Essays on Modalized Epistemology
Year: 2018
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Knowledge requires more than a true belief. In order to know something one must not only believe the truth, rather one’s belief has to be related to its truth in a certain way. One of the principal aims of epistemology, the study of knowledge, is to explain what that ‘certain way’ is. This dissertation examines the idea that knowledge requires a certain modal connection to truth. Such a connection is expressed with a condition that includes modal notions, like ‘would’, ‘must’, ‘could’, ‘might’ etc. Modal notions refer not to how things are, but to how things could have been, should be, must be, or would be. Modalized epistemology is epistemology that seeks to solve epistemological problems with the help of modal notions. The motivation for modalized epistemology stems from the fact that many concepts that have a central place in epistemology seem to be modal in nature. ‘Reliability’, ‘luck’, ‘ability’ and ‘certainty’ are perhaps best explicated with the help of modalities. This thesis develops further an existing modal condition known as the safety condition and applies it to several epistemological problems. According to the safety condition in order to know it must be the case that one could not easily have erred. In Essay 1 a novel way of understanding the safety condition is offered and used to solve two perennial problems in epistemology. In Essay 2 modalized epistemology is applied to the problem of peer disagreement. In Essay 3 it is argued that the modal relation that must hold between a belief and its truth in cases of knowledge cannot be as strong as some virtue epistemologists are inclined to think. The thesis contains also an introductory chapter that offers a brief historical background of the development of modalized epistemology and lays out the current debate as well as some problems that are left unanswered in the essays.
Author: Jaakko Hirvelä
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2790465424