Nozick’s which is incompatible with closure. If anything is “the killer objection” to Nozick’s account, then it is based on his denial of closure. 2
Author: Peter Baumann
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2273114103